A Record 201 Million-Dollar Flats. A Quarter of Them Had 65 Years of Lease Left.

In August 2026, 201 HDB flats changed hands at a million dollars or more. That is the first month in the public record to cross 200 — we checked every month of HDB's registered resale transactions from January 2017 to September 2026, all 240,919 of them, and the previous high was 188 in June.

The headline got reported. The composition did not, and the composition is the story.

Of those 201 flats, 82 were four-room, 65 were five-room, one was a three-room terrace in Queenstown — and 53 were executive flats. Executive flats accounted for 170 of August's 2,521 resale registrations, or 6.7% of the market. They took 26.4% of its million-dollar sales.

Nearly one in three executive flats that sold crossed a million

Turn that around and the number gets sharper. The hit rate is the share of each flat type's own August sales that closed at or above S$1 million.

It is not a one-month artefact. Across the first nine months of 2026, 288 of 1,185 executive resales cleared a million — 24.3%, against 7.5% of four-room sales and 11.2% of five-room. If an executive flat comes to market, roughly a quarter of the time it is a million-dollar flat.

The same money buys two different things

Here is where it stops being a curiosity. These are the medians of the 201 flats, by type.

Roughly the same cheque. The executive flat delivers 57% more floor area and 29% less lease than the four-room. On a price-per-square-foot basis it is the cheapest way into the million-dollar club by a wide margin — S$679 against S$1,118.

That is not irrational. Floor area is the thing HDB has stopped producing, and a family that needs 146 square metres cannot buy 146 square metres in a 2018 four-room at any price. But it should be named for what it is: a trade of lease for space, priced at roughly 26 years of lease per 53 extra square metres.

The spread within the 53 is narrow, which tells you this is a type characteristic rather than a handful of outliers. Every one of them had between 51.6 and 72.0 years left. Forty-nine of the 53 were under 70 years.

There will not be another one

The reason the lease is short is that the supply is closed. HDB wound the executive flat down in favour of the executive condominium scheme; the last executive maisonettes were built in the 1990s and the single-storey executive apartments ran a little later.

The resale record puts a hard date on it. Across all 17,120 executive-flat resales registered between 2017 and 2026, the newest lease commencement is 2004. There are none from 2005 onward. Every executive flat in Singapore is at least 22 years into a 99-year lease, and that floor rises by one year every year, permanently.

So this segment behaves unlike any other part of the HDB market. The four-room million-dollar cohort refreshes itself — 2018-vintage BTO flats reaching their minimum occupancy period, then 2019, then 2020. The executive cohort cannot. It only ages.

The lease is not your problem. Your buyer's CPF is

A 65-year lease is comfortable for most buyers today. CPF rules turn on whether the remaining lease covers the youngest buyer to age 95, and 30 + 65 = 95, so anyone 30 or older can use CPF up to the full Valuation Limit. Below that, CPF is pro-rated — provided at least 20 years remain — and CPF's own worked example is two 25-year-olds buying a 65-year-lease flat, who may use 90% of the purchase price.

The constraint does not bind the buyer. It binds the buyer after them, and it tightens every year you hold. Take the median million-dollar executive flat and ask what a 30-year-old buyer could pay for with CPF at each exit point.

The four-room bought in the same month, with 91 years left, imposes no age floor on anyone until the 2040s.

None of this is a prediction about prices. It is a statement about who will be allowed to bid. A rising age floor removes the youngest, most CPF-dependent buyers from the pool first, and those are the buyers who set the marginal price in a market where most purchases are CPF-funded. We have written the general version of this arithmetic in The 95 Rule, worked and what 99 years is worth at 60.

The price has already moved a long way

Executive flats have not been quietly ignored. The median executive resale price went from S$600,000 in 2017 to S$910,000 across 2026 — up 51.7% — while the median executive flat sold got ten years older, from 22 years into its lease to 32.

That is the whole debate in one line. Buyers paid half as much again for a decade less lease, and there is a defensible reason (nothing this size is being built) and an uncomfortable one (the constraint is further away than the payoff).

Worth noting that the executive share of the million-dollar market has actually been falling: it peaked at 29.6% in 2023 and is 20.4% so far in 2026. Not because executive flats got cheaper, but because the four-room cohort reaching MOP is growing much faster.

Where they are

The 201 as a whole look central — Toa Payoh 32, Queenstown 26, Bukit Merah 21. The 53 executive flats look nothing like that: Tampines 9, Bishan 8, Pasir Ris 8, Hougang 6, Woodlands 5.

That is the second thing this segment quietly does. It is the suburban route to a million dollars, and it runs on square metres rather than location. The single most expensive executive flat in August was a 162 sqm unit in Bishan at S$1,650,000, on a lease that commenced in 1987 — the second-highest price of all 201 transactions that month.

What this does not say

The dataset is HDB's own, by registration date, and it excludes transactions that may not reflect full market price, such as sales between relatives. Medians are medians: individual flats vary by storey, condition, renovation and block.

We have not modelled future prices and we are not going to. The claims here are all descriptive: the composition of August's record, the age structure of the executive stock, and what the published CPF rules do to a buyer pool at a given remaining lease. Whether a 146 sqm flat with 65 years left is worth S$1.1m to you depends on how long you intend to hold it and what you intend to do at the end — which is a planning question, not a market one.

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