What owning it actually costs
Every price conversation is about what a home is worth. This one is about what it costs to hold, whatever it turns out to be worth.
- Use this when
- When you want the cost of OWNING a home rather than the price of buying one.
- You will need
- The price, roughly when you bought or will buy, your deposit, and your loan rate.
- You will get
- Every duty, interest and commission — and the price a sale must clear to return your own cash.
The figures below are an example. Replace them with yours — nothing is saved and nothing is sent anywhere.
What it costs to be wrong
Everything above assumes the price does whatever it does. This is the other tail. It makes no forecast and picks no growth rate: it reads the published index, takes every 5-year stretch that has ever run in it, and applies what actually happened in each one to the price you paid.
A sale has to clear S$1,939,447 just to return the money you put in — +21.2% above what you paid, before this home has made you a cent. Across 5 years that is +3.9% a year.
That total rises the longer you hold, because you keep putting cash in — S$429,960 so far, and every instalment adds to it. The rate it asks for falls at the same time. A longer hold is a bigger number and an easier one.
86 of the 186 5-year stretches in URA Private Residential Property Price Index since 1975-Q1 finished below that.
Since you bought, in 2021-Q2, that index has moved +32.6% to 2026-Q2. That is what the market did, not what this home did — the two are not the same number and nothing here claims to know the second.
47 of those 186 stretches ended lower than they started. Every window overlaps its neighbours, so these are 186 readings of one history and not 186 independent trials — the index holds 10 5-year stretches that share no quarter with each other. They are counted, not turned into a probability, for that reason. The worst of them started in 1981 and the best in 1976: they are the boundaries of what has happened, not a range of what will.
URA Private Residential Property Price Index — Non-landed · URA, via SingStat Table Builder · 1Q2009 = 100 · 1975-Q1 to 2026-Q2 · 186 overlapping 5-year windows · retrieved 2026-09-04 · source · Executive condominiums are not in this index.
From 1Q 2015, the private residential property price indices are computed using a stratified hedonic regression method. Under this method, variations in the attributes of private residential properties transacted such as age and unit size are controlled for by using hedonic regressions and price movements are aggregated using 5-quarter fixed weights to derive the aggregate price change. Data are compiled from caveats lodged at Singapore Land Authority, stamp duty data from the Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore, as well as data provided by developers.
Three you set yourself
The section above reads the record and chooses nothing. This one does the opposite: you pick the rate, and the arithmetic follows your assumption. Under each slider is the number of 5-year stretches in the published index that finished at or below the rate you have set — so the assumption stays yours, and how common it has been does not.
- Selling costs
- Redeems the loan
- Back to CPF
- To you
The ledger
| Gone for good — no sale returns these | |
|---|---|
| Buyer’s Stamp Duty | S$49,600 |
| Legal fees on purchase | S$3,000 |
| Interest paid to the bank over 5 years | S$205,551 |
| Legal fees on sale | S$2,800 |
| Subtotal, before commission | S$260,951 |
| Charged on the sale price, so it depends on what you get | |
| Agent commission at 2% plus GST | 2.18% |
| Seller’s Stamp Duty — held past the three-year schedule | None |
| Comes back, but to CPF and not to you | |
| CPF principal used — S$2,500 a month while the loan ran | S$350,000 |
| Accrued interest at 2.5% | S$36,202 |
| Refunded to your Ordinary Account | S$386,202 |
| Still owed | |
| Outstanding loan after 5 years | S$1,078,205 |
| Monthly instalment — S$2,956 of it cash | S$5,456 |
- Rent. The alternative to buying is renting, and this calculator does not know which home you mean, so it cannot look one up. Name a project and it will read the filed tenancy contracts for it. Until then this is the largest figure not in the ledger, and note which way that points: the monthly instalments ARE charged as interest they could have earned elsewhere, and the rent you would have paid instead is NOT credited back.
- Maintenance, conservancy or sinking fund, property tax, insurance and renovation. All real, none published per property.
- Any change in the property’s value. This ledger is only what it costs to hold, and nothing in it estimates what it is worth or will be worth. What the published index has done over holding periods this length is a separate, dated question — it is the section on being wrong, and it is still not a valuation of this address.
URA’s filed rental contracts are on the rental yield page if you want to put a real number to the first of those.
- Stamp duty is counted as cash here. Buyer’s Stamp Duty can often be reimbursed from CPF, which moves it between the cash and CPF columns without changing the total.
- CPF accrued interest is computed at the Ordinary Account rate. Your actual figure is in your CPF statement and is the one that governs.
- If a sale at market value does not cover the loan and the CPF refund, CPF requires no cash top-up of the shortfall. Selling BELOW market value does require one.
- Seller’s Stamp Duty is selected by purchase date — the 4 Jul 2025 change extended the holding period to four years for purchases from that date.
- Nothing here compares the purchase against an investment return. Cash held outside CPF does not earn the Ordinary Account rate and cannot be made to, so growing it at that rate and calling the result a benchmark would be measuring against something you could not have had.
IRAS — Buyer’s Stamp Duty (effective 2023-02-15) · IRAS — Additional Buyer’s Stamp Duty (effective 2023-04-27) · CPF Ordinary Account interest rate (effective 2026-08-21) · CPF refund rule: CPF Board · nothing on this page is saved or sent anywhere.