HDB Executive Maisonette Prices 2026: My Honest Take

By Gary Lim · ERA Senior Division Director · CEA R009877B · 5 September 2026

The August number that made me sit up : HDB Executive Maisonette Prices 2026 : My Honest Take

Every HDB executive maisonette owner in Singapore should know what happened in August 2026. A record 201 million-dollar HDB flats changed hands in a single month — the first time the monthly count has ever crossed 200 — and 53 of them were executive flats. That’s more than one in four.

Let me put that in context. In the second quarter of this year, executives made up just under 20% of million-dollar deals. One month after the Government removed the 15-month wait-out period for private owners on 28 July, the executive share jumped to 26%. Five-room flats added another 65 deals. Put the big formats together and large flats took nearly six in ten of August’s million-dollar transactions.

This is not a market that’s running away — the overall resale index barely moved, up 0.1% on the month by flash estimates and still down 0.5% year-on-year. Prices island-wide are flat. But underneath that flat index, one specific segment — the biggest, rarest flats — is being repriced in real time. I’ve spent 17 years working the D19 and D20 corridor, where half of Singapore’s maisonette listings sit, and I have never seen the enquiry mix skew this hard toward space.

So this article does two jobs. If you’re thinking of buying an HDB executive maisonette, I’ll show you exactly what they cost town by town, what’s on the market right now, and the lease-decay math that most agents conveniently skip. If you own one — especially in Hougang, Bishan, Serangoon or Tampines — I’ll show you why the next six to twelve months may be the best selling window you’ve had in years.

What exactly is an HDB executive maisonette?

An executive maisonette (EM) is a two-storey HDB flat — living, dining and kitchen downstairs, bedrooms upstairs, connected by your own internal staircase. Typical size is 1,450 to 1,610 sq ft, with some going well past that. HDB stopped building them in 1995, which means every single EM in Singapore was built between roughly 1983 and 1995 and is now 31 to 43 years old.

Three formats get mixed up all the time, so let’s be precise:

That “stopped 1995” line is the entire investment thesis, both for and against. Supply is permanently fixed and shrinking in lease terms every year. Scarcity supports prices. Lease decay erodes them. Everything else in this article is about which force wins, for which unit, on which timeline.

The 2025–2026 EM record board

The national record for an HDB executive maisonette has fallen three times in about thirteen months:

Notice the pattern: every recent record is in Bishan, and every record flat had only around 60 years of lease left. Buyers paid top-5-in-history money for a flat that’s already a third of the way through its lease. As my colleague-in-data Norman Koh put it in Stacked’s coverage of the August record month: buyers of larger units tend to be right-sizing retirees, and they simply aren’t that worried about a shorter remaining lease. They’re buying 25 good years of space, not 95 years of paper.

I cover the Bishan story in full — the town where the EM trophy market lives — in my [DRAFT] Bishan HDB resale deep-dive, and the wider million-dollar phenomenon in my live piece on million-dollar HDB flats in 2026.

HDB executive maisonette prices by town (2026)

Roughly 945 maisonettes transacted between January 2025 and August 2026, and the island-wide average now sits around $978,000. Here’s how the towns stack up, from the data Stacked and others have published this quarter, cross-checked against my own closings:

Two things I’d flag from the trenches. First, the sub-$900k band is shrinking — a year ago you could still find Tampines and Hougang EMs under $900k without much hunting; today those are $950k conversations. Second, the premium for a corner or top-floor EM with an unblocked view has widened sharply. When only a handful of units in a block are maisonettes, one motivated buyer sets the new block record, and the next seller anchors on it.

What sellers are asking right now — live listings data

Numbers from the past are easy. Here’s what I pulled from live Listings.sg market data this week — 23 executive maisonettes actively listed for sale island-wide as of 5 September 2026:

Read that first bullet again. The median asking price for an executive maisonette in Singapore is now a million dollars. Not the record — the middle of the market. And sellers are clearly watching the record board: that $1.65m Bishan St 22 ask didn’t appear from nowhere; it appeared three weeks after Bishan Spring printed $1.65m one street away.

Asking is not getting, of course — I tell my sellers this weekly. But the gap between asking and transacted has been closing in this segment all year, which is exactly what you see when demand outruns a fixed supply. If you want to sanity-check any specific block, run the numbers with the free calculators at listings.sg/tools before you negotiate.

The wait-out removal: why the big-flat bid is back

Here’s the part of the story that connects the dots, and it’s the reason I’d argue the HDB executive maisonette market has structurally changed since 28 July 2026.

For almost four years — since September 2022 — anyone who sold a private property had to wait 15 months before buying a non-subsidised HDB resale flat, unless they were 55 and older buying a 4-room or smaller. That rule surgically removed the single richest buyer group from the large-flat market: condo and landed owners cashing out and right-sizing into a big flat. Seniors could skip the wait only by buying small. Big flats got no exemption at all.

On 28 July, with resale prices having eased for two straight quarters, HDB removed the wait-out period entirely with immediate effect. The ex-private buyer walked straight back into the showflat — sorry, the staircase landing — and August was the first full month of data.

What the first month shows:

One month is one month — I hedge my flash estimates like everyone should, and the official Q3 index lands 1 October. But the shape of the data matches exactly what you’d predict: the returning buyers are equity-rich, lease-insensitive, and they want space. They aren’t bidding up 3-rooms in Woodlands. They’re bidding up executive maisonettes in Hougang, five-rooms in Bidadari, and jumbos in Tiong Bahru. August’s single biggest deal was a five-room at Tiong Bahru View at $1,688,888. The biggest EM markets — Hougang and Tampines — are precisely where the non-mature million-dollar record just broke.

And the records didn’t stop at the EM. August’s tape was a procession of first-evers across the big-flat map — here are six that Stacked flagged, several of them project or town records:

Toa Payoh alone logged 32 million-dollar deals in the month — 24 of them along Bidadari Park Drive and Alkaff Crescent — and mature estates took a record 177 of the 201. Year-to-date the count stands at 1,290 million-dollar flats against 1,593 for the whole of 2025; at August’s run rate, 2026 breaks the annual record before Christmas.

I wrote about the removal’s mechanics when it happened — see my piece on the impact of lifting the 15-month wait-out period. The prediction back then from most analysts was a 0.5–2% price lift skewed to larger flats in mature estates. The first month of data suggests the skew is real, and if anything sharper than forecast — the index barely moved while the big-flat segment set three records at once.

The lease-decay math nobody shows you

Now the cold shower. Every HDB executive maisonette conversation must pass through this section, because the same 60-year lease that doesn’t bother a 62-year-old right-sizer can quietly wreck the sums for a 35-year-old family. Here’s the honest math.

CPF usage: the age-95 rule

You can use full CPF only if the remaining lease covers the youngest owner to age 95. A 1988-built EM has about 61 years left. For a 34-year-old buyer, 95 − 34 = 61 — you just scrape through. Any younger, and your CPF usage gets pro-rated. For a 30-year-old couple buying a 57-year-lease EM, the pro-ration bites hard, and the cash top-up requirement climbs.

Financing a $1.0m EM (today’s median ask)

These are planning figures, not quotes — and note the trap: on shorter-lease EMs, banks may cut the LTV below 75% or shorten the tenure, so the older and cheaper the flat, the more cash it can paradoxically demand. Model your own numbers with the calculators at listings.sg/tools, and if you’re weighing an HDB loan against a bank package, the 2.6%-versus-1.40% gap is the widest I’ve seen in my career.

The resale horizon question

Buy a 60-year-lease EM today and hold 15 years, and you’re selling a 45-year-lease flat to a buyer whose CPF and loan will both be restricted. That future buyer pool is thinner. This is why I tell younger clients: an EM is a fantastic home and a mediocre asset. The buyers winning August’s bidding are the ones for whom that trade-off doesn’t matter — retirees converting condo equity into space plus cash, planning to carry the flat to the end of their own timeline, not the lease’s.

The 5-room and jumbo alternative

If the maisonette math doesn’t clear, the adjacent options are doing the same dance. Five-rooms took 65 of August’s 201 million-dollar deals, and the five-room is where the younger-lease big-flat supply lives — newly-MOP projects in Bidadari, Dawson, Bedok South and Punggol offer 90+ year leases at 1,100–1,200 sq ft, at higher psf but with full CPF and clean financing. I’ve compared the trade-off in my piece on newly-MOP flats versus older resale flats — the short version is you’re choosing between space per dollar (old EM) and lease per dollar (young 5R).

Jumbo flats are the wildcard third option: single-storey space monsters, mostly in older estates, with the same fixed-supply logic as EMs. A Tiong Bahru-area jumbo on a 45-year lease sold for $1.53m in May — briefly a national 4-room record — which tells you lease-insensitivity is alive and well at the top of that market too (more in my [DRAFT] Bukit Merah deep-dive).

Who should buy an HDB executive maisonette — and who shouldn’t

My verdict – HDB Executive Maisonette Prices 2026 : My Honest Take

FAQ : HDB Executive Maisonette Prices 2026 : My Honest Take

What is the most expensive HDB executive maisonette ever sold?

$1.65 million — Blk 192 Bishan St 13 (Bishan Spring), a 1,743 sq ft duplex on the 22nd–24th storey, transacted August 2026 with about 60 years of lease remaining. It’s among the five biggest HDB resale deals in history.

Why did HDB stop building executive maisonettes?

HDB phased out maisonettes and other executive formats around 1995 to focus land use on higher-density standard flat types. Every EM in existence today was built between roughly 1983 and 1995 — supply is permanently capped and ages together.

How many executive maisonettes are there in Singapore?

Estimates put the stock in the tens of thousands island-wide, concentrated in Hougang, Tampines, Pasir Ris, Bishan, Serangoon and Choa Chu Kang. Only about 20–25 are actively listed for sale at any one time island-wide — which is why well-priced units in good blocks move fast.

Can I use full CPF to buy an executive maisonette?

Only if the remaining lease covers the youngest owner to age 95. Most EMs have 57–65 years left, so buyers in their mid-30s and older generally clear the bar; younger buyers face pro-rated CPF and bigger cash requirements.

Did the 15-month wait-out removal really push up big-flat prices?

The first full month of data (August 2026) shows record million-dollar volume with the executive share jumping from about 20% to 26%, record non-mature-town activity led by Hougang, and the first monthly price uptick after months of drift — while the overall index stayed nearly flat. It’s one month, and the official Q3 figures land 1 October, but the skew toward large flats matches exactly what the policy change predicted.

Are executive maisonettes a good investment in 2026?

As a pure investment, no — lease decay caps long-run appreciation and thins your future buyer pool. As a home, they’re arguably the best space value in Singapore, and near-term prices are supported by fixed supply plus the returning ex-private buyer bid. Buy for the living, not the flipping.

Should I sell my executive maisonette now or wait?

If selling was already in your 1–2 year plan, the current window is unusually good: records are resetting, the buyer pool just expanded, and active competition on the market is thin. Timing beyond that depends on your next move — I map this out in my [DRAFT] guide on the best time to sell your HDB.

Executive maisonette vs 5-room flat — which should I choose?

EM if you value absolute space, separation and character, and your age/financing clear the lease math. A newly-MOP 5-room if you want a young lease, full CPF, cleaner resale prospects, and don’t mind ~400 fewer square feet at a higher psf.

What we do for your clients: Blk201_Clementi_EM_Buyer Presentation

http://Hougang-hdb-resale-2026

Singapore Cooling Measures Tweaked how for the Market in 2026