Her Parents Moved. The Grant Came Back.

Wei Ling and Marcus took the Proximity Housing Grant in 2024 because the arithmetic looked free. S$20,000 off a resale flat for buying within four kilometres of her parents in Bishan — money for a decision they had already made for other reasons. Nobody at the appointment described it as a five-year undertaking, and the one page that does say so puts it in a footnote.

In early 2026 her parents sold their Bishan flat and moved to Jurong West to be near her brother's new job. They did not tell anyone this was a housing-grant event, because nobody had told them it was.

Wei Ling and Marcus are an illustrative composite — the arithmetic below is computed, the scheme conditions are HDB's, and the town prices come from HDB's own transaction file. But the shape of this is not unusual, and the part people get wrong is always the same part.

What the grant is, precisely

The Proximity Housing Grant is a CPF housing grant for resale flats only — it does not apply to BTO. For married couples and families it pays S$30,000 if a parent or child lives with you in the flat, and S$20,000 if they live within 4km. Single citizens get S$15,000 and S$10,000 respectively (CPF Board).

The 4km is measured as a straight line between postal centroids. Not driving distance, not MRT stops, not "the same estate." A flat that is a fifteen-minute drive from your mother can be outside the radius, and a flat on the wrong side of a canal with no direct road can be inside it.

Then there is footnote 2 on the CPF page, which is where the whole thing actually lives:

Do note that your parent(s) or child must observe the proximity rule during the MOP after purchase.

Five years. And the obligation is written against a household that is not yours.

The condition you do not control

Every other housing condition an owner signs is a condition about their own behaviour. Do not sublet the whole flat. Do not sell before MOP. Live in it. Those are all things the owner can choose to keep doing.

The proximity condition is different in kind. It is satisfied by where somebody else lives. If your parents right-size to a smaller flat in another town, move in with a sibling, or follow a job — all ordinary things for people in their sixties to do — the condition fails, and the failure is on your title, not theirs.

Where that lands, per the industry guidance, is that HDB can recover the grant with interest (99.co, Dollars and Sense). The interest is the CPF accrual rate, so this is not a fixed S$20,000 sitting in a drawer waiting to be handed back — it compounds quietly at 2.5% a year against a liability the household has usually forgotten it has.

If you are relying on this grant, the sentence worth getting in writing from HDB is not "am I eligible" — everyone checks that. It is "what happens to this grant if my parents move, and does it matter whether they move by choice."

What the 4km actually costs

Here is the part that gets skipped entirely, and it is much larger than the grant.

The grant does not pay you to live near your parents. It pays you to buy in the market around your parents. If they live somewhere expensive, the grant is not a discount — it is a token against a premium.

Computed from HDB's resale transaction file, all 4-room resale transactions from March to August 2026 (n = 5,498, island-wide median S$630,000):

Wei Ling's parents are in Bishan. The Bishan premium over the island-wide median is S$158,000, or 7.9 times the grant she collected for staying near them. Financed at 75% LTV over 25 years on an HDB concessionary loan at 2.6%, that premium carries S$538 a month — S$6,456 a year against a one-time S$20,000. It also adds S$4,740 in Buyer's Stamp Duty, which is a quarter of the grant gone before she has moved in.

Read the bottom of the table and the picture inverts. If your parents are in Ang Mo Kio, Sengkang or Woodlands, the surrounding market is at or below the island median and the S$20,000 is close to genuinely free — the grant covers the premium several times over, or there is no premium at all.

The Proximity Housing Grant is worth most to the households whose parents live in the cheaper half of the island. That is the opposite of how it is usually pitched, and it follows directly from the fact that a flat grant is fixed while a town premium is not.

The honest way to run this decision

None of the above is an argument against living near your parents. Childcare that does not have to be paid for, an extra pair of hands during an illness, a grandparent who actually knows the grandchildren — those are worth real money and a good deal that isn't money. If you want to be near family, be near family.

It is an argument against letting a grant be the reason.

Three things to do before the option fee:

1. Run the proximity check on the actual flat, not the estate. HDB's straight-line measurement is unforgiving and it is the only measurement that counts.
2. Price the town premium first, grant second. Compare the flat you would buy near your parents against the flat you would buy if they lived anywhere else. If the gap is a multiple of the grant, you are not taking a grant, you are paying a premium and receiving a rebate on it.
3. Have the conversation with your parents about the next five years. Not to extract a promise — you cannot hold anyone to one, and you should not want to. Just so that when they start thinking about right-sizing in year three, somebody in the family knows there is a clause attached.

Wei Ling and Marcus would have bought in Bishan anyway. Her parents are there, the schools are there, and the flat is a good flat. What they did not do was write down, anywhere, that a fifth of their grant was a contingent liability sitting on someone else's decision to move house.

That line belongs on the completion statement. It never is.

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Wei Ling and Marcus are an illustrative composite, not clients. Town medians are computed from HDB's resale transaction dataset on data.gov.sg, all 4-room resale transactions registered March–August 2026. Mortgage figures assume a 25-year HDB concessionary loan at 2.6% p.a. and 75% LTV; stamp duty computed on current IRAS BSD rates. Grant amounts and conditions are HDB's and can change — confirm your own case with HDB before committing. Methodology published. No spin.