The Rental Stamp Duty Calculator, Explained

Lease stamp duty is small, but it's frequently calculated the wrong way — plenty of online tools still use an outdated tiered method. The current rule is a flat 0.4% on the rent over the lease, and the Rental Stamp Duty Calculator applies exactly that, handles the low-rent exemption, and shows how the number is built so a tenant or landlord can sanity-check what's payable on a tenancy agreement.

The current method, in one line

Lease duty is charged on the Average Annual Rent (AAR) — the total rent over the lease, divided by its length in years. If the AAR is $1,000 or below, the lease is exempt and the duty is zero. Above that, the duty is a flat 0.4%, applied one of two ways depending on the lease length:

For a lease of up to four years, duty is 0.4% of the total rent over the whole lease. For a lease longer than four years, or open-ended/indefinite, duty is 0.4% × four years of AAR — the law caps the chargeable period at four years' rent. The calculator picks the right branch from your inputs and rounds the result down to the nearest dollar, as IRAS does.

A concrete example the tool mirrors: a two-year lease at $4,000 a month is $96,000 of total rent, so the duty is 0.4% × $96,000 = $384.

What it asks

Enter the monthly rent (use the higher of the contractual and market rent), the lease term in months, and tick the box if the lease is open-ended. The calculator returns the duty and shows the working — the AAR, the lease length in years, and which rule it applied — so there's no mystery about where the figure came from.

How to read it

Open the Rental Stamp Duty Calculator, enter your rent and term, and read the duty. Two things worth knowing: the duty is the tenant's responsibility by default, and it must be stamped (typically within 14 days of signing) for the agreement to be admissible — a small cost that's cheap to get right and awkward to fix late. If your AAR comes in at or under $1,000, the tool will simply show zero — the exemption, applied automatically.

Calculate your lease duty at tribesg.com/stamp-duty/rental.

Sources: TRIBE Rental Stamp Duty Calculator; the flat 0.4% lease-duty method, the $1,000 AAR exemption and the four-year cap per IRAS, as at June 2026. Informational only; not tax or financial advice.

Silas Tan is a District Director at Huttons Asia and co-founder of TRIBE. This article is for informational purposes and does not constitute financial or investment advice. CEA Registration R000303I.