Fifteen HDB Towns Sit Within $133,000 of Each Other. Ang Mo Kio Alone Spans $424,000.

Almost every HDB search starts with a shortlist of towns. It is the first filter on every portal and the first question every agent asks. On 2026 resale data it is also, for most of the island, the smaller half of the decision.

Rank Singapore's towns by their median four-room resale price this year and the cheapest fifteen — Jurong West at $535,000 up to Tampines at $668,000 — are separated by $133,000 in total. The middle 50% of four-room sales inside Ang Mo Kio alone covers $424,000.

Everything below is computed from HDB's registered resale transactions on data.gov.sg — all 241,483 records from January 2017 to September 2026, restricted to four-room flats, the most-traded type. Towns with fewer than 40 sales in a year are excluded from that year's ranking, which drops Bukit Timah and Marine Parade in 2026.

The ladder is flat in the middle and steep at the top

The shape is what matters. Between Yishun and Choa Chu Kang the entire town premium is $888. Between Geylang and the towns below it, it is $75,000 in one step.

Nine of the 24 towns are genuinely expensive. The other fifteen are, for pricing purposes, close to interchangeable.

What each decision costs a month

At the HDB concessionary rate — 2.6%, pegged at the CPF Ordinary Account rate plus 0.1% and unchanged through 2026 — with the 75% loan-to-value ceiling over 25 years, the arithmetic is direct.

Crossing fifteen town boundaries costs $453 a month. Getting the flat wrong inside Tampines costs $483. The town shortlist that every search begins with is worth less than the choice of which unit to bid on, right up until the point you reach into the top nine towns — where the town becomes the dominant term very quickly.

Twelve towns are wider than the band

The middle 50% of a town's sales is a fair measure of how much the flat itself matters once the town is fixed. In 2026, twelve of 24 towns have an internal spread wider than the $133,000 that separates the cheapest fifteen towns from each other.

Then Queenstown $198,500, Bukit Batok $146,944, Tampines $142,000 and Bishan $137,084.

Ang Mo Kio is the clearest case. Its middle half runs $542,500 to $966,500. That $424,000 spread is larger than the $312,000 gap between the cheapest town on the island and Clementi, the nineteenth cheapest of the 24. A four-room in Ang Mo Kio can be priced like a Jurong West flat or like a Bishan one, and the town name on the listing does not tell you which.

Mature towns with both old and newly-MOP stock produce the widest spreads, which is why Bedok, Ang Mo Kio and Clementi sit near the top of the list while Woodlands ($70,000), Choa Chu Kang ($65,888) and Pasir Ris ($71,500) are tight. In the tight towns, the town really is most of the price.

This is getting worse, not better

The internal spreads are widening faster than the between-town ones.

Both grew, but the within-town figure grew 46% against 34% for the fifteen-town band. Meanwhile the ends of the market have pulled apart in dollars even as they converged in percentages: the gap between the dearest quartile of towns and the cheapest quartile widened from $290,000 to $375,028, while falling from 71% to 60% of the island median. And the cheapest towns have risen fastest — the cheapest third of towns in 2017 posted a median gain of 58.2% by 2026, against 50.8% for the middle third and 52.2% for the dearest.

That is the mechanism behind the flat middle. Nine years of the bottom of the ladder rising faster than the top has compressed fifteen towns into one price band.

What to do with this

If your shortlist sits inside the cheaper fifteen towns, widening it costs almost nothing and buys a much larger pool of flats. Ruling out Bukit Panjang to save money against Woodlands is a $21,000 decision — about $71 a month. Ruling out the top floor, the corner unit or the renovated flat inside whichever town you pick is routinely a $130,000 one.

If your shortlist includes Queenstown, Toa Payoh, Bukit Merah or Kallang/Whampoa, the reverse holds and the town is the decision. The step from Punggol to Geylang alone is $75,000, and from Geylang to Queenstown is another $295,000.

The general rule the data supports: narrow the town list until you are choosing between towns whose medians differ by more than your town-to-town step is worth, then stop narrowing and start looking at flats. For most buyers that means a shortlist of five or six towns, not one.

Method

All figures computed from HDB's registered resale transactions dataset on data.gov.sg, January 2017 to September 2026, 241,483 records, of which 8,547 are 2026 four-room sales. Four-room flats only; other types have different town orderings. A town enters a year's ranking only with 40 or more sales that year, so 2026 ranks 24 towns and 2017 ranks 25. "Middle 50%" is the interquartile range of recorded resale prices, uncorrected for floor area, storey or remaining lease — it is the spread a buyer actually sees, not a like-for-like premium. Registrations trail deals by roughly three months, so September 2026 is partial at 2,020 records across all flat types. Monthly figures assume the 75% HDB loan-to-value ceiling, the 2.6% concessionary rate and a 25-year tenure; they are the difference in instalment, not affordability advice.