Published 8 August 2026
Tenants pay the same for freehold and leasehold. Owners don't.
By Realila
A tenant renting a small unit in Singapore pays about the same whether the building is freehold or leasehold: $6.00 per square foot against $6.17 in 2025, with leasehold marginally ahead. Buyers pay considerably more for freehold. The difference comes out of yield: a freehold shoebox returns 4.16% gross, a leasehold one 4.54%.
Freehold is worth something. It is not worth anything to a tenant, and that shows up in what an owner earns.
Key takeaways
- Shoebox rents are effectively identical across tenure ($6.00 freehold, $6.17 leasehold in 2025) and have been for nine years. What tenants pay
- The shoebox rent premium over family-sized units shows no stable ordering by tenure. The two lines converge and cross. The premium
- Because freehold sells for more and rents for the same, leasehold yields more, in both size bands, in every year measured. Yield
- This is not "tenure doesn't matter." It matters to owners, through price and eventual lease decay. It is invisible to tenants. What this means
Tenants do not price tenure
Median monthly rent per square foot, measured across the same projects at both ends of the period. Shoebox is URA's 40–50 sqm band; family-sized is the 90–130 sqm bands.
| Year | FH shoebox | LH shoebox | FH family | LH family |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | $4.03 | $4.13 | $2.74 | $2.59 |
| 2018 | $3.97 | $4.13 | $2.74 | $2.61 |
| 2019 | $4.03 | $4.03 | $2.69 | $2.60 |
| 2020 | $4.10 | $4.08 | $2.67 | $2.61 |
| 2021 | $4.23 | $4.21 | $2.75 | $2.74 |
| 2022 | $5.16 | $5.06 | $3.25 | $3.25 |
| 2023 | $6.19 | $6.19 | $3.99 | $4.01 |
| 2024 | $5.99 | $6.04 | $3.93 | $3.91 |
| 2025 | $6.00 | $6.17 | $4.04 | $4.00 |
The lines sit on top of each other. In nine years the largest gap in the shoebox columns is 17 cents, and it runs in leasehold's favour as often as freehold's. The family columns behave the same way.
This is not surprising once stated. A tenant signs for one or two years. Lease decay over the following seventy is not their problem, and perpetual ownership is not a benefit they can use. What a tenant is buying is location, the state of the building, and the unit itself.
No stable ordering
The same holds for the shoebox premium over family-sized units within each tenure.
| Year | Freehold | Leasehold |
|---|---|---|
| 2017 | +47.0% | +59.7% |
| 2018 | +45.1% | +58.2% |
| 2019 | +49.7% | +55.0% |
| 2020 | +53.7% | +56.2% |
| 2021 | +53.8% | +53.6% |
| 2022 | +58.7% | +55.5% |
| 2023 | +55.2% | +54.5% |
| 2024 | +52.4% | +54.4% |
| 2025 | +48.6% | +54.0% |
The two converge from a 12.7-point gap in 2017 to 5.4 points in 2025, and cross over in the middle years. There is no consistent ordering to report.
Compare that with the same premium split by region, where the three lines never touched in nine years and the ordering held throughout. Region separates cleanly. Tenure does not separate at all.
You pay for freehold out of yield
Gross yield is twelve months of median rent per square foot divided by median resale price per square foot, both measured on projects present at both ends of the period.
| Year | FH shoebox | LH shoebox | FH family | LH family |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 3.19% | 3.82% | 2.58% | 3.08% |
| 2018 | 3.23% | 3.69% | 2.31% | 2.91% |
| 2019 | 3.16% | 3.51% | 2.42% | 2.85% |
| 2020 | 3.36% | 3.71% | 2.39% | 2.87% |
| 2021 | 3.45% | 3.68% | 2.18% | 2.81% |
| 2022 | 3.99% | 4.14% | 2.38% | 3.05% |
| 2023 | 4.16% | 4.73% | 2.68% | 3.44% |
| 2024 | 4.05% | 4.30% | 2.50% | 3.20% |
| 2025 | 4.16% | 4.54% | 2.39% | 3.10% |
Leasehold yields more in both size bands in all nine years. Not once does freehold come out ahead.
The arithmetic is not complicated. Rent is the same. Freehold sells for more per square foot. Divide the same numerator by a larger denominator and you get a smaller number. The freehold premium is paid entirely in capital and returns nothing in income.
The gap is wider for family-sized units (around 0.7 of a percentage point in 2025) than for shoeboxes, at 0.38. Freehold commands a larger price premium in the family-sized market than in the small-unit market, so more yield is given up to obtain it.
What this means
This is not an argument that tenure does not matter. Freehold buys perpetual ownership, no lease decay, no eventual expiry, and whatever the market will pay for those at resale. Those are real and this data does not price them.
What the data does say is narrower and useful: the freehold premium is not compensated by income. An owner choosing freehold is buying a capital characteristic and paying for it out of running yield, every year, for as long as they hold.
Whether that trade is worth taking depends on how long you intend to hold, what you believe about lease decay at your building's age, and what you expect a buyer to pay for perpetuity in twenty years. None of those is in this data.
One caution about our own earlier work. We reported that freehold shoeboxes now trade 14.6% below freehold family units while leasehold shoeboxes still carry a premium. That is a comparison inside each tenure. It is easy to read it as meaning freehold shoeboxes have become cheap, and therefore high-yielding. They have not: freehold prices remain higher than leasehold prices in absolute terms, which is why freehold yields less. A ratio inside a category tells you nothing about levels across categories.
What this does not tell you
- Lease decay. Most leasehold stock in this sample has seventy or more years remaining. What happens at forty years, or thirty, is a different question and out of reach here.
- Net yield. These are gross figures. Maintenance, property tax, agent commission, vacancy and income tax all come out first, and they do not scale identically across tenure or size.
- Total return. Yield is one half of what an owner earns. Capital growth is the other, and it is a separate article.
- Your building. Medians across hundreds of projects. Individual buildings vary widely.
Method
URA non-landed rental contracts and private non-landed resale caveats, 2017 to 2025. Executive condominiums and collective sales excluded.
Tenure is derived from the sale records of each project, which carry a clean freehold or leasehold classification. Projects whose sale records show more than one tenure type are excluded rather than assigned by majority (91 projects in total).
URA reports rental floor area in 10 sqm bands rather than exact areas, so rent per square foot uses the midpoint of each band. Shoebox uses the 40–50 sqm band, which converts to 431–538 sqft and shares its upper boundary with URA's 50 sqm shoebox threshold. Family-sized uses the 90–130 sqm bands, 969–1,399 sqft.
Both the rental and sale series run on fixed panels: projects with at least three transactions in that band and tenure in both the 2017–2019 and 2023–2025 windows, so every column describes the same projects at both ends. Medians are taken across projects rather than pooled across transactions.
Yield is gross and is not a return an individual owner realises. 2026 is excluded: only two months of rental data exist.
Rental data to February 2026, sale data to 17 July 2026.
Every number in this post is drawn from Realila Research and dated to when it was true. In Research you can change the period, compare segments, and drill into projects on the same data.
All 16 articles in this series
- Shoebox units: price premium gone, rent premium intact
- Shoebox psf premium: +21% in 2017, below zero by 2025
- Shoebox psf up 24% since 2017, family-sized up 57%
- Prime shoebox psf fell 4.5% since 2017, suburban rose 26%
- Freehold shoebox premium is negative. Leasehold's isn't.
- Shoebox premium by completion year: no age pattern
- Shoebox yield is now 4.3%. Family-sized is 2.9%.
- Shoebox rent premium: 58% in OCR, 51% RCR, 47% CCR
Shoebox yield: leasehold 4.54%, freehold 4.16%You are here
- Shoebox rent premium by building age: 43% to 24%
- Shoebox units: 88.8% sold at a profit, at 1-3% a year
- A shoebox gained $77,672. The owner made $87,079, or lost $119,285.
- New launch shoebox: rented out +7%, left empty +3.1%
- New launch vs resale shoebox: 1.1% or 13.1% a year
- Launch timing: 10.5% a year at launch, 6.2% a year later
- Shoebox unit price Singapore: $848,000 resale, $1.27m new
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