Australia Doesn't Charge ABSD. It Charges a Subscription Instead.

Three Australian developments — Cavallo in Melbourne, Park Avenue Residences and The Kensington in Sydney — go on sale to Singapore buyers this weekend, at a Savills event at Voco Orchard Hotel on 19 and 20 September. Prices start at A$705,000.

The pitch for offshore property almost always rests on the same sentence: there is no ABSD. That is true, and it is the least useful true thing anyone will tell you this weekend. In Australia you are the foreigner, and Australia taxes foreigners too. The difference is not that the toll is absent. It is that Singapore charges it once and Australia charges it every year.

You cannot buy an existing home at all

Start with the constraint that shapes everything else. Since 1 April 2025, foreign persons have been banned from buying established dwellings in Australia. The ban was originally to run to 31 March 2027; it has since been extended to 30 June 2029 (ATO). A great many guides written in 2025 still carry the old date.

New dwellings, near-new dwellings and off-the-plan purchases remain open. So when three projects are marketed to Singaporeans in a Singapore hotel ballroom, that is not a sales preference. It is the only part of the Australian market a foreign buyer is legally allowed into. Everything below applies to the segment you are permitted to buy — and that segment is new-build, which is where the developer's margin and the resale discount both live.

The upfront bill, computed

Three separate charges land on a foreign buyer at purchase: the ordinary state transfer duty everyone pays, a foreign-buyer surcharge on top, and a federal FIRB application fee. Applied to the units actually being launched this weekend:

The surcharge is 9% in New South Wales — it rose from 8% for contracts dated on or after 1 January 2025 (Revenue NSW) — and 8% in Victoria, unchanged since 1 July 2019 (SRO Victoria). Both sit on top of the ordinary duty scale, not instead of it. Our duty calculations reproduce Revenue NSW's own published example on a A$1,000,000 purchase (A$39,187) and the Victorian scale at three separate price points, so the arithmetic is checkable.

Note the FIRB fee behaves like a staircase, not a rate. Park Avenue's one-bedder at A$980,000 attracts A$15,600. The Kensington's one-bedder at A$1,030,000 attracts A$31,300. Fifty thousand dollars of extra price costs A$15,700 of extra fee. The same cliff repeats at A$2 million, where A$100,000 more price costs A$31,300 more fee. If a unit is priced within a whisker of a threshold, the threshold is worth more attention than the view.

The part that does not stop

Singapore's ABSD is brutal and finite. You pay 20% on a citizen's second property, and then you are done. Australia's foreign-buyer regime is lighter at the door and then bills you annually for as long as you hold.

New South Wales charges surcharge land tax at 5% of the unimproved land value, with — and this is the line worth reading twice — no tax-free threshold at all. Revenue NSW states it plainly: "A tax-free threshold does not apply to surcharge land tax. You must pay surcharge land tax regardless of the land value of your property" (Revenue NSW). The rate was 2% until 2022, 4% in 2023–24, and 5% from 2025. Victoria's absentee owner surcharge is 4%, applying from A$50,000 of land value, and it doubled from 2% as recently as the 2024 land tax year.

For a strata apartment the taxable land value is a fraction of the purchase price — your unit's share of the site, not the building. We could not verify the exact apportionment formula for a Victorian or NSW strata lot, so rather than invent one, here is the breakeven across a range of assumptions. The question: how many years of NSW surcharge land tax does it take to erase Singapore's 7.6-point upfront advantage-in-reverse?

So on plausible assumptions, somewhere between five and fifteen years of ownership, the Australian buyer has handed over more than the Singapore buyer did — and then keeps paying. The ABSD is a toll. The surcharge is a subscription.

Two things people get wrong

Singapore was never exempt from the NSW surcharge. Between 21 February 2023 and 8 April 2024, Revenue NSW accepted that its surcharges were inconsistent with international tax treaties for citizens of eight countries: New Zealand, Finland, Germany, India, Japan, Norway, South Africa and Switzerland. Singapore was not on that list, and never was. The window itself was then closed for everyone by the Treasury Laws Amendment (Foreign Investment) Act 2024, which commenced on 8 April 2024 (Federal Register of Legislation). If anyone gestures at a treaty argument this weekend, it does not apply to a Singaporean, and it no longer applies to anybody.

An empty unit is expensive. If a foreign-owned dwelling is not occupied or genuinely available for rent for 183 days or more in a vacancy year, the annual vacancy fee is charged — and since 9 April 2024 it is double the application fee you paid. On the Park Avenue two-bedder that is A$62,600 a year, about S$56,800. On the three-bedder, A$125,200. A lock-and-leave holiday flat is the single most expensive way to own Australian property as a foreigner.

What this does not settle

None of the above says Australian property is a bad idea. Rental yields in Sydney and Melbourne are generally higher than Singapore's, the entry quantum is a fraction of a Singapore condo, and currency exposure cuts both ways. What it says is narrower: the tax case for going offshore is far weaker than "no ABSD" implies, and the shape of the cost is different in a way that matters most to exactly the buyer who plans to hold for a long time.

Three further things sit outside this piece and belong in a conversation with an Australian accountant before anyone signs: Australian income tax on the rent, capital gains tax on exit for a non-resident, and Victoria's temporary off-the-plan duty concession, which may reduce the dutiable value on a Melbourne purchase and therefore the 8% surcharge with it. We could not confirm the concession's current terms from a primary Victorian source and have deliberately not netted it into the table above, so the Melbourne figures should be read as the full-duty case.

Figures as at 16 September 2026. Australian duty scales and surcharge rates are current for the 2026–27 year; FIRB fees are the schedule for 1 July 2026 to 30 June 2027. Converted at S$1 = A$1.1027, the rate on 14 September 2026. Singapore BSD and ABSD are computed from IRAS rates as at 27 April 2023, on a Singapore citizen buying a second residential property. Methodology published. No spin.