No New Town Has Crossed a Million Dollars in 30 Months

September 2026 was the biggest month the million-dollar HDB flat has ever had. 208 resale flats changed hands at or above S$1 million on HDB's own registration data, beating August's 201. It happened in a month when total resale volume fell, from 2,519 transactions to 2,245 — so 9.27% of September's resales crossed a million, also a record, against 0.29% in 2019.

The natural reading is that the million-dollar flat is spreading across the island. We recomputed the entire series from HDB's transaction file and it is not. No town has entered the million-dollar club since Sengkang in April 2024 — thirty months ago. The record is twenty-three towns, mostly three of them, going deeper into ground they already held.

The record, and whose number it is

Two figures are circulating. Goody Feed reported 209 on 6 October, attributing it explicitly to SRX data released that day. HDB's own registration file, vintage 12 October 2026, gives 208.

Neither is wrong. They are different houses counting with different cut-offs — the news vintage also showed 2,248 September transactions against HDB's current 2,245. One detail worth knowing: filtering at S$999,000 instead of S$1,000,000 returns exactly 209, and fifteen September flats transacted at precisely S$1,000,000. Every figure in this article is HDB's, dated, and reproducible from the file.

A useful check on whether these counts settle: August's 201, which we published on 28 September, is still 201 in today's vintage.

The club stopped growing in April 2024

The first HDB resale flat to cross a million dollars did so in July 2012 — a 150 sqm executive apartment at 149 Mei Ling Street, Queenstown, at exactly S$1,000,000. 5,622 flats have crossed since.

Twenty-three of Singapore's 27 towns have now produced at least one. The entry timeline is the whole argument:

Nine towns joined in 2022. One joined in 2023, one in 2024, and none since. Dispersion was a 2021–2023 story, and it ended three years ago.

The concentration figures say the same thing without reference to the club. Expressed as an effective number of towns — one divided by the Herfindahl index across towns — the market widened from 6.3 in 2021 to 11.3 in 2023, then stopped: 11.3, 10.7, 11.9 across 2024, 2025 and 2026. In September itself, the top three towns produced 81 of the 208 sales (38.9%), the top five produced 113 (54.3%), and the bottom ten towns produced 30 between them.

Three towns did most of the work

Compare the first nine months of 2024 with the first nine months of 2026 and the market added 747 million-dollar sales. Where they came from:

• Toa Payoh +145 (joined the club in 2017)
• Queenstown +130 (2012)
• Bukit Merah +79 (2018)
• Tampines +65, Bedok +59, Ang Mo Kio +59, Clementi +34
• Every town that joined in 2024 or later, combined: +13

Three towns, all of which crossed a million before 2019, account for 354 of the 747 — 47% of the growth. The new entrants account for 1.7%.

What a town's first million-dollar flat actually is

There is a second reason "my town has million-dollar flats now" tells an owner very little. We benchmarked each town's first million-dollar sale against that town's own transactions in the twelve months ending with it.

The median town-first flat sat at the 99.9th percentile of its own town's price distribution and cost 2.22 times the town median (range 1.61x to 3.07x). Twenty-two of 23 were above their town's 99th percentile. Fifteen of 23 were executive flats; the median floor area was 150 sqm, and 19 of 23 were at least 120 sqm. On a combined test — executive, or 120 sqm and over, or in the town's top storey decile, or an unusual model — all 23 qualify.

They were also rare locally. The first flat's type-and-model combination was a median 5.4% of its town's volume at the time. Ang Mo Kio's entrant was an "adjoined flat", 0.9% of the town's transactions. Punggol's was a Premium Apartment Loft: one in 774.

Woodlands is the clean illustration. The town crossed a million in May 2022 and has had 107 million-dollar sales since. Every single one is an executive flat. The best five-room Woodlands has managed in 2026 is S$895,000 and the best four-room S$758,000. A Woodlands four-room owner lives in a million-dollar town and is a quarter of a million dollars away from the number.

"A million-dollar town" means two different things

Share of each town's own 2026 resale volume crossing a million:

Bukit Timah and Bukit Batok are both million-dollar towns. One does it in roughly one sale in two. The other does it in one in 139.

The three that have never crossed are close but constrained. Choa Chu Kang's all-time high is S$980,000 (November 2025), Jurong West's S$980,000 (June 2024), Sembawang's S$945,000 (January 2026). The binding constraint is stock: executive flats are 8.5%, 8.4% and 6.7% of their 2026 volume, with executive medians of S$830,000, S$776,500 and S$760,000. These are towns without much of the large, old, premium inventory that produced most of the firsts.

What did change: the million-dollar flat got smaller

The geography froze. The flat type did not. Four-room flats were 10.3% of all million-dollar sales in 2022 and are 42.9% in 2026 — 74 of September's 208. The median million-dollar flat has shrunk from 117 sqm to 110 sqm.

That shift is concentrated too. In 2026, four-room flats are 70.6% of Toa Payoh's million-dollar sales and 69.9% of Queenstown's. They are 0.0% of Woodlands', Tampines', Hougang's, Serangoon's, Pasir Ris', Punggol's, Sengkang's, Jurong East's, Marine Parade's, Yishun's, Bukit Batok's and Bukit Panjang's.

So there are two markets under one headline. In a handful of central mature towns, an ordinary four-room routinely crosses a million. Everywhere else it still takes an executive flat or a maisonette, a few times a year, and the town's entry ticket was a 99th-percentile outlier that told nobody anything about their own flat.

Method and limits

All figures are computed from HDB's resale transaction records published on data.gov.sg — 242,454 registrations from January 2017 for the recent analysis, and 988,657 from January 1990 for the all-time series — retrieved 11 October 2026, file vintage 12 October 2026.

The limits, plainly. Data is by registration date, not the date a deal was struck, so September's registrations include August transactions. October 2026 is a part month (750 registrations) and is excluded throughout. Counts can be revised in both directions: the 6–7 October news vintage showed three more September transactions than HDB's file does today. The dataset has no buyer field — nothing here supports any claim about who is buying. Floor is given in three-storey bands only, and floor area is HDB's measure, which includes recess areas and upgrading add-ons. Records before March 2012 are on an approval-date basis; this does not affect anything above, since the first million-dollar sale came after. Lim Chu Kang, with 64 transactions ever and none in 2026, is excluded rather than counted as a town that failed to cross.

One number to correct in circulation: Pinnacle@Duxton's S$1.72 million and S$1.701 million September sales are two different flats (1C and 1B Cantonment Road), not a conflict between sources. Neither is the all-time HDB record, which remains S$1,728,000 — 96A Henderson Road, Bukit Merah, April 2026.