What Singapore flats cost, and what that means

Four questions, answered from every resale transaction the Housing Board has published since 2017 — 243,611 of them, up to Oct 2026.

Are flats getting more expensive?

Yes, sharply, but the climb has just paused. The median resale flat went from $398 psf in 2017 to $604 psf in 2025, a rise of 52 per cent in 8 years. In 2026, with 21,545 sales recorded so far, the median stands at $602 psf — slightly below the year before, and the first year since 2020 that prices have not clearly risen.

Are they outpacing what people earn?

Yes, by about 19 percentage points. Since 2017 the price of a square foot has risen 52 per cent while median household income rose 33 per cent. Both are shown below on the same scale, each set to 100 in 2017, because two measures of different size cannot honestly share a chart any other way.

Put another way: in 2017 a median flat cost 3.8 years of a median household’s gross income. By 2025 it cost 4.4 years. That is the gap above, expressed as the thing a buyer actually feels.

Which districts cost what?

D21, covering Upper Bukit Timah and Clementi Park, is the dearest at $864 psf; D17 in Loyang and Changi is the cheapest at $477 psf — a spread of 1.8 times across an island 50 km wide. Four of Singapore’s 28 districts contain no HDB flats at all.

The spread is also closing: since 2017 the cheapest districts have grown fastest, and the dearest slowest. See where prices grew.

What do flats cost in my town?

District codes are how the market quotes itself; towns are how people live. These are the eight busiest HDB towns by resales over the twelve months to Oct 2026, and each has a page with every block in it.

Medians of block medians over the twelve months to Oct 2026. All 26 towns and 24 districts.

Is the cheapest flat really the cheapest?

Often not. A flat is a lease, not a freehold, and a shorter one is being used up faster. Divide everything a buyer will ever pay — price, both stamp duties, fees, all the mortgage interest and the running costs — by the months of lease remaining, and the ranking changes.

A flat in Hougang at $1.23 million with 89 years left works out at about $1,909 a month of use. One in Chinatown at $475,000 with 47 years left works out at $1,490. Two and a half times the price, 28 per cent more per month. Per square foot per year, the dearer flat is the cheaper one.

Where these numbers come from

Resale prices are every transaction the Housing Board publishes, through data.gov.sg. Household income is SingStat’s annual series. Stamp duty rates are read from Iras and stored with the dates they took effect. Nothing is bought, nothing is estimated where it could be counted, and where a figure has had to be worked out — postal codes, which HDB does not publish for its blocks — the method sets out how and what it cannot do.