HSK 3.0, explained
HSK 3.0 is the standard published as GF 0025-2021 and phased in from July 2026. It replaces HSK 2.0’s six levels with three stages of three levels each — nine in total. If you studied for HSK 2.0, the short version is that your level number does not carry over unchanged.
Which level is this word?
Type or paste a Chinese word — you get its HSK 2.0 level and its HSK 3.0 band.
Nine levels, seven bands — and that is not a typo
HSK 3.0 defines nine levels for the exam. The official vocabulary list does
not publish nine word lists: levels 1–6 each get their own, and levels 7, 8 and 9
share a single combined list of advanced vocabulary. So every table on this page has
seven rows, and every word in our data carries a band of 1–6 or the single value
7-9. Anyone promising you a 9-row word list is inventing the split.
| 3.0 band | What it covers |
|---|---|
| 1 | First contact — greetings, numbers, family, the survival set. |
| 2 | Everyday routine: time, shopping, getting around, simple past and future. |
| 3 | Opinions and comparisons; the level where sentences stop being formulaic. |
| 4 | Work, study and abstract nouns — the start of reading for content rather than practice. |
| 5 | Media and argument: enough range to follow a news item without a dictionary. |
| 6 | Nuance — near-synonyms, register, and the set phrases that make writing read as natural. |
| 7-9 | The advanced band. HSK 3.0 defines levels 7, 8 and 9 separately for the EXAM, but publishes ONE combined vocabulary list for all three, which is why it is a single row here and a single value in our data. |
Where HSK 2.0 words actually landed
The move from 2.0 to 3.0 is usually described as a shift — old level 4 becomes new band 5, and so on. On real data it is not a shift, it is a scatter. The table below is computed from our own word list every time this page is built, never typed in by hand.
| HSK 2.0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7-9 | not yet mapped | words |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HSK 1 | 142 | 8 | 3 | 1 | · | · | · | · | 154 |
| HSK 2 | 88 | 47 | 7 | 3 | 1 | 1 | · | 6 | 153 |
| HSK 3 | 64 | 144 | 51 | 28 | 8 | 1 | 1 | 9 | 306 |
| HSK 4 | 12 | 156 | 181 | 138 | 70 | 13 | 19 | 11 | 600 |
| HSK 5 | 3 | 57 | 345 | 376 | 204 | 58 | 212 | 45 | 1300 |
| HSK 6 | · | 2 | 59 | 93 | 350 | 245 | 1338 | 413 | 2500 |
Two things worth reading off it. HSK 2.0 levels 3, 4, 5 spread across every one of the seven bands — there is no single 3.0 band that “is” old level 3. And 212 words that were HSK 5 are in the advanced 7–9 band in 3.0, so a chunk of what used to be upper-intermediate is now classified advanced.
How complete this is
90.35% of our 5,013 words carry a 3.0 band. That average hides the shape: HSK 1 is fully mapped and HSK 6 is 83.5% — 413 of its words have no 3.0 band yet. Where a word has no band, the lookup box says so rather than showing you an empty slot. The gap is in the published source list, not in the join.