Lease decay: what a shorter HDB lease actually costs

A 99-year lease sounds like a lifetime, and for the first few decades the market treats it as one. Then it stops. The interesting thing about lease decay in Singapore is not that it happens, it is when it starts showing up in prices, and the answer is much earlier than the arithmetic alone would suggest.

Why the curve bends early

If a lease were simply a countdown, price would fall smoothly and slowly. It does not, because two rules bite well before the lease expires.

CPF. A buyer can only use their CPF Ordinary Account in full where the remaining lease covers the youngest buyer to age 95. Fall short and the usable amount is pro-rated. For a couple in their thirties that condition starts to bind around the 60-year mark, which is why the curve turns there rather than at year 20.

Financing. Loan-to-value falls as the tail shortens, and the maximum tenure shortens with it. A buyer who needs a larger cash deposit and a shorter term is a buyer who can bid less, regardless of what they think the flat is worth.

The result is a price curve shaped by policy as much as by time. Look at the lease band chart on Queenstown or Toa Payoh, two mature towns with a wide spread of lease ages, and the step down between bands is visible without any statistics.

Reading the bands honestly

A caution the charts on this site carry and that is worth repeating: lease bands are not a controlled experiment. Older flats are not only shorter-leased, they are often larger, lower, and in different parts of a town from newer blocks. Some of the gap between a 90-year band and a 50-year band is lease and some of it is everything else that correlates with age.

That is why the bands are shown per town rather than nationally. Comparing lease bands within one town holds a great deal of the “everything else” roughly constant. Comparing them across the country does not.

What it means if you are buying

A shorter lease is not automatically a bad purchase. It is a cheaper purchase with a shorter horizon and tighter financing, and whether that trade is good depends on how long you intend to hold it and what you can borrow. What you should not do is treat a low PSF on a short-leased flat as a bargain without checking the lease band it sits in: on the town pages here, that is one chart down from the headline.

Figures on this page track the published dataset and are current to July 2026.