HDB rental yield, measured from the rental register

Both halves of a rental yield are public in Singapore, which is unusual: the resale register gives the price and the renting-out register gives the rent. Dividing one by the other gives a gross yield, and 26 districts publish one, running from 4.3% to 7.8%. Before the table, the caveat, because it decides what the number may be used for.

What exactly is this figure?

It is the median annual rent for one flat type in a district, divided by the median resale price for the same flat type in the same district. Both sides are medians over populations, not a rent and a price for one flat.

That matters because the flats being rented out are not the flats being sold. They are two different sets of homes, matched on flat type and district and on nothing else, so the one being rented may be older, lower, or have less lease remaining than the one being sold. The ratio is dimensionless and comparable across districts, which is what makes it worth publishing. It is not a return anyone earned.

What is it not?

• Not a net yield. No agent fees, no property tax, no maintenance, no vacancy, no income tax. Net is materially lower and this site does not estimate it, because the deductions vary by owner and guessing them would be inventing a number.
• Not a return on capital. It ignores the price change on the flat itself, which over any real holding period dwarfs the rent.
• Not an investment case. Buying an HDB flat to let is heavily constrained by eligibility rules, and the minimum occupation period means most owners cannot rent the whole flat out for years.
• Not stable. Both registers move, and a yield is a ratio of two medians, so it inherits the noise in both.

What is the yield by district?

The pattern is the one economics predicts and it is worth seeing in the data. The dearest quarter of districts by rate average 4.9% gross yield; the cheapest quarter average 7.0%. Rents do not rise as fast as prices across the island, so yield falls as price rises. A high yield is usually a statement about a low price, not about a good investment.

How does the lease affect it?

A yield says nothing about the remaining lease, and in this market that is a serious omission. Two flats with the same rent and the same price have the same yield whether one has ninety years left and the other forty, and they are not the same asset: the second is a depreciating one. What a shorter lease costs has to be read alongside any yield figure, which is why the table above prints the lease of the cut it was computed on.

Where is a yield withheld, and why?

A district publishes a yield only where both sides clear their sample floors on the same flat type. Where either side is too thin, the figure is withheld rather than computed on a handful of rentals, and the page says so. A ratio of two noisy medians is noisier than either, so the floor here is doing more work than it does on a single statistic.

Figures are read live and are current to August 2026. For how the two registers differ from the private market’s, see public and private as two markets.