Every time property prices hit a new high, someone says they can’t go any higher. Then they do.
URA’s private home price index rose 40% between 2Q2020 and 2Q2025, and another 2.9% by 2Q2026. Interest rates spiked in 2022. Most foreign buyers now pay 60% additional buyer’s stamp duty. Prices kept going anyway.
People blame construction costs, land prices, or Singapore being a safe haven. We think there is a simpler reason. The number of well-paid households grew much faster than the stock of private homes.
Affordability starts with income
Whether a household can buy a home comes down to whether it can service the mortgage. Banks check this with the Total Debt Servicing Ratio, which caps all monthly debt repayments at 55% of gross income, worked out at an interest rate of at least 4%.
So income decides how many households can realistically bid for a home.
Net worth matters too. Many buyers bring sale proceeds from an HDB flat, CPF savings or family money. Count wealth in and the pool of households who could afford expensive property gets bigger.
Foreign buyers are another source of demand we leave out. They don’t show up in Singapore’s household statistics at all, yet they buy private homes here. Since the 60% stamp duty landed in April 2023, though, they have been a small slice of the market.
So the numbers below are the conservative version of the story. Income only, residents only.
We use S$15,000 a month as a rough line for a condo. Take two salaried earners making S$15,000 together, including employer CPF. That’s about S$12,800 in gross pay. With no other debt, TDSR lets them borrow about S$1.48 million over 30 years. At 75% financing, that’s a home of around S$1.97 million, and they would still need about S$490,000 for the downpayment, plus stamp duties.
Condos. More buyers than homes.
Going by SingStat’s household income and housing stock figures, in 2020 there was roughly one resident household above our threshold for every condo unit in Singapore. Five years later there are 1.3.
That isn’t a count of buyers. Many of these households already own a condo, and not every unit is for sale. But it is a fair gauge of potential demand. The number of households who clear the bar grew more than three times faster than the number of condos.
Resident households aren’t the only ones living in them either. In 2025 there were 375,612 condo and apartment units, but only 266,400 resident households living in one. Some of the rest sit empty, and URA counted 23,827 vacant non-landed private homes in mid-2025. The others house people who never appear in our income numbers.
HDB. It doesn’t make sense, at first.
At the lower end, the story flips. The number of households below S$15,000 fell by about 60,000. Meanwhile the government ramped up HDB building, adding a net 84,000 flats.
By our logic, public housing should have felt the least price pressure. It didn’t, at least not at first. HDB’s resale price index rose 54% between 2Q2020 and 2Q2025, faster than private homes.
We think two things explain it.
The first is timing. COVID-19 delayed Build-To-Order (BTO) projects. HDB finished the last two of 92 delayed projects in January 2025, about 75,800 flats in all. Even completed BTO flats can’t be resold until their owners finish the five-year Minimum Occupation Period (MOP), so resale supply stayed thin while demand ran hot.
The second is that high income doesn’t mean a household has left HDB. On a broader measure that includes rental and investment income, about 376,000 HDB households earned S$15,000 or more a month in 2025, according to SingStat’s General Household Survey 2025. That’s six in ten of the 618,000 resident households above that line. When private homes are scarce, we think many of them trade up within HDB instead. It helps explain why million-dollar HDB flats have become common.
Now supply is catching up. HDB resale prices have slipped for three straight quarters and were flat year on year at 2Q2026. Property agency ERA estimates 13,480 flats reach their MOP in 2026, nearly double 2025’s 6,973. Over the same year, landed prices rose 7%.
Landed. The tightest squeeze.
Landed is where the numbers get extreme. According to SingStat, Singapore’s landed housing stock grew by just 153 homes between June 2020 and June 2025. That isn’t a typo.
Meanwhile, the same household survey counts about 199,400 resident households earning S$30,000 or more a month in 2025, or S$360,000 a year. That’s nearly double our estimate of about 105,000 for 2020. There are now about 2.6 of these households for every landed home in the country, up from about 1.4.
Not every landed home is for sale. Many affluent households already own one, and PRs need government approval to buy most landed homes. But with a stock that barely moves, even a small share of these households entering the market is enough to push prices. Landed prices rose 42% between 2Q2020 and 2Q2025, a little ahead of condos, and another 7% by 2Q2026.
Singapore’s housing mix was built for a poorer Singapore
About 71.5% of Singapore’s homes are HDB flats. That mix made sense when most households earned modest incomes. It makes less sense today.
A third of resident households now earn S$15,000 or more a month from work, up from under a quarter in 2020. Condos, apartments and landed homes still make up only 27.8% of the housing stock, barely up from 27.0%.
The government is already adjusting at the edges. From 24 August 2026, HDB raised the income ceiling for BTO flats from S$14,000 to S$16,000, and for new executive condominiums (ECs) from S$16,000 to S$18,000. More households who could stretch for private housing now stay eligible for public housing. The 2026 Government Land Sales programme also has 9,320 private homes on the Confirmed List, including ECs, which URA says is more than 50% above the average of the past 10 years.
We think the private share of housing has to keep rising to fit a richer population. Until the stock catches up, high earners will keep competing for a private market that is too small, and spilling into HDB resale, pushing prices up at both ends.
Rising income has been the culprit
None of this means you should rush out and buy a condo or a landed. Prices can and do pause. Non-landed prices dipped 0.1% in 2Q2026, and HDB resale prices have eased for three quarters. A recession that hits incomes, higher interest rates or the new private supply coming through would all ease the pressure.
But it does explain why “prices are too high, they must come down” keeps being the wrong call. Prices look high against what Singaporeans used to earn. They look less extreme against what a third of households earn today.
So when people ask why property prices keep rising, the simplest answer is rising income. The number of households who can pay has been growing faster than the private homes available to them, and prices have followed.
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