Executive HDB Flat: The Class Singapore Stopped Building, And What 328 Sales Say It Is Worth

The executive HDB flat is the strangest asset in Singapore public housing. It is the biggest flat
most people can buy, it is the most likely of any flat type to sell for over a million dollars, and HDB has not built
one since the early 2000s. There is a fixed and slowly shrinking number of them, they are all getting older at exactly
the same rate, and in about six years the median one will cross the lease threshold that changes how buyers can
finance it.

I pulled every Executive-type resale from July and August 2026 — 328 transactions across 22 towns —
and worked out what the class is actually worth, where it has gone, and when its lease problem arrives.

Along the way the data broke one of my own standing conclusions about what extra floor space costs in an HDB flat.
I have left that section in rather than quietly dropping it.

First, what an executive HDB flat is not

Search this term and the top result is HDB’s own page about Executive Condominiums, which is a completely
different product. So before anything else:

If you are looking at a listing that says “Executive” and the price is $1.6 million with a 99-year lease starting
next year, you are looking at an EC. If it says Executive and the lease commenced in 1988, you are looking at what
this page covers.

What an executive HDB flat costs right now

Across 328 Executive resales in July and August 2026, the median was $914,850 for 146 sqm, or
1,572 sq ft, at $580.92 psf. The median flat’s lease commenced in 1993, making it 33 years old.

The range: $638,888 at the bottom — a 125 sqm Premium Apartment at Block 479 Segar Road in Bukit
Panjang, 2002 lease — to $1,650,000 at the top, a 162 sqm maisonette at Block 192 Bishan Street 13 with a
1987 lease, on the 22nd to 24th floor. That top sale is $946 psf.

Put that next to the four-room flat, which is the comparison most upgraders are actually making. A four-room in the
same two months ran a median $630,000 for 93 sqm at $609 psf. So the Executive gives you 57% more floor area for
45% more money, and it comes out 4.6% cheaper per square foot.

That sounds like the bargain of the century, and about half of it is an illusion. I take that apart below, because it
is the single most misread number in this part of the market.

Method

HDB resale registry on data.gov.sg, read 26 September 2026. July and August 2026 because both months are complete.
Unlike my four-room work, this covers all towns, not a twelve-town sample, because the Executive market is small
enough that the whole thing fits. Every figure recomputed locally from the raw rows.

The class Singapore stopped building

This is the fact that makes the Executive flat different from every other flat type, and it is visible directly in
the lease data.

The 328 flats that sold carry lease commencement years running from 1976 to 2004. That is the whole span.
There is no 2005 Executive flat, no 2012 one, none from the last twenty years. HDB stopped building the type, and the
supply is now fixed at whatever was completed by the early 2000s, minus whatever gets demolished under SERS.

Two consequences follow, and they pull in opposite directions.

Scarcity supports the price. About 164 Executive flats change hands a month nationally — 158 in
July, 170 in August. Against roughly 2,500 to 2,650 total resales a month, that is around 6.4% of the market. Nobody
is building competing supply. If you want 1,500 square feet in public housing, this is very nearly the only door, and
that scarcity is real and permanent.

Age undermines it. Every one of these flats gets a year older every year with nothing new entering behind
them. The median is already 33 years old. There is no restocking, so the average age of the class rises by
approximately one year, every year, forever.

That combination — permanently scarce and permanently ageing — is why I think of this class differently
from the rest of the HDB market, and why the lease section further down is the most important part of this page.

The model split nobody publishes

“Executive” is a flat type, not a floorplan. Underneath it sit four genuinely different products, and I have not
found another page that prices them separately.

The Apartment and the Maisonette are nearly identical in floor area — 145 against 146 sqm — and separated
by $69,000 and 41 psf. That gap is the thing worth understanding, and it goes the wrong way.

The maisonette premium is vintage-perverse

The Maisonette sells for 7.2% more per square foot than the Apartment while being, on median,
seven years older. A 1988 flat outpricing a 1995 flat of the same size is the opposite of how the rest of the
HDB market behaves, where newer stock wins on psf almost without exception.

People pay for the internal staircase. Two storeys inside an HDB block reads as a house rather than a flat, and
there is a fixed and dwindling number of them. Whether that premium is durable as the leases run down is a genuinely
open question — the buyer is paying extra for a layout while accepting seven extra years of lease decay. I have
a longer piece on this sub-type at
executive maisonette prices, and
this dataset supports what I argued there.

The last ones built were the smallest, and are worth the least

The Premium Apartment is the youngest model in the class — median lease 2001 — and it is also the
smallest at 132 sqm and the cheapest at $551 psf. So the final generation of Executive flats was
13 sqm smaller than the ones built a decade earlier, and being newer has not made up the difference.

That is the class shrinking before it died, and it matters practically: if you are shopping for maximum space, the
2000s Executive flats are a trap. They are the newest and they give you the least.

The three “Adjoined flat” rows are converted jumbos that happen to be classified Executive — 162 sqm at a
1978 median lease. Small n, so I would not price anything off them, but they are a reminder that the type is not
internally consistent. I cover that classification quirk in
the jumbo flats guide.

Four towns sold none: the executive HDB flat is a suburban product

Of Singapore’s 26 HDB towns, 22 recorded at least one Executive sale in the two months. Four recorded
zero:

Bukit Merah. Bukit Timah. Central Area. Marine Parade.

Those are four of the most expensive towns in the country. The Executive flat — the largest, most expensive
flat type HDB built — is structurally absent from the places where HDB flats cost the most. It was a
suburban product from the start, built where land allowed generous floorplans, and no amount of demand has moved it.

Towns with nine or more Executive sales. Eight further towns recorded between one and six. Pasir Ris,
Woodlands, Tampines, Jurong West and Hougang together took 52.7% of the national Executive market.Pasir Ris is the capital of the Executive flat, with 14.3% of all national sales. Together with Woodlands,
Tampines, Jurong West and Hougang it accounts for 52.7% of the market — five towns, all of them the
outer ring.

The price leadership, though, sits somewhere else entirely. Bishan is the aristocrat at a $1,260,000 median
and $795 psf, and the three highest Executive sales in the country over these two months were all Bishan maisonettes:
$1,650,000 at Block 192 Bishan Street 13, $1,550,000 at Block 442 Sin Ming Avenue and $1,438,000 at Block 212 Bishan
Street 23. Serangoon follows at $1,129,000. Both are central-adjacent towns with good schools and small
Executive stocks, which is exactly the combination that produces high prices on low volume.

At the other end, Jurong West at $487 psf is the cheapest large space in the class — a 145 sqm median
at $745,000. Against Bishan’s $795 psf that is a 1.63× spread for the same flat type.

The most reliable million-dollar flat in Singapore

This is the finding I would put on a slide if I only had one.

88 of 328 Executive sales crossed $1 million — 26.83%. More than one in four. For comparison, in the
same two months, 6.28% of four-room sales crossed $1 million.

But the more interesting difference is where. Million-dollar four-room flats appeared in five towns, and
almost three quarters of them were in Queenstown and Bukit Merah. Million-dollar Executive flats appeared in
sixteen towns:

Tampines leads. Woodlands produced nine million-dollar flats — the same town that contains the cheapest
four-room flats in Singapore. That is not a contradiction; it is the point. The million-dollar Executive flat is a
suburban phenomenon driven by floor area, while the million-dollar four-room is a central-location phenomenon driven by
newness. They are two completely different markets that happen to share a price threshold.

If you own an Executive flat in an outer town and have assumed a million dollars is out of reach because your
postcode is not Queenstown, the data says otherwise. Nine Woodlands owners and eleven Hougang owners got there in two
months. The full million-dollar picture across all flat types is in
my running count of million-dollar HDB flats.

The lease cliff arrives around 2032

Now the part that should shape any decision about holding one of these.

The median remaining lease across the 328 sales is 66.1 years. Currently 14.6% of the flats that sold
have under 60 years left, and 72.3% have under 70.

Shortest remaining lease in the sample: 49.1 years. Longest: 76.8 years.Sixty years is not an arbitrary line. It is roughly where CPF usage and loan tenure rules begin to bite, because
financing rules key off whether the remaining lease covers the youngest buyer to age 95. As the lease shortens, the
pool of buyers who can finance the purchase narrows, and it narrows fastest for exactly the buyers who want a big
family flat.

The median Executive flat has 66.1 years left. It crosses 60 years in about six years — around 2032.
And because no new Executive flats exist behind them, the whole class crosses together. There is no incoming supply of
younger stock to keep the median up. This is the one flat type where the lease profile of the entire category marches
in one direction with no dilution.

Worth noting that the 57.7% sitting between 60 and 70 years is the biggest single band, and it moves into the
under-60 band over roughly the next ten years. Anyone modelling the HDB resale market in the 2030s should have that
in the model.

What the extra space costs, and a conclusion of mine that just broke

I have been building a position across several pieces this month about what extra floor space costs in an HDB flat.
The method is simple: compare the median price step between two flat types against the median area step. If a
flat is priced purely by the square foot, the two should match.

What I found for the smaller steps was that buyers consistently under-pay for extra space, and that the
bigger the step, the harder they under-pay. Going from three-room to four-room, the price rose 8.19 percentage points
less than the area. Going from four-room to five-room, 2.38 points less. Bigger jump, bigger discount on the extra
space. It was a tidy conclusion and I stated it as a house position.

The Executive flat is by far the biggest step available, so it should be the strongest test. Here is the result,
computed town by town so that I am not comparing a Bishan Executive against a Jurong West four-room:

The median gap across those eight towns is −5.78 points on a median area step of +46.5%.

So the gradient goes: three to four rooms, −8.19 on a +36.8% area step. Four to five rooms, −2.38 on
+21.5%. Four-room to Executive, −5.78 on +46.5%.

That is not a gradient. The biggest area step in the entire HDB range produces a smaller discount than the
three-to-four-room step. “The bigger the step, the harder buyers under-pay” does not survive the addition of a third
data point, and I am retiring it.

Look at the town column and you can see why it was always shaky. The gaps run from −20.0 in Punggol to
+19.8 in Woodlands — a forty-point spread. In three of eight towns buyers over-pay for the extra
space relative to a flat rate. A median drawn across a range that wide is not summarising anything; it is averaging
two different behaviours. The honest conclusion is that there is no stable price of space at the Executive step,
and the town you are in matters more than the size step you are taking.

Punggol and Sengkang, the two negative outliers, are both towns whose Executive stock is 2001–2003 Premium
Apartments at 128 to 130 sqm competing against brand-new four-room flats. The “Executive” there is barely bigger and
noticeably less new, so buyers do not pay up. Woodlands is the reverse: old, cheap four-rooms against genuinely large
148 sqm Executive stock.

And the psf “discount” is a mix artefact

Remember the national figure: the Executive looked 4.6% cheaper per square foot than the four-room. Compare them
within the same town and that reverses in most places:

In five of eight towns the Executive flat is DEARER per square foot than the four-room. The national
−4.6% exists only because Executive flats are concentrated in towns whose four-room flats are cheap. It is a
textbook mix effect, and if you have been telling yourself an Executive is cheaper per square foot, that is probably
not true in your town.

Who should buy an executive HDB flat

The comparison most of my clients are really weighing is Executive flat against resale condo, and that gap has
moved a lot this year — the HDB versus condo price
gap has the current numbers. For the wider resale backdrop, the
2026 HDB resale price overview sets the context, and if you
are working out loan tenure and CPF limits against a shortening lease, you can
run your own numbers with the free calculators at listings.sg/tools.

HDB’s own overview of the flat types it has built and sells is at
hdb.gov.sg,
and it is worth noting that the Executive flat no longer appears there as something you can buy new — which is
the whole story of this page in one absence.

The verdict

Computed from the HDB resale registry on data.gov.sg, read 26 September 2026. Free valuation at
buycondo.sg; the video library is at buyers.sg.

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