Property Tax in Singapore: Annual Value and Owner-Occupier vs Rented Rates

Property tax is the annual tax every Singapore property owner pays, and it is one of the few housing costs people forget to budget for until the bill arrives. It is not based on what you paid for the home or what you earn — it is based on the property’s Annual Value, and the rate depends on whether you live in it or rent it out. Here is how the bill is built.

Annual Value: what your tax is really based on

The Annual Value is the estimated gross annual rent your property could command if let out, excluding furniture and maintenance fees, as assessed by IRAS’s Chief Valuer. It is derived from market rents of comparable properties, so it moves with the rental market — when rents rise across the board, AVs (and tax bills) tend to follow at the next review. You can look up your property’s AV on the IRAS portal.

Owner-occupier vs non-owner-occupied rates

The single biggest lever on your bill is whether you live in the home:

Both scales are progressive: the rate steps up on higher bands of AV. The owner-occupier scale starts with a tax-free first $12,000 of Annual Value and climbs to a top marginal rate of 32%; the non-owner-occupied scale has no tax-free slice and runs from 12% to 36%. That is why a rented investment condo in a prime area can carry a markedly higher property-tax bill than an owner-occupied flat — a real holding cost to fold into any investment or keep-and-rent calculation.

For 2026 the government is also granting a one-off property-tax rebate on all owner-occupied homes — a larger rebate for owner-occupied HDB flats and a smaller, capped rebate for owner-occupied private homes — automatically offset against the year’s bill. It is a one-year relief, not a permanent rate change, so budget for the full amount to resume the year after.

How to estimate and budget for it

Find your AV on the IRAS portal, apply the current owner-occupier or non-owner-occupied schedule, and set the amount aside — it is billed yearly (payable in January, or by monthly GIRO). For most owner-occupied HDB flats the bill is modest; for larger or rented private homes it is a line item worth planning for. It sits alongside your other costs of ownership, and unlike stamp duty it recurs every year you hold the property.

Figures on this page are computed from the current snapshot and update each rebuild. Contains information from data.gov.sg (Singapore Open Data Licence) and OneMap, Singapore Land Authority. This is general information for research, not financial or professional advice.