A Storey Is Worth 0.6%. The Raw Numbers Say 96%.

Take every four-room HDB resale transaction this year, split them by floor, and the numbers look emphatic: flats on the first six storeys sold at a median of S$564 psf, flats on the 25th storey and above at S$1,106 psf. A 96% premium for height.

That number is almost entirely wrong, and the way it is wrong is instructive. High floors are not spread evenly across Singapore. They exist in tall blocks, and tall blocks are new blocks in expensive places. Of the 296 four-room sales above the 25th storey this year, 68 were in Queenstown, 49 in Bukit Merah, 33 in Kallang/Whampoa and 32 in Toa Payoh. Their median remaining lease is 88.7 years. The median for flats on the first six storeys is 70.2 years.

So the raw comparison is not measuring height. It is measuring Dawson against 1970s Yishun, with eighteen years of lease thrown in.

How to measure it properly

The clean way to price a floor is to hold everything else still — same block, same flat type, same lease, same lift lobby, same MRT walk, same school catchment — and let only the storey vary.

HDB's published transaction file allows exactly that, because it records the block and street for every sale. We took four-room transactions from 2025 and 2026, kept the 845 blocks with at least six sales spanning at least three storey bands, and fitted price per square foot against storey with a separate baseline for every block.

The answer is 0.600% of PSF per storey. Ten floors up is worth 6.2%. Twenty floors is 12.7%. Thirty floors — roughly the full height of a tall HDB block — is 19.7%.

Run the same estimate on other flat types and it barely moves: 0.561% per storey for three-room flats across 566 blocks, 0.637% for five-room flats across 294 blocks. Run the market-wide model instead, controlling for town, lease and size but not for the specific block, and it comes out at 0.735% — slightly higher, because "a block tall enough to have a 30th floor" is itself a quality signal that block-level controls absorb.

Call it 0.6% to 0.7% a storey. Not 96%.

What that looks like in one block

88 Dawson Road, Queenstown. Every four-room sale there in 2026, in storey order:

Same block, same size, same 89-year lease, nine months apart at most. The trend is real — bottom to top is S$848,000 to S$1,088,000, a 28.3% spread across 42 floors — but look at the exceptions. The 16th-to-18th floor unit beat the 19th-to-21st. Two units on the same 34th-to-36th band sold five months apart for S$1,175,000 and S$1,038,000, a gap of 13% with no altitude between them at all.

That is the honest shape of the premium: a shallow upward slope with a great deal of noise around it. Orientation, renovation, view obstruction, urgency of the seller and the month of the sale all move a unit further than a few floors do.

Why the premium is smaller than people expect

Height in an HDB block buys three things — view, breeze and distance from the noise — and all three saturate. The jump from the 3rd floor to the 12th delivers most of the available improvement. From the 30th to the 42nd, a buyer is paying for a view that was already unobstructed.

The costs run the other way. High floors mean longer lift waits, real exposure during lift breakdowns and, for families with young children or elderly parents, a genuine penalty. Some buyers pay a premium for floors 4 to 8 specifically. The market's aggregate 0.6% is the net of a large group that prefers height and a smaller group that avoids it.

There is one more reason the number stays small: a high floor is not a scarce asset within a block. A 48-storey block has roughly as many units above the 25th floor as below it. Scarcity premiums attach to corner units, unblocked orientations and rare layouts — not to altitude, which comes in bulk.

What it is worth in dollars

On the 2026 median four-room resale price of S$628,000:

• Ten floors: about S$38,700
• Twenty floors: about S$79,800
• Thirty floors: about S$123,400

Those are the amounts worth arguing over. A seller pricing a 25th-floor unit 20% above a 5th-floor comparable in the same block is asking for roughly double what the market has paid. A buyer refusing a 6th-floor unit and paying S$60,000 more for the 20th in the same stack is paying about S$20,000 above the historical rate for those fourteen floors.

And the comparison a buyer should actually run is not floor against floor. It is 0.6% per storey against 1% per year of remaining lease, which is what the same dataset says a year of lease is worth. Twelve floors and seven years of lease price about the same. When a high-floor unit in an older block is being sold against a low-floor unit in a newer one, that is the trade being made — and the lease is the larger number.

Figures computed from HDB's resale flat transaction dataset published on data.gov.sg. Within-block estimates use four-room transactions from January 2025 to 12 September 2026, restricted to blocks with at least six sales across at least three storey bands (845 blocks, 7,346 transactions), fitted as log price per square foot on storey with block-level baselines. Storey is taken as the midpoint of HDB's published three-storey band, so individual floors within a band are not distinguishable. The market-wide comparison uses 2026 four-room transactions with town fixed effects and controls for lease and floor area. Methodology published. No spin.