Every $1.5 Million HDB Flat Has Come From 47 Blocks

On 25 September the reported news was a record: a five-room flat at Pinnacle@Duxton changed hands for $1,720,000, the second-highest price ever paid for an HDB flat. It beat the previous project record, set two weeks earlier, by $19,000.

The more useful number is 47. That is how many individual HDB blocks have ever produced a resale sale at $1.5 million or more. There are 9,753 blocks in the transaction file. The top of the HDB market is not a price band. It is an address list.

Everything below is recomputed from HDB's own registered-resale file on data.gov.sg — all 241,357 transactions from January 2017 to September 2026. The published counts reproduce exactly: 11 flats have crossed $1.6 million in 2026 against five in the whole of 2025, and the national record remains $1,728,000, paid in April 2026 for a five-room at 96A Henderson Road in Bukit Merah.

The million-dollar flat is a market. This is not.

The two thresholds behave nothing alike.

A million-dollar flat is now an ordinary event in a tenth of the country's blocks. In 2026 alone, 1,460 of 19,290 resales cleared $1 million — 7.6%, spread across 630 blocks. At $1.5 million the same year produced 55 sales from 34 blocks: 0.29% of the market.

The threshold itself explains why. The median HDB resale price in 2026 is $630,000. One and a half million dollars is 2.38 times the middle of the market. Nothing gets there on a rising tide.

Two clusters do most of the work

The 47 blocks are not evenly spread, and two addresses dominate.

Twelve blocks — seven at Duxton, five at Toa Payoh — account for 44.4% of every $1.5 million HDB sale ever recorded. Pinnacle@Duxton has produced 589 resales in the file altogether, so roughly one in twenty-one of its resales clears $1.5 million, against one in 2,063 for the market as a whole.

By town, three account for 61.5% of the total: Central Area 28, Toa Payoh 24, Bishan 20. Then Queenstown 15, Bukit Merah 14, Clementi 8, Kallang/Whampoa 5, Bukit Timah 2, Ang Mo Kio 1. Seventeen of Singapore's towns have never produced one.

What the 47 have in common

Two things, and neither is location.

The first is lease age. Seventy-one of the 117 sales — 61% — are flats whose leases began in 2011 or 2012. Add 2016 and 2021 stock and you have 94 of 117. The top of the HDB market is overwhelmingly young: flats with 80-plus years still to run, built after HDB started putting 40-storey towers on central land. Only eight sales came from stock older than 1995, and those are the Tiong Bahru and Bukit Timah exceptions.

The second is size. Ninety-nine of the 117 are five-room flats. Eleven are executive flats, six are four-room, and exactly one is a three-room. A $1.5 million flat is almost always 105 to 122 square metres.

Put those together and the list is not really 47 blocks of luck. It is the small set of large, new, centrally sited projects HDB built in the 2010s — and buying into that set is the only way a flat reaches this price.

The record sale argues against the thing people assume

Last week's two Duxton sales sit in the same project, in the same month, at the same floor area of 107 sqm:

The lower flat cost $19,000 more. And in May, a 105 sqm unit in 1B on the 43rd to 45th storey — some 24 floors above the record flat — printed $1,630,000, or $1,442 psf.

We measured the within-block storey premium earlier this month at 0.600% of psf per storey for four-room flats, which is about 6% over ten floors. Applied here, the higher flat should have been worth roughly $100,000 more than the one that broke the record. It was worth $19,000 less. Across thirteen five-room Duxton resales in 2026, the 19th-to-21st storey band alone spans $1,480,000 to $1,720,000 — a $240,000 range inside one project, one band, one year.

Height is a real premium in aggregate and a weak predictor of any single sale. At this end of the market, unit-specific facts — outlook, renovation, which way the flat faces, how long the seller waited — are worth more than nine storeys.

Is the list getting longer?

Slowly, and from a standing start.

Volume is compounding, but the pool of qualifying buildings is widening much more slowly than the number of sales: 14 new blocks joined in 2026 against 17 the year before. What is growing fastest is repeat business in blocks already on the list.

That is the practical read for anyone selling. There is no path by which a typical flat approaches this price band, because the band is a property of a handful of buildings rather than of the market. If your block is not one of the 47, the relevant question is not what the record was last week — it is what your own block and flat type have actually printed, which is a number you can look up and which almost certainly begins with a six.

Method

All figures computed from HDB's registered resale transactions dataset on data.gov.sg, January 2017 to September 2026, 241,357 records. "Block" means a distinct block-and-street pair. Registrations trail deals by roughly three months, so September 2026 is partial (1,894 records). Prices are as recorded by HDB and are not adjusted for inflation; psf figures are computed from the dataset's floor area in square metres, which is why our $1,493 psf on the record flat differs by a dollar from figures derived from a rounded 1,151 square feet. Project records reported in the press on 25 September 2026 were cross-checked against the file and reproduce exactly.