What it really costs to live in Singapore

You'll have seen the headline: Singapore is the most expensive city in the world. It's the wrong shape of true. Two things here really do cost a fortune, housing and cars, and either one can swallow a good salary on its own. Almost everything else, the food, the buses and trains, the daily running of a life, is cheaper than in most of the cities people arrive from.

This is the money half of the move, in detail. If you want the whole journey in order, the job, the pass, the lease, the tax year, read our complete guide to moving to Singapore first, then come back here to build the budget. Every figure below comes from a published source, and we say which one, because cost data goes stale faster than rules do.

The two lines that decide your budget

Nearly every Singapore budget that goes wrong goes wrong in the same two places.

The first is rent. Your take-home here looks generous, partly because nothing comes off your pay for a state pension while you're on a work pass, and partly because income tax is genuinely low. Then the lease lands and most of that difference is gone.

The second is the car you assumed you'd buy. You can't simply walk into a showroom here. You have to win a certificate at auction first, and it gives you the right to run a car for ten years and no longer.

Get those two decisions right and the rest of the budget mostly looks after itself. Get them wrong and no amount of careful shopping will save it.

Rent: what a flat actually costs

There are two housing markets here, each with its own published numbers. Look at both, because they answer different questions.

Public housing, the HDB flats where most Singaporeans live, is the cheaper half. HDB publishes median rents every quarter, town by town and size by size, taken from the rents landlords declare. In the most recent table, a three-room flat runs from about S$2,500 a month in an outer town like Choa Chu Kang to about S$3,300 in the central area. Four-room flats run from roughly S$3,000 to about S$4,600. Five-room flats reach about S$5,100 centrally.

The smallest flats, the two-room ones, sit around S$2,350 to S$2,450, though only a handful of towns rent out enough of them to publish a median. Renting one bedroom rather than a whole flat is cheaper again, but nobody publishes those figures, so treat any number you're quoted as one person's story rather than a market rate.

Private condos are quoted by the square foot per month, which takes getting used to. The planning authority publishes a median for every project with enough signed leases in the quarter. Across those projects the middle sits near S$5 a square foot. A thousand square foot flat, a comfortable two-bedroom, therefore lands close to S$5,000 a month. The cheaper projects sit nearer S$3.50 and the top of the market runs past S$11.

Group the central and city-fringe postal districts together and their median is around S$5.90 a square foot, against about S$4.80 for the rest of the island. Being central costs you about a fifth. Size costs you everything, which is why the same budget buys a small flat by the river or a big one out east.

Then there's the cash you need before you move in. Landlords want a deposit measured in months of rent, plus the first month up front, and an agent usually takes a fee. The tenancy also has to be stamped with the tax authority, at 0.4% of the rent over the whole lease. None of that's huge on its own. Together it's a real sum to have sitting ready.

The car: why almost nobody bothers

Before you buy a car in Singapore you bid for a certificate of entitlement, the COE, in a government auction that runs twice a month. Win one and you may register a car and use it for ten years. Then it expires and you start again.

In the most recent auction, the certificate for an ordinary family car closed at about S$124,000. The larger-engine category closed near S$130,000. Over the past year the smaller category has moved between roughly S$102,000 and S$129,000, so this isn't a number to plan around to the dollar. It's a number to respect.

Spread across the ten years it buys you, that certificate alone works out near S$1,030 a month. That's before the car, before the registration taxes on top of it, before insurance, road tax, parking and petrol at about S$2.50 a litre. For comparison, eating two hawker meals a day for a month costs around S$250. The certificate is roughly four times that, and you can't drive it anywhere.

Which is why most people here don't own a car and don't miss one. The island is small, the trains are good and taxis are everywhere. If you're arriving from somewhere a car is simply part of a household, this is the biggest habit you'll change, and the one that quietly funds everything else.

School fees, and the route most arrivals never check

If you're moving with children, this is the line that decides whether an offer works at all.

International schools publish their fees, and the long-established ones are expensive. At two of the best known, annual tuition runs from about S$36,000 for the youngest year groups to around S$58,000 at the top of the school, with tax included. A one-off application fee and an enrolment fee of several thousand sit on top of that. Smaller and newer schools charge less, sometimes a lot less, but the spread is wide enough that you have to read each school's own fee page rather than trust a range.

Here's the part newcomers miss. Foreign children can attend ordinary government schools, and the education ministry publishes a flat monthly fee for them. For a child from outside the region that fee is a little over S$1,000 a month at primary level, around S$2,190 at secondary and around S$2,540 at pre-university. The published schedule steps up each year, so check the current one. Set against an international school, primary schooling in the local system costs roughly a third.

The catch is access rather than money. Places depend on what's available in your area, and children joining partway through usually sit a centralised placement test first. The curriculum is demanding, taught in English, with a second language required. It's a real option and it's worth asking about properly before you assume the international route is the only one.

A helper is normal here, and the levy is the small part

Live-in domestic help is ordinary here in a way it isn't in most of Europe. It changes what a working couple with young children can realistically manage.

The government levy is published and modest. It's S$300 a month for a first helper and S$450 for a subsequent one. Families with a young child, an elderly member or a person with a disability pay a concessionary S$60 instead. The levy isn't the cost, though. Her salary is, and there's no published rate for it, because pay is set by agreement and by what her home country's mission asks for.

Around that sit the things people forget. You have to post a S$5,000 security bond for any helper who isn't Malaysian. You have to buy her medical insurance with an annual claim limit of at least S$60,000, plus personal accident cover of at least the same. Agencies charge their own fees to match you with someone. Treat the levy as the visible corner of a bigger and more honest number.

What is genuinely cheap

Now the good news, and it's properly good news.

Eating out is cheap, and not in a grim way. The national statistics office tracks average hawker prices across the country, which is why these are real averages rather than one lucky stall. A plate of chicken rice averages about S$4.14. Economical rice, one meat and two vegetables, averages about S$3.74. Char kway teow is around S$4.62 and wanton noodles around S$4.47. Coffee with condensed milk is about S$1.39 a cup.

Transport is the other one. No ride on the basic bus and train network costs more than S$2.57, and short hops start at S$1.28. An adult monthly pass covering unlimited basic bus and train travel is S$122. In a city where you don't need a car, that's the entire transport budget for most people.

Utilities are reasonable if you're sensible with the air conditioning, which is really the whole game. Electricity is billed at about 35 cents a unit including tax, and the tariff is reset every quarter. Every hundred units costs you around S$35, and the aircon is the biggest single thing on that meter, alongside the fridge and the water heater. Water and piped gas are billed separately and are small by comparison.

Groceries are mixed, and the split matters more than the total. Local staples are cheap: a whole chilled chicken averages about S$8.55 a kilo, ten eggs about S$3.29, a litre of fresh milk about S$3.73. Imported western food is where the bill climbs. Ribeye averages over S$55 a kilo and salmon around S$35. Shop the way people here shop and your grocery bill looks reasonable. Shop the way you did at home and it doesn't.

Healthcare: good, efficient, and not subsidised for you

The health system here is genuinely excellent. The low prices you'll read about mostly belong to somebody else.

Take the polyclinic, the public primary care clinic that citizens use. A standard consultation costs a citizen S$18.50 and a permanent resident S$37.50. On a work pass you pay the unsubsidised rate for the same visit, which is S$85.35. That gap is the subsidy, and it isn't yours.

Most foreign residents end up with a private family doctor instead. Prices there vary by clinic and by what is actually done, so we aren't going to invent a figure. What matters is the shape of it. Routine care is affordable out of pocket, and a hospital admission isn't. Nothing obliges an employer to give an Employment Pass holder medical cover, so read your contract instead of assuming. If there's none, private cover becomes a monthly line, priced on your age and history rather than a list.

Three budgets, and what they leave out

Here's what those numbers add up to. Each budget counts only the lines you can actually look up. Food beyond the hawker habit, a phone, insurance, travel and anything social sits on top.

One person, first pass, outer town. A two-room flat at the published median is around S$2,400. The monthly transport pass is S$122. Two hawker meals a day comes to about S$250. That's roughly S$2,800 a month before utilities, a phone, insurance or a single drink. The lowest salary that qualifies for an Employment Pass sits in the mid five thousands, so those fixed lines take about half of it before tax. Workable, not comfortable.

A couple, no children, no car. A four-room flat in an outer town runs around S$3,000 to S$3,500. Two monthly passes are S$244. Two people eating out twice a day is close to S$500 a month at the national average, and cooking a few nights brings that down. Call it S$4,000 a month for the fixed lines, with the flat doing most of the work. Move that same flat into the central area and you add well over a thousand a month for exactly the same rooms.

A family of four, condo, two children at international school. A 1,300 square foot condo at the median works out near S$6,700 a month. Two children in the middle of the published fee range is roughly S$80,000 a year, which is another S$6,700 a month. A helper's levy adds S$300, and her salary sits on top of that. Before this household has eaten anything, it's spending close to S$14,000 a month. Put the same two children in a government school and the school line drops to about S$2,070, which changes the arithmetic of the entire move.

Add a car to any of these and you're adding about S$1,030 a month for the certificate alone, plus the car itself and everything that follows it.

What your payslip does and doesn't include

Two quirks make pay here behave differently from what you're used to.

The first is that nothing comes off your salary for the state retirement scheme. Those contributions are payable for citizens and permanent residents, not for work pass holders. Your net pay looks generous next to the same headline salary in Europe. The catch is that retirement saving is now entirely your own job, and the easiest thing in the world is to quietly spend the difference.

The second is that income tax really is low. Resident rates are progressive, the first slice of chargeable income is taxed at nothing, and the top rate is 24%. Most people arriving on a normal professional salary pay a fraction of what they were paying at home.

Put those together and the trap is obvious. The generous take-home is real, and so is the rent. Budget from the flat you can actually get, not from the number at the bottom of the payslip.

Where budgets go wrong

In roughly the order people find out:

1. Planning from the salary instead of the lease. Find the published median for the flat you'd accept, then work backwards. It's the only line big enough to break the plan.
2. Forgetting the cash needed up front. Deposit, agent fee, lease stamping at 0.4% of the rent over the term, school deposits, a helper's bond. None of it's optional and all of it lands in the first month.
3. Assuming the air conditioning is free. It's the biggest thing on your electricity bill and the easiest to run without noticing.
4. Treating a car as a normal purchase. It's the single most expensive habit you can bring with you.
5. Assuming somebody else covers your health. The subsidies belong to citizens and permanent residents, and nothing forces an employer to fill the gap.
6. Signing a year in the first neighbourhood you're shown. Your commute will teach you more about where to live than any list of rents.

Frequently asked questions

Is Singapore really the most expensive city in the world?

It depends entirely on what you buy. On housing and on cars it sits near the top of any list, and the gap is large. On everyday food, public transport and utilities it's cheaper than most of the cities people move here from. The headline comes from an index built around an expat basket that leans heavily on those two expensive things.

Do I need a car in Singapore?

Almost certainly not. You have to win a government certificate at auction before you can register a car at all, and it lasts ten years before it expires. The island is small, the train network is good and taxis are everywhere. Most foreign residents never own a car and say they don't miss it.

Is an HDB flat cheaper than a condo?

Usually yes, and you get more space for the money, but you give up the pool and the gym. There are rules attached, though. You need a qualifying pass with at least six months left to run, and only citizen owners may rent out a whole flat. Some blocks are closed to foreign tenants because of the non-citizen quota.

Can my children go to a local government school instead of an international one?

In principle yes, and it costs a fraction of the international route. Foreign children pay a published non-citizen rate rather than the subsidised one. The real constraint is access, not money: places depend on availability and children joining partway usually have to sit a centralised placement test first.

Does my employer have to give me health insurance?

Not if you hold an Employment Pass. The medical insurance requirement applies to Work Permit and S Pass holders, not to you. Many employers do provide cover anyway, so read your contract rather than assuming, and remember that public healthcare subsidies go to citizens and permanent residents only.

How much should I be earning before the move makes sense?

Work backwards rather than forwards. Start with the flat you'd actually accept and find its published median rent, add school if you have children, then see what is left. Rent and school are the two lines that decide the answer, and both are published, so you can do this before you negotiate.