What a high floor is actually worth

That a high floor costs more is one of the few pieces of Singapore property folklore that is straightforwardly checkable. HDB publishes a storey range on every resale, so the premium is a measurement, not a belief.

What the data shows

Across most towns the top storey band trades somewhere between 10 and 30 per cent above the lowest, per square foot. The spread is wider in towns with genuinely tall blocks and a view worth paying for, and close to flat in towns where most stock tops out around twelve storeys and one floor looks much like another. The storey chart on each town page shows that town’s own figure; comparing Bukit Merah against Sembawang makes the point faster than any average would.

The caveat that matters

Storey band is not randomly assigned. Taller blocks are often newer, which means longer leases, different flat models and sometimes different parts of a town. Some of the measured premium is height and some of it is everything that travels with height. The bands are shown per town for that reason: within one town, much of the confounding holds still.

What you should take from it is a range, not a multiplier. If the premium between the bottom and top band in your town is 15 per cent, a seller asking 30 per cent more for a high floor is asking for something the recent transactions do not support.