Singapore · HDB resale · closed transactions
Singapore has an official table for what a shrinking lease is worth. The resale market disagrees with it — and if you are buying an older flat, the difference is most of your money.
What the statutory table values a 50–54 year lease at, against a fresh one.
What buyers actually paid, per square foot, over the last 24 months.
Roughly a fifth of the flat's value, missing from the official convention.
Bala's Table is the government's leasehold table — the schedule used for lease top-ups and land betterment charges. Property agents quote it constantly to reassure sellers of older flats. But it was never built to predict a resale price, and it doesn't. Below about 55 years remaining, the market marks flats down roughly twenty percentage points harder than the table implies. Above 80 years, the two agree almost exactly.
Pick a town and flat type to see real median prices by remaining lease — every point is a median of closed HDB resale registrations, not an asking price.
| Lease left | Median price | Median psf | Typical size | Deals |
|---|
Bala's Table values land. It has no opinion about whether anyone can get a loan. The market does, and that is the whole gap.
As a lease shortens, the pool of people who can buy your flat shrinks — because the financing rules tighten before the lease runs out, not when it does:
A buyer can use their CPF in full only if the remaining lease covers the youngest buyer to age 95. Short of that, CPF use is pro-rated, and under 20 years remaining it cannot be used at all. For most Singaporean buyers, CPF is the down payment — so this rule decides who can even make an offer.
Loan tenure is capped by the remaining lease as well as by age, so a shorter lease means a bigger monthly payment for the same price — which collides with the income ceilings on how much anyone may borrow.
The result: a 45-year-lease flat is not competing for the same buyers as an 85-year one. It is competing for a smaller, more cash-heavy crowd. The 20-point gap is the price of that thinner market.
These are the rules as published by CPF and HDB; check CPF and HDB for your own case before relying on them.
This is a market-wide pattern, not a valuation of your flat. Two honest limits:
Lease travels with other things. Flats with 90 years left are usually in newer blocks, often in newer parts of a town. The gap you see bundles the lease together with everything correlated with it. Nothing here isolates the lease as a pure cause — it shows what buyers actually pay, which is the number that matters when you are choosing between two flats, but it is not proof that the lease alone caused the difference.
Medians move around. Bands with few transactions wobble, and the national curve is not perfectly smooth for that reason. Every point below is drawn from at least eight closed deals, and the deal count is shown so you can judge it yourself.