The HDB psf Record Left Duxton After Nine Years. It Won by $1.17.

A five-room flat on the 37th to 39th storey of 91 Dawson Road sold for $1,600,000 in September. At 99 square metres, that works out to $1,501.46 per square foot — the highest figure ever recorded against a registered HDB resale transaction.

It beat the previous high by $1.17 per square foot. And it ended something: for nine years, almost every time this record moved, it moved to another unit at The Pinnacle@Duxton.

The transaction

HDB's own register gives the row plainly: September 2026, Queenstown, five-room, 91 Dawson Road, storey 37 to 39, 99.0 sqm, flat model Premium Apartment, lease commenced 2016, remaining lease 88 years and 7 months, resale price $1,600,000.

The block is part of SkyTerrace @ Dawson, a 758-unit project of five towers that HDB commissioned from SCDA Architects in 2008 and that won Design of the Year at the President's Design Award 2016. It is a Build-To-Order project, not a DBSS and not a design-competition winner — the architect was appointed directly.

One detail to keep: the margin is $1.17 psf, which is inside the rounding. The March 2025 Pinnacle flat prints $1,500.29 from HDB's 94 sqm; a May 2026 Pinnacle sale prints $1,500.00 exactly. Whether September's sale is a record at all depends on carrying the decimals rather than the rounded square footage. We carry the decimals, and say so.

Nine years at one address

Taking every registered transaction since January 2017 and keeping only those that set a new running maximum psf gives 35 record-setting sales. Twenty-three of them came after November 2017. Of those twenty-three:

The record sat at $1,500.29 from March 2025 until September 2026 — eighteen months, the longest it has gone unbeaten in the series. Then it moved estates for the first time since 2018.

The price record belongs to a different flat

Here is the part the headline hides. Singapore's most expensive HDB flat by price and its most expensive by price per square foot are not the same flat, not in the same town, and not the same size.

The Dawson flat costs $128,000 less and $80 per foot more. It is 14 square metres smaller. Neither flat is better value than the other on this evidence; they are two different purchases, and the two records are measuring different things.

The cleanest version of the same point sits inside one project. SkyTerrace sells two products both labelled "five-room": a 99 sqm Premium Apartment and a 122 sqm Premium Apartment Loft. Across 2025 and 2026:

Same project, same five-room label, same two years. The smaller product earns $149 more per square foot and $154,000 less in total. The project's own price record — $1,700,000 at 92 Dawson Road in February 2026 — is a Loft, and it prints $1,295 psf, two hundred dollars a foot below the flat that has just taken the psf record.

What psf is actually measuring here

Rank all 19,853 registered resales of 2026 by psf, then rank them again by price, and take the top hundred of each. Only 42 flats appear on both lists.

Twenty-one of the top hundred by psf are three-room flats. Two of them are two-room. None of those would come close to the top hundred by price. Run it across the whole year and the gradient is the same: median psf in 2026 is $761 for a two-room flat, $614 for a four-room and $581 for a five-room, while median price runs the other way, $372,900 to $630,000 to $741,503.

This is arithmetic, not a market signal. A smaller flat spreads a smaller number of square feet over the fixed costs of being a home in a particular place, so its psf is higher. Christine Sun of OrangeTee made the point directly in June 2025: "smaller properties tend to command a higher unit price compared to larger residences," and "some million-dollar flat transactions may not seem as extravagant when assessed on a psf basis."

The finding under the record: Queenstown has overtaken the Central Area

The single sale is thin evidence. The breadth behind it is not. Taking the top hundred psf sales of each year and counting which town they came from:

Queenstown was losing ground through 2024 and now supplies nearly half the top hundred. 2026 is the first year it leads. Eighteen of Queenstown's own top twenty psf sales this year are Dawson Road or Margaret Drive addresses.

The mechanism is supply, not fashion. Only 30 distinct blocks produced 2026's hundred highest-psf sales, and four of the six most frequent are in the Dawson estate — 95, 94 and 86 Dawson Road and 1C Cantonment Road among them. The median lease commencement in that top hundred is 2016, against 1998 for all 2026 resales. Dawson is where HDB put a large quantity of tall, young, centrally sited stock, much of it through the Tanglin Halt Selective En bloc Redevelopment Scheme, and that stock is now reaching the resale market with eighty-eight years of lease still on it. Queenstown's median psf for the year is $1,003 against $602 islandwide.

What is not settled

One sale is one sale. The 99 sqm Premium Apartment at SkyTerrace has printed six transactions in two years. A record struck in a market that thin tells you what one buyer paid, not what the product is worth.

September is still filling. Registrations trail agreed deals. This retrieval returned 2,246 September records; HDB published 7,528 transactions for the third quarter against our 7,415. More September sales will arrive, and one of them could sit above $1,501.

The all-time price figure carries an asterisk. EdgeProp has reported a July 2024 sale at SkyOasis @ Dawson at about $1.726 million that does not appear in HDB's file. We searched for it and confirmed its absence. Any "highest ever" claim, including ours, is a claim about this dataset.

No analyst has commented on this transaction. The causal explanations circulating — the high floor, the award-winning design, the long lease — are reporters' inferences, including where they are plausible. We have not found a named researcher on the record about this flat.

What to do with this

If you are pricing your own flat, the record is the wrong comparable twice over: wrong block, and probably wrong measure. Only 30 blocks produced 2026's hundred highest psf. Price to what your block and your flat type have actually printed.

If you are choosing between a bigger flat and a smaller one in the same project, expect the smaller one to cost more per foot and less in total, and decide on the floor area you need rather than on which number looks cheaper. At SkyTerrace the gap is $149 psf in one direction and $154,000 in the other.

If you are reading that HDB flats now cost $1,500 a square foot, that is one flat. The islandwide median for 2026 is $602.

If you own in the Dawson estate, the breadth figure matters more to you than the record. Queenstown supplying 46 of the island's hundred dearest sales by psf, up from 15 two years ago, is the durable fact here.

Method

All price, size, lease and composition figures were computed directly from the full register of 241,920 HDB resale transactions on data.gov.sg, January 2017 to October 2026, retrieved 3 October 2026. Price per square foot is resale price divided by the dataset's floor area in square metres converted at 10.76391 square feet to the square metre, carried to two decimals; figures derived from a rounded square footage will differ by a dollar or so, which is the whole of the margin in the headline record. Records are running maxima by month of registration, so a record "set" in a month may have been agreed earlier. Towns, flat types, flat models, storey ranges and lease commencement years are the dataset's own fields, unedited. The transaction itself was first reported by EdgeProp Singapore on 1 October 2026; the $1,728,000 price record at 96A Henderson Road was reported by the same outlet in May 2026. Project facts for SkyTerrace @ Dawson are from the President's Design Award citation and HDB's own Remaking Our Heartland record for the estate.