Three Weeks Ago, Certainty Cost One Basis Point. It Still Does — If Your Loan Is Big Enough.

Three weeks ago we wrote that the price of certainty on a Singapore mortgage was one basis point — a 1.40% two-year fixed against a 1.39% float, S$4.66 a month on a S$1 million loan. Since then the banks have moved their fixed boards and the floats have barely budged.

The premium did not widen by the same amount for everybody. It widened almost entirely for people with ordinary loans.

What actually moved

Standard Chartered raised its one-year and two-year fixed packages by 0.2 percentage points to 2.00%, effective 1 October 2026. OCBC adjusted its home loan rates in the week of 21 September, and now quotes a three-year fixed at 2.08% and an HDB five-year fixed at 2.28%. Citi's two-year fixed is at 2.20%, Maybank's three-year at 2.55%, and DBS's HDB three-year fixed at 2.08%. At least four fixed-rate options have crossed 2%. Floating packages, on the same survey, sit mostly between 1.5% and 1.8% (The Straits Times, 2 October 2026, using Mortgage Master data on a S$500,000 loan).

Those are boards. What borrowers actually sign is a different series, and it moved far less. Redbrick Mortgage Advisory's median accepted two-year fixed rate across its own loan book ran 1.45% in January and 1.50% in September — five basis points in nine months (Stacked Homes, 8 October 2026, rates indicative as at 28 September). The boards moved. The transacted market moved a fraction as much.

Both facts are true because the Singapore mortgage market does not have a single price.

The premium is a function of your loan size

Redbrick states the spread outright: through July to September, the typical two-year fixed was 1.40% for loans above S$1.5 million and 1.65% for loans under S$500,000. By early October it put fixed at 1.50%–1.80% for loans above S$1 million and 1.80%–2.00% for smaller ones.

Set that against the floating floor, which is the single most robustly evidenced number in the market this week: 1.43%, being three-month compounded SORA at 1.2332% plus a 0.20% spread, with a minimum loan of S$800,000. Four independent rate tables published it within six days of each other, and it reproduces arithmetically.

All on a 25-year tenure. The arithmetic is unremarkable; the gap between the first row and the last is the point. A borrower with S$1.5 million and a broker can still buy two years of certainty for the price of a coffee a week. A borrower with S$500,000 pays fifteen to twenty-five times that, in percentage terms, for the same two years.

It is worth being blunt about why. The 0.20% spread over SORA that produces the 1.43% float appears on no bank's own website. DBS's public rates page lists an "Exclusive" package at three-month SORA plus 0.75%. UOB publishes SORA plus 0.70% in years one and two, rising to plus 1.00% from year four. OCBC publishes a one-month SORA promotional spread of 0.98%, then 1.40%. The thin spreads in every comparison table are broker-deviated pricing on large loans. There is no published retail board rate for a Singapore fixed mortgage at all — every number in circulation is an aggregator's or a broker's quote, which is also why six reputable tables gave six different "cheapest fixed" answers in the same week, from 1.35% to 2.00%.

It is a funding story, not a Fed story

The obvious explanation is the Federal Reserve, which raised its target range a quarter point to 3.75%–4.00% on 16 September, its first increase since 2023, on a 12–0 vote (Federal Reserve). The obvious explanation is wrong, or at least secondary.

Singapore fixed-rate mortgages are priced off the bank's own two-to-three-year funding cost, and that cost moved on its own terms:

• The two-year Singapore government bond yield went from 1.694% on 8 September to 1.96% on 8 October — 27 basis points in a month, and 50 basis points up from 1.46% in early January.
• OCBC itself says SGD overnight indexed swap rates for one- to three-year tenors rose by nearly 0.3 percentage points in September 2026 (via The Straits Times, 2 October). That is the bank naming a 30 basis point move in precisely the tenor that prices a two-year fixed mortgage.
• The five-year SGS yield reached 2.24% by 8 October. Six-month Treasury bill cut-offs went from 1.70% on 10 September to 1.92% by 27 September.
• Over the same month, three-month compounded SORA rose four basis points, from 1.19% at end-August to 1.231% on 8 October.

Twenty-seven against four. That ratio is the entire article. Fixed boards price off a forward curve that moved; floating packages reset off a backward-looking ninety-day average that has not caught up yet.

Redbrick's Clive Chng puts the mechanism the same way: "banks price fixed rates on where they think rates are going, not where they are today," and what local banks are pricing now "is the chance of more hikes to come." He explicitly rejects the reading that this is a reaction to September's hike.

There is a wrinkle worth noting. Market-implied odds of a further hike at the Fed's 27–28 October meeting ran at 54.2% on 23 September and had fallen to roughly 18% by 10 October on CME FedWatch pricing. The fixed boards were set against the late-September curve, not against October's odds. If those odds hold, the new fixed rates look expensive relative to what the market now expects.

Floating borrowers have not escaped. They have not been billed.

The front of the SORA curve has inverted. One-month compounded SORA is 1.2902% and three-month is 1.2310% (8 October prints, per aggregators citing MAS). The one-month sitting above the three-month is what the arrival of higher rates looks like in a benchmark computed in arrears.

We walked through this mechanism in August: compounded SORA is an average of the past, so if overnight rates simply stay where they are, the three-month figure climbs toward the one-month. Nothing new has to happen. Bank analysts quoted in early October expect three-month SORA to finish 2026 near 1.40% — roughly 17 basis points above today, which on a 1.43% package becomes about 1.60%.

Mortgage Master's chief executive David Baey, quoted on 2 October, is direct about it: floating rates are "not going to be great for the next six months to a year," and are "going to increase in the next one year before it decreases again."

So the honest comparison is not 1.43% against 1.80%. It is a float that is contractually going to rise against a fixed rate that already has.

The HDB loan is quietly closing the gap

The HDB concessionary rate is 2.60% for 1 October to 31 December 2026, unchanged, pegged at 0.1 percentage points above the CPF Ordinary Account rate of 2.5% (CPF Board).

It has not moved since 1999, and it cannot. The OA rate is pegged to a three-month average of major local banks' interest rates, which was 0.32% for May to July 2026 — against a legislated floor of 2.5%. The peg would have to rise nearly eightfold before the floor stopped binding.

That makes 2.60% a fixed ceiling in a rising market. In January, the best bank fixed rate of about 1.45% sat 1.15 percentage points below it. On the boards now above 2.00%, that advantage is down to 0.60 points — and on a S$500,000 loan over 25 years the HDB loan costs S$2,268 a month against S$2,119 at a 2.00% bank fixed. Borrowers who dropped the HDB loan for a thin bank rate are watching the reason narrow.

Two clarifications, because they get conflated. The 4% floor that runs to end-2027 applies to the Special, MediSave and Retirement accounts — not the Ordinary Account, and therefore not the HDB rate; the OA has its own separate 2.5% floor. And HDB loans carry no prepayment penalty, where a bank loan during lock-in typically does.

What the premium does not price

Fixing buys you two years of a known instalment. It does not buy you a known rate after that, and the reversion is package-specific rather than a market standard: DBS's two-year fixed reverts to three-month SORA plus 1.00%, OCBC's to plus 0.65% in year three and plus 1.00% in year four, Standard Chartered's one-year fixed to one-month SORA plus 0.40%. A 1.80% fixed that reverts to SORA plus 1.00% is a 2.23% loan in year three on today's benchmark.

It does not buy flexibility. Lock-in is typically two years with a redemption penalty around 1.5% of the amount repaid, though the published range across banks runs 0.75% to 2%. Partial prepayment within lock-in is not uniformly penalised — UOB publishes one free prepayment a year capped at 20% of the original loan; OCBC allows up to 50% of a SORA package to be prepaid in the first two years. Internal repricing is not always chargeable either: UOB publishes one free conversion after 24 months, OCBC a free package switch after year one on new loans. Check your own letter of offer rather than a comparison table.

And it does not buy a rate you were quoted. Every figure in this article carries a loan-size basis, and the gap between the best large-loan price and the best small-loan price — 1.45% against 1.80%, on the same two-year product in the same week — is wider than the entire move in floating rates this year.

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Method

Bank repricing, the Standard Chartered effective date, the OCBC swap figure and the floating range are from The Straits Times, 2 October 2026 (read in SPH Media's syndicated copy), with rates stated on a S$500,000 loan using Mortgage Master data. The median-accepted-rate series and the loan-size breakdown are Redbrick Mortgage Advisory's, published in Stacked Homes, 8 October 2026. SORA levels are 8 October 2026 prints as restated by rate aggregators citing MAS; the three-month figure of 1.2332% used for the 1.43% float is the 5 October print. Two-year and five-year SGS yields are from Investing.com's historical series and a published MAS-sourced benchmark table dated 8 October 2026; MAS's own statistics pages were not reachable for this piece, so every SGS and SORA figure here is a dated third-party restatement of MAS data. The FOMC statement and meeting calendar are primary. CPF and HDB rates are from the CPF Board. Instalments are computed on a standard amortising formula over a 25-year tenure. We have deliberately not published bank-level fixed rates where only a single aggregator carried them and other dated sources disagreed; where sources conflicted on the same bank, we used the better-evidenced figure and said which.

Nothing here is a recommendation. We are not your financial adviser, and the right answer depends on your loan size, your lock-in, your remaining tenure and how much instalment variation you can absorb.