By Felix Kong｜Licensed Insurance Agent
Looper Insurance Agency Limited (GA1034)
Published: 2026-08-25｜Last updated: 2026-08-25

Since the Food Business (Amendment) Regulation 2026 opened the door to dogs in Hong Kong restaurants, floor staff have a point of contact that did not exist before. An employee bitten in the course of employment suffers a work injury under the Employees' Compensation Ordinance (Cap. 282) — a statutory liability of the employer that does not depend on the dog owner and does not disappear because "the dog wasn't ours". This article works through a real Hong Kong case (anonymised, figures rounded): a 52-year-old server bitten by a customer's dog, with roughly HKD 277,000 awarded. The employer lost not because it had no rule, but because it had never written the rule down.

Table of Contents

1. The facts: a table of four, and a dog

2. The employer's defence: "staff are not allowed to touch the dogs"

3. Why the court did not accept it

4. How the HKD 277,000 was built

5. When the "serious and wilful misconduct" defence actually works

6. Four things a restaurant owner must do

7. FAQ

1. The Facts: A Table of Four, and a Dog

A 52-year-old restaurant server was attending a table of four customers, one of whom had brought a dog. During service the dog bit the server, causing multiple injuries to the hand. She was admitted to hospital and went on to attend twenty-two treatment sessions, with psychiatric symptoms as well.

What matters legally is not how aggressive the dog was. It is that the injury occurred during working hours, at the workplace, in the course of the work. Those three elements are enough to engage the employer's liability under Cap. 282.

Under the Employees' Compensation Ordinance (Cap. 282), an employer must compensate an employee injured or killed in an accident arising out of and in the course of employment, regardless of who caused the accident. A third party's fault — here, the dog owner's — does not extinguish the employer's statutory liability; the insurer may pursue the third party by subrogation afterwards, but the two are separate questions. Failing to maintain valid employees' compensation insurance under section 40(1) is a criminal offence, carrying a maximum fine of HKD 100,000 and two years' imprisonment.

2. The Employer's Defence: "Staff Are Not Allowed to Touch the Dogs"

The employer denied liability on a simple basis: the restaurant had a rule prohibiting servers from playing with or touching customers' dogs. The employee had broken the rule, so no compensation should follow.

The employee's answer was equally simple: she had never heard of any such rule, and in any event she was not playing with the dog when the bite occurred.

That turned the case into a pure evidential question: can you prove the rule ever existed?

3. Why the Court Did Not Accept It

On the evidence, the court found nothing to prove the prohibition ever existed. It had never been written down and was said to have been communicated orally; the three witnesses who allegedly communicated it did not attend trial, so their statements were disregarded. The court also accepted that she was not playing with the dog when bitten.

A safety rule with nothing written down, nothing signed and no training record is, to a court, close to no rule at all. Restaurant owners rarely dispute this once it is pointed out — they simply never thought a matter of common sense needed a paper trail. In work injury litigation, an employer's safety policy is proved almost entirely by documents rather than testimony. That is the most transferable lesson in the case: half the value of a rule lies in its content, and half in the record of it.

The court added a further point: even if the rule had existed, it would not necessarily have helped, because the threshold for defeating compensation on the basis of employee misconduct is set separately — see section 5 below.

4. How the HKD 277,000 Was Built

(Total compensation awarded by a Hong Kong court. The case is anonymised and figures are rounded for illustration; actual compensation is assessed under the Ordinance.)

Compensation under Cap. 282 falls into three broad heads: a lump sum for permanent loss of earning capacity, periodical payments for temporary incapacity (generally four-fifths of the difference between monthly earnings before the injury and earnings or earning capacity after it), and medical expenses, which are subject to a daily cap.

One point is consistently underestimated: the length of the sick leave often drives the total more than the injury itself. The 9% lump sum here was around HKD 120,000, but nearly two years of periodical payments plus medical expenses more than doubled the total. For a restaurant, a floor server out for two years is not only a compensation cost — it is a staffing and rostering cost that runs alongside it.

5. When the "Serious and Wilful Misconduct" Defence Actually Works

Many owners have heard that an employer need not pay if the employee was careless. The Ordinance does contain such an exception, but it is narrow.

Under the Employees' Compensation Ordinance, compensation is not payable where the injury is attributable to the employee's own serious and wilful misconduct — but where the injury results in death or serious incapacity, the court may still award all or part of the compensation having regard to all the circumstances. In other words, the more serious the injury, the harder it is to defend on the basis that the employee brought it on themselves. In practice, courts look for clear, documented misconduct, not a general submission that the employee "should have been more careful".

In this case the court found no evidence of any serious or improper conduct by the employee, so the defence was unavailable.

6. Four Things a Restaurant Owner Must Do

Once dogs are admitted, these four are the minimum:

1. Write it down and get it signed. Put "staff must not initiate contact with customers' dogs", "staff handling food must not have contact with dogs" and "wash and disinfect hands after any contact" into the staff handbook, and have employees sign for it. The last two also reflect clauses 1.14 and 1.15 of the FEHD guidelines.

2. Keep training records. Clause 1.24 requires staff training covering precautions when interacting with dogs and handling incidents. Keep the attendance sheet, the date and the content.

3. Record incidents immediately. Clause 1.26 requires a dog bite incident that calls for a police report to be reported in the prescribed form to the Director within two working days of the incident; keep the same record even below that threshold — it is your first evidence when notifying your insurer.

4. Declare payroll accurately. EC premium is set on estimated annual earnings and adjusted after expiry against actual earnings. Under-declared payroll reduces a claim proportionally — the single most common trap for Hong Kong SMEs.

Next Step

If your premises already holds a dog permission, or you are preparing for the next application phase, the useful first move is not more cover — it is checking three things: your EC earnings declaration, your public liability limit and exclusions, and whether your staff handbook has been updated. We can review all three with you.

Related Articles

• Dogs in Hong Kong restaurants: three questions for your insurer

• How much public liability cover is enough?

• Shop package or standalone public liability?

• Public Liability Insurance in Hong Kong (English Guide)

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Looper Insurance Agency Limited (GA1034) offers free quotations for employees' compensation, public liability and SME package insurance.
Phone: 2633 6813
Email: cs@looperin.com
Website: www.looperin.com

Disclaimer: This article is for reference only and does not constitute insurance or legal advice. The case is anonymised and figures rounded for illustration; actual compensation is assessed under the Employees' Compensation Ordinance and coverage is subject to policy terms and conditions.