Per square foot or per square metre? Singapore uses both, and they disagree by 10.76

Singapore is a metric country that buys property in imperial units. HDB records the floor area of every flat in square metres; every agent, every listing and every conversation quotes dollars per square foot. One square metre is 10.7639 square feet, so the same market rate has two spellings: as of August 2026 the national median is S$603 per square foot, and that is the same statistic as S$6,490 per square metre. Both are on every page of this site, and the conversion between them is the single most common place a comparison goes wrong.

What is the conversion?

One square metre is 10.7639 square feet, so a rate per square metre is the larger number: the same dollars are being spread over a smaller unit of area. To go from per square metre to per square foot, divide by 10.7639; to go back, multiply. An invented flat makes the direction test concrete: a rate of S$10,400 per square metre is S$966 per square foot, and a flat quoted at S$966 per square foot is at S$10,400 per square metre. If your conversion made the per-square-foot figure the bigger one, you divided when you should have multiplied.

The two failure modes are not equally dangerous. Dividing twice produces a figure about 116 times off, which nobody believes. Multiplying when you should divide produces a figure 10.76 times off, and in a market where both units are in daily use a wrong number of that size can look almost plausible, especially in a headline with no unit printed at all.

How do you spot a unit error in the wild?

By magnitude. Over the current window, the middle three-fifths of priced HDB resales nationally rate between S$526 and S$747 per square foot. A “per square foot” figure in the thousands is almost certainly a per-square-metre figure wearing the wrong label; a “per square metre” figure in the hundreds has usually travelled the other way. Private rates run higher than HDB rates, but not ten times higher, so the test survives the crossing: when a quoted figure sits an order of magnitude from the medians published on the district pages here, check the unit before you check the market.

Why did per square foot win here?

Nothing principled. Property practice here inherited imperial units and never gave them up, while the statistical agencies stayed metric. The result is that the authoritative source and the working vocabulary use different units, and anyone comparing a government figure to an agent’s figure has to convert first. The gap runs right through the registers: HDB publishes floor areas in square metres, URA records private floor areas in square metres, and the market quotes both stocks in dollars per square foot anyway.

What does a flat’s floor area look like in both units?

It helps to carry the reference points rather than the formula. The register’s median floor areas by flat type, in both spellings:

Unlike a rate, an area converts safely at any point: multiplying one flat’s recorded floor area by 10.7639 is a unit identity, the same flat measured twice. So if a listing quotes square feet and you want to place it in the table above, divide by 10.7639 and read the register’s unit directly.

Which does this site use?

Leads with PSF, because that is what the market speaks, and prints the per-square-metre equivalent beside every headline so the two can be reconciled without arithmetic. The unit toggle beside the heading switches the whole page, both markets and every tab on it. The conversion happens once, on the raw record, before any median is taken: converting a median is not the same as taking the median of converted values when rounding is involved, and doing it in the wrong order is how two pages end up disagreeing by a dollar.

One more reconciliation trap: every rate on this site is published to three significant figures, because a median over a few dozen resales cannot support more precision than that. Converting a rounded figure back through 10.7639 will not reproduce the original to the dollar, and the residue is rounding, not a disagreement in the data. Compare figures in one unit, whichever it is, rather than round-tripping between the two.

Does the conversion change what a good rate is?

No, and that is the point of getting it right: the unit is a spelling, not a judgement. What a figure in either unit is worth still depends on district, flat type and remaining lease, which is its own question. Every figure on this page is read live from the published dataset and is current to August 2026.