A two-bedroom costs $1,439,500 resale and $1,813,300 new. Per square foot the new one has cost more every year since 2017.

A two-bedroom condominium is what most people look at when a shoebox is too small and a family home costs too much. In 2025 more two-bedrooms sold than any other size. That has only happened three times since 2017.

In 2025 a resale two-bedroom sold for a median $1,439,500. A new launch two-bedroom sold for $1,813,300, 26% more.

That gap is real, but it is not what it looks like. A new launch two-bedroom is smaller than a resale one, and per square foot it has cost more in every part of Singapore in every year since 2017. There is no year in the record where a new two-bedroom was the cheaper square foot.

Key takeaways

• Median two-bedroom resale is $1,439,500 in 2025. New launch is $1,813,300. What it costs
• Per square foot, a new launch two-bedroom has cost more than a resale one in all three regions in all nine years from 2017 to 2025. The square foot test
• The gap in total price did widen. In the suburbs it went from 3.8% in 2017 to 29.4% in 2025. How the gap widened
• New two-bedrooms have shrunk to 678 sqft, and that is now the median in the suburbs, the city fringe and prime alike. What you get for the money

What a two-bedroom costs in 2025

Median transacted price, private condominiums and apartments, January 2024 to August 2026.

Region	Resale	New launch	Difference
Outside Central	$1,238,000	$1,603,000	+29.5%
Rest of Central	$1,510,000	$1,855,000	+22.8%
Core Central	$2,100,000	$2,083,072	-0.8%

The median is the middle. If you are working to a budget, the range matters more. These are resale prices:

Region	5% pay less than	Median	5% pay more than
Outside Central	$921,950	$1,238,000	$1,780,000
Rest of Central	$1,013,750	$1,510,000	$2,280,000
Core Central	$1,338,000	$2,100,000	$3,300,000

And the same for new launches:

Region	5% pay less than	Median	5% pay more than
Outside Central	$1,197,000	$1,603,000	$1,999,357
Rest of Central	$1,440,400	$1,855,000	$2,289,600
Core Central	$1,592,250	$2,083,072	$2,688,500

With $1.25 million you can buy a typical suburban resale two-bedroom. The cheapest new launches in the same suburbs start around $1.2 million, so the two overlap at the bottom even though the middles are far apart.

Why we compare within regions, not across the country

One national number describes what sold in a given year. It does not describe how prices moved between years, because what sold changes.

Prime districts are where this bites. In 2017 the resale market had a foot in prime and the new launch market barely did. By 2025 the two had swapped places.

Share of two-bedroom sales in prime districts	2017	2025
Resale	26.3%	16.7%
New launch	11.0%	27.5%

A prime two-bedroom costs roughly twice a suburban one. So when prime goes from one in nine new launch sales to more than one in four, the national new launch median rises even if no developer changes a price. The resale shift runs the other way and pulls the resale median down.

Both movements push in the same direction. They make a new launch look cheap in 2017 and expensive in 2025, whether or not anything happened to prices. So every year-on-year comparison below is done within each region, where the geography holds still.

How the gap widened

How much more a new launch two-bedroom costs than a resale one, in total price.

• OCR (suburban)
• RCR (city fringe)
• CCR (prime)

Region	2017	2021	2025
Outside Central	+3.8%	+23.5%	+29.4%
Rest of Central	+4.4%	+14.9%	+21.5%
Core Central	-11.7%	-2.8%	-1.0%

Two things stand out.

The suburbs and the city fringe tell the same story. A new two-bedroom cost about 4% more than a resale one in 2017. It peaked at 43.4% in the suburbs in 2022 and sits near 29% today. The idea that new launches have always carried a big price tag is not right. The gap was small eight years ago and grew.

Prime does not follow. In Core Central the two prices sit close together and the sign flips from year to year with no direction to it. Few new two-bedrooms launch in prime in any given year, so a single project can move the median. Prime is the region where the total price tells you least.

Per square foot, the new one has always cost more

The total price is the wrong measure for this comparison, because the two homes are not the same size.

2017

Region	Resale	New launch	New costs more by
Outside Central	$970	$1,356	+39.8%
Rest of Central	$1,258	$1,609	+28.0%
Core Central	$1,827	$2,105	+15.2%

2025

Region	Resale	New launch	New costs more by
Outside Central	$1,545	$2,328	+50.7%
Rest of Central	$1,917	$2,728	+42.3%
Core Central	$2,226	$3,032	+36.2%

Every year in between looks the same.

• OCR (suburban)
• RCR (city fringe)
• CCR (prime)

There are twenty-seven region and year combinations in this data, three regions across nine years. In all twenty-seven, a new launch two-bedroom cost more per square foot than a resale one. Not most of them. All of them.

This is the finding that survives every way we cut it, and it changes how the prime figure should be read. A new launch two-bedroom in Core Central costs about the same as a resale one in total. Per square foot it costs 36.2% more. The totals only match because the new home is 269 sqft smaller.

New two-bedrooms have shrunk to one size

• OCR (suburban)
• RCR (city fringe)
• CCR (prime)

A new two-bedroom in 2025 has a median of 678 sqft in the suburbs, on the city fringe and in prime. The same number three times. That is 63 square metres, and it has become the standard two-bedroom developers build regardless of where they are building.

Set against what a resale two-bedroom actually gives you, the difference is large and it has grown:

Median floor area, sqft	2017 resale	2017 new	2025 resale	2025 new
Outside Central	947	700	807	678
Rest of Central	942	732	786	678
Core Central	969	710	947	678

This is most of the answer to why the total-price gap opened when it did. A developer who shrinks the home can raise the price per square foot and hold the total price steady for a while. That works until the price per square foot rises far enough that it stops working, which is roughly what happened from 2020 onward.

Resale homes have been shrinking too, for a different reason. The two-bedrooms reaching the resale market now were built more recently and were smaller when new. A suburban resale two-bedroom has gone from a median 947 sqft to 807 sqft. So even the resale price series understates how much prices moved: suburban resale prices rose 38.9% from 2017 to 2025, but per square foot they rose 59.3%.

Resale prices sat still, then moved

• OCR (suburban)
• RCR (city fringe)
• CCR (prime)

Region	2017	2021	2025	2017 to 2021	2021 to 2025
Outside Central	$900,000	$951,000	$1,250,000	+5.7%	+31.4%
Rest of Central	$1,150,000	$1,280,000	$1,530,000	+11.3%	+19.5%
Core Central	$1,710,000	$1,838,000	$2,060,000	+7.5%	+12.1%

Four slow years, then four fast ones, and the further from the city centre the sharper the turn. Anyone whose sense of two-bedroom pricing formed before 2021 is working from a number that barely moved for half a decade and then moved by a third. That catches out both sides. Sellers ask too little and buyers expect prices that stopped existing four years ago.

What this does not tell you

• Whether either is worth it. A new home comes with a full lease, no wear and tear, and the chance to pick your unit before it is built. Whether that is worth paying 40% or 50% more per square foot is your call, not a number's.
• What it rents for. This article covers what a two-bedroom costs to buy. What one earns in rent, and what that works out to as a yield, is a separate question we will cover on its own.
• What happens after you buy. In our shoebox work, the mortgage rate and the stamp duty a buyer paid changed their return more than the choice of new or resale did. We have no reason to think two-bedrooms are different.
• Your own home. These are middle values across hundreds of projects. The floor it is on, which way it faces, what condition it is in and which project it sits in all matter more than any number here.

Method

Figures are transacted prices from URA caveat data for private condominiums and apartments, excluding collective sales. Bedroom count is worked out from the unit record rather than stated in the caveat. It resolves for 97.0% to 98.7% of transactions each year from 2015 to 2025.

Annual figures cover resales and new sales separately, 2017 to 2025 inclusive. Year-on-year comparisons are made within each region, never across the national pool, for the reason set out above. The 2025 national medians of $1,439,500 and $1,813,300 describe what sold in 2025 and are not compared to earlier years.

Regional price ranges and size comparisons in the first section cover transactions from January 2024 onward.

Records with a floor area below 200 sqft or above 6,000 sqft are treated as corrupt and excluded. No two-bedroom sale in this period falls outside that range, so the exclusion removes nothing here. Beyond that, no transaction is excluded on floor area. The largest two-bedrooms in this data are older prime apartments that genuinely ran past 2,000 sqft, and removing them would mean deleting real sales for being unfamiliar.

There is a related problem we have found and not yet fixed, and it is better to say so than to wait. Bedroom count is derived from the unit record, and for one class of unit that record is unreliable: a number of large units carry a bedroom count that cannot be right for their floor area. Each sale takes its bedroom count from a unit record, and we count a sale as affected when that unit record gives more than 1,000 square feet for every bedroom it claims, which finds 245 sales among the 61,819 in the annual series. Excluding them would move the 2025 resale median by $6,167, from $1,439,500 to $1,433,333. It moves nothing else in this article. Every new launch median, every price per square foot, every regional comparison, and the finding that a new launch costs more per square foot in all twenty-seven region and year combinations, are all unaffected. We are correcting the underlying records and will restate the figure if it changes.

Prime new launch medians rest on smaller counts than the other regions, between 194 and 1,247 sales a year, so single projects can move them.

Sale data to 4 August 2026.