Hold the rent, or raise it

At renewal you actually have three choices, not two: hold the rent, raise it, or let the tenant go and re-let at whatever the market gives you next. Raising it is never free. The question this page answers is not whether you can raise the rent — in Singapore you almost always can — but what a raise actually risks against what it gains, in real cash terms, not in the abstract percentage a market report prints.

The mechanics of a renewal

A residential tenancy in Singapore typically runs one or two years, and Singapore sets no rent control and no statutory cap on what a landlord may ask for at renewal — the increase is a negotiation between you and your tenant, not a filing with any authority. What ends the tenancy is either the fixed term expiring with no renewal agreed, or a break clause either side exercises. If a dispute over arrears or a deposit follows a bad renewal, the Small Claims Tribunal hears residential rental arrears and deposit claims up to S$20,000 (S$30,000 with both parties' written consent) for tenancies of two years or less, typically resolved in four to twelve weeks.

The practical menu at renewal is: hold the rent flat, raise it and see if the tenant accepts, offer a smaller-than-market increase to secure an early lock-in, or let the tenant leave and re-let at whatever a new tenant will pay. Each has a different cash-flow profile, and the size of a raise most owners consider — a few percent — is small against the cost of getting the decision wrong, which the rest of this page works through.

Who can even let this out — the eligibility layer underneath the decision

If this is an HDB flat, raising the rent only becomes a live question once you have cleared the Minimum Occupation Period: the whole flat may be let after 5 years' MOP, or 3 years for a non-subsidised flat bought on the open market without a grant before 30 August 2010. Prime and Plus flat owners may never rent out the whole flat, even after the 10-year MOP that applies to them.

Only Singapore Citizens who have fulfilled the MOP may rent out a whole HDB flat; a Singapore PR who owns one may not. If the non-citizen tenant quota for the block or neighbourhood has already been reached, HDB will only let you rent to Singaporeans and Malaysians, whatever a foreign tenant is willing to pay. HDB takes a serious view of owners who break the rental rules — it has imposed financial penalties and, in serious cases, recovered flats outright, so this sits above fine-print risk.

Private property carries no citizenship restriction on the owner's side: a Singapore Citizen, PR or foreign owner may all let out a condo or landed home they are entitled to hold, subject only to URA's occupancy rules — private homes under 90 sq m may house at most six unrelated persons, larger units up to eight through 31 December 2028, with a minimum stay of three consecutive months and no daily or weekly lets. That minimum-stay rule matters directly to this page's question: you cannot legally bridge a void with short-term lets while you hold out for your new asking rent.

Citizenship — yours, and what it does to the numbers

Your own citizenship status doesn't change whether you may raise the rent on private property, but it changes what you keep from it. A non-resident individual earning rental income from Singapore property must file a tax return and report the rent to IRAS, taxed at a flat 24% (22% before Year of Assessment 2024) — no progressive bands, no personal reliefs the way a Singapore tax resident gets. A landlord who has moved overseas and is weighing a rent increase from a distance is doing that arithmetic against a materially higher tax rate on the marginal dollar than a resident landlord faces. Under the FTA parity this site notes elsewhere for buyers — US, Swiss, Liechtenstein, Norwegian and Icelandic nationals taxed as citizens for stamp duty — that parity is a buying-stage rule and does not touch this non-resident income-tax rate at all; the two are separate questions answered by separate statutes.

The math a raise actually has to clear

Here is the calculation most landlords skip. A market aggregator's own worked example: a six-week void on a S$4,500-a-month unit costs roughly S$6,200 in lost rent — and on the article's own account, it takes over five years of a flat 3% annual increase to recover that (a flat 3% a year on that same arithmetic actually works out closer to 3.8 years, by this page's own recalculation). Put more generally: a vacant month costs about 8% of a year's rent — roughly twelve times what a typical 0.7% quarterly market rent increase adds to your income over that same period. A rent increase that pushes a reliable tenant out is very often a net loss for years, not a wash against the extra you'd have collected had they simply stayed.

How long a genuine void actually runs depends on the unit. PropertyNet.SG reports well-priced units in good locations typically taking 21 to 28 days to re-let, MRT-adjacent city-fringe condos as fast as 14 days, and overpriced units — the ones asking above where the market has actually moved — 45 to 60 days. The completed private residential vacancy rate stood at 6.4% in 2Q 2026, up from 6.2% the prior quarter: a market with room in it, not one desperate for your specific unit at any price. Standard yield-calculator convention builds in one to two months of vacancy a year as a matter of course, discounting headline market rent to about 95% of the asking figure before calling it realistic income.

This is why some landlords run the trade the other way: offering a 2% to 5% rent reduction in exchange for an early renewal, locking in continuity rather than testing the market at all. It is a bet, priced explicitly, that a known paying tenant beats an unknown void — rather than a decision left to chance.

A landlord insurance policy's vacancy clause adds a second, less obvious cost to getting a raise wrong: most policies suspend or void cover once the property sits empty beyond 30 to 60 days — precisely the window an overpriced re-let can run into. A void long enough to breach your own insurance is a compounding cost, not a one-off.

Where the market actually is right now

URA's private residential rental index rose 0.7% quarter on quarter in 2Q 2026, against 0.3% in 1Q 2026. The index stood at 152.3 in 2Q 2026, against a 3Q 2023 peak of 185.1 — a fall of roughly 17.7% from that peak. The gain is not uniform: non-landed rents rose 0.4% quarter on quarter against 2.7% for landed, and by region CCR non-landed rose 1.2% while RCR was flat and OCR fell 0.3% — the same quarter produced three different answers to 'is rent rising' depending on what and where you own.

Forecasters do not agree on where this goes next. Knight Frank expects rents to grow 1% to 3% for the whole of 2026; a separate market guide projects a further 0% to 5% decline in the URA rental index through end-2026 before stabilising in 2027. Neither reading is reconciled here — treat both as directional, not as a number to anchor your own asking rent on. Average non-landed condo gross yield sits around 3.36% for 2026, with region-level ranges of roughly 4.0-4.5% in the OCR near an MRT, 3.5-4.0% in the RCR, and 2.5-3.5% in the CCR — the yield band your specific unit sits in shapes how much a raise is even worth fighting for.

Taxes — what a raise changes, and what it doesn't

Raising the contracted rent does not itself move your property tax bracket the year you sign it — Annual Value is IRAS's own estimate of the market rent your property could fetch, revised periodically off market evidence generally, not off your specific lease the day you sign it. But a run of tenants paying a genuinely higher contracted rent is exactly the kind of market evidence that feeds a future Annual Value revision, so a raise that sticks across a cycle of tenants can show up later as a higher property tax bill, not just as higher rent received. Owner-occupier property tax rates apply to only one property you occupy yourself; any property you let out is taxed at the non-owner-occupier residential schedule regardless of how modest the rent is.

That non-owner-occupier schedule for 2024 runs 12% on the first S$30,000 of Annual Value, 20% on the next S$15,000, 28% on the next S$15,000 and 36% above S$60,000 — and a vacant residential property gets no relief from this; it is taxed at the same non-owner-occupier rate throughout the void. That is a second, quieter reason a long void from an over-ambitious raise costs more than the lost rent alone: the property tax runs on regardless of whether anyone is paying you.

On the income side, IRAS allows a landlord to deduct expenditure on repair, insurance, maintenance or upkeep incurred while a property sits vacant during part of a year, plus any property tax paid for that vacancy period, against rental income — provided reasonable efforts were made to find a new tenant. It softens a void; it does not erase it.

Whichever way the renewal goes, the tenancy agreement itself carries its own stamp duty: 0.4% of the total rent over the term for a lease of four years or less, calculated on the average annual rent. By convention the tenant pays it, though the parties may agree otherwise in the lease, and an unstamped tenancy agreement generally cannot be used as evidence in court if the relationship later sours. A renewal on fresh terms needs this stamped again, same as a first lease.

Borrowing — what a mortgaged landlord is actually exposed to

If you plan to use this rental income to qualify for financing elsewhere — a refinance, or a loan on another property — a bank must apply a minimum 30% haircut to it, and will only count it at all against a stamped tenancy agreement with at least six months still to run. A short renewal, or one you delay stamping, may not be credited by a bank at all when your own TDSR is tested; MAS caps TDSR at 55% of gross monthly income and MSR at 30% for the properties it applies to.

The carry math behind the decision, worked through on ledger rates: a S$2m condo yielding 3.36% gross brings in about S$67,200 a year, or S$5,600 a month; a S$1.5m loan over 30 years runs about S$5,100 a month at 1.40% and about S$7,160 a month at a 4% stress rate; one vacant month alone costs about S$5,600 of rent. At the stress rate this unit is already running negative carry before a single void — which is the ordinary case for a leveraged landlord, not the exception, and exactly why a raise that triggers even one bad void does more damage to a mortgaged owner than to one holding the property in cash.

An alternative to raising the rent to relieve cash pressure is drawing equity out of the property instead — a cash-out refinance, available on private property and ECs past their 5-year MOP, not on HDB flats, capped at 75% LTV for a borrower with no other housing loan, with the CPF-funded share of the property excluded from what can be drawn as cash. It is a different lever entirely: it changes your balance sheet and your own debt service, not your tenant's rent. See [Financing a resale purchase](/borrow/resale) and the mechanics of [equity loans](/borrow/equity-loans) and [refinancing](/borrow/refinancing) generally.

Control — the lever that isn't the rent line

Before pushing the number, ask what you actually control here. You cannot control the market rent; you can control the unit. A tenanted unit that has never been refreshed is a weaker basis for a raise than one where a modest repaint, a fixed appliance or an upgraded fitting genuinely lifts what a new tenant would pay for it — asking for more on a better product, not just asking for more on the same one. This is the same lever reno, A&A and rebuild play elsewhere on this site at other lifecycle stages: control over the outcome, rather than being a pure price-taker on whatever a market index prints this quarter.

Conveyancing — the paperwork either way

A straight renewal with the same tenant, on terms both sides broadly accept, does not need an agent's involvement at all, and most landlords handle it directly. A property agent's role, where one is used, ends once the landlord and tenant have signed the tenancy agreement and the property is handed over; the agent cannot then be asked to manage the property as part of that same estate-agency engagement. If you engage an agent on an exclusive basis to find a replacement tenant, that appointment runs up to three months, and you stay liable for commission if the unit is let through another agent, or by yourself, during that window.

If the raise fails and the tenant leaves, re-letting means running tenant screening again from scratch — see [Checking your tenant](/realty/landlord/checking-your-tenant) — and absorbing the void described above. If the honest answer is that the unit is more trouble than it's worth at this rent, the choice isn't limited to raising or holding: see [Rent it out, or sell it](/realty/landlord/rent-it-out-or-sell-it) and [What a void actually costs](/realty/landlord/what-a-void-costs) for the fuller comparison.

Estate — what happens to this lease if you don't outlive it

A tenancy does not end because the landlord dies; it binds the estate the same way it bound the owner. If the property was held in joint tenancy, it passes automatically and in full to the surviving owner on death, outside the will and the estate, and the survivor must lodge a Notice of Death with the Singapore Land Authority to update the land register. Where the owner held it alone or as tenant-in-common, the interest — and the tenancy sitting on top of it — passes under the will or, with none, under the Intestate Succession Act, which can leave a tenancy being administered by an executor rather than decided by the person who negotiated it.

If you are the landlord and you are overseas when a rental decision needs signing — the renewal itself, or the initial application to rent out an HDB flat — HDB requires a certified true copy of a Power of Attorney in its own prescribed form, lodged with the High Court, and the attorney named cannot themselves be a tenant of the flat. Where mental capacity, not just distance, is the issue, a donee acting under a registered Lasting Power of Attorney can manage renting out and refinancing a property on the donor's behalf once capacity is lost, sending the registered LPA to HDB, CPF Board, SLA and banks as needed.

The twelve questions this site asks about everything you hold

Before 'raise or hold,' this site asks two questions that actually sort a reader — and they are not 'are you buying to invest or to stay,' because nobody buys an asset believing it will fall, so that question sorts nobody. Q1: are you borrowing to buy this property? Q2: once you hold it, are you lending it out — is it let? Answer no and yes and you sit in the cash-plus-let-out quadrant: pure yield, positive carry by construction, and a rent decision is a clean income question with no debt clock running against you. Answer yes and yes and you're in the spread play: your carry is the gap between what the tenant pays and what the bank charges you, and that gap is the whole game this page's math has been circling.

C0 — the play

This is a cash-flow decision, not a balance-sheet one. You are not buying or selling anything; you are re-pricing an existing asset's income for the next lease term.

C1 — balance sheet

What you own and what you owe do not change the day you raise or hold the rent. They can change indirectly, months later, if a bad decision here forces a distressed sale, a refinance, or shows up in a higher future Annual Value once IRAS revises it.

C2 — cash flow

This is where the decision actually lives. A rent increase that's accepted adds a small, certain amount each month; a rejected increase that costs you a tenant can create a real funding gap — the void — for weeks or months, on top of a mortgage and property tax that keep running regardless of who's paying rent.

C3 — profit and loss

Your reported profit for the year moves with whatever rent you actually collected, not with what you asked for. A unit vacant for two months shows two months less income on the P&L even if the eventual new rent is higher than the old one — profit and cash arrive on different clocks, and a raise that looks good on an annualised P&L can still produce a cash-flow crunch in the months it takes to bite.

C4 — carry

Income minus financing cost. A cash-owned, let-out unit almost always runs positive carry; a mortgaged one, especially tested at a stress rate, can run negative even before a void, as the worked S$2m example above shows. A rent increase that doesn't survive tenant departure can turn a marginal positive carry into a real cash gap for however long the unit sits empty.

C5 — give and get

What you give up by holding the rent flat is the difference between old and new rent, times however many months are left on this lease term. What you give up by raising it and losing the tenant is that same increase, minus a void, minus re-letting costs, minus a fresh agent's commission if one is used.

C6 — exposed to

You're exposed to your specific tenant's willingness to pay more rather than move, to how the broader market has actually moved since your last lease — not how a headline index reads — and to how quickly this specific unit, in this specific condition, would actually re-let if the tenant walks.

C7 — for how long

Whatever you agree now, typically one or two years, is the horizon you're committing the property's income to. A short renewal preserves the option to re-price sooner; a longer one locks in certainty but removes your ability to react if the market moves further in the meantime.

C8 — the failure cascade

If a raise goes wrong it runs in a specific order: the tenant leaves, producing negative carry against the mortgage and property tax that keep running; that hits cash flow directly as the void extends; a long enough void accumulates into that year's P&L as lost income; a mortgaged owner running tight can slide toward negative equity if forced into a distressed sale; illiquidity follows if the unit can't move fast enough at a fair price; insolvency is the endpoint, rare from one bad rent decision alone, but the direction a leveraged, badly-timed raise pushes toward.

C9 — liquidity

How fast this becomes money again if it goes wrong is the void timeline itself: 14 to 60 days for a re-let depending on pricing and location, plus however long it takes you to accept that the ask was wrong and reprice down to what the market will actually pay.

C10 — control

You are not a pure price-taker here. You control the unit's condition, the size and timing of the ask, and whether you offer continuity — a smaller increase, an early-renewal discount — instead of testing the market cold.

C11 — the exit

The exit from this specific decision is simple: the tenant renews, or they don't and you re-let. The exit from the property itself is a separate, larger decision — see [Rent it out, or sell it](/realty/landlord/rent-it-out-or-sell-it) for when raising the rent stops being the right question to be asking at all.

When this is worth paying someone else for

A renewal with an existing tenant, on terms both sides already broadly agree to, is not a transaction that needs a property agent's fee. Where it is worth paying someone: reading the market properly before you name a number, since an agent sees live comparables you don't; running professional tenant screening if the answer is to let this one go; or handling a foreign or corporate tenant's paperwork end to end. Ask what specifically you're paying for, not for representation in the abstract — and if an agent is pushing you toward re-letting rather than renewing, ask why, because the honest answer sits in the next section.

What the agent actually earns, and where that points them

CEA sets no fixed commission for a residential letting, and no fixed guideline on the amount — it is agreed between you and the agency, and paid to the agency, not the individual agent. Market convention is reported at about one month's rent from the landlord for a 12-month lease with a landlord's agent. That figure is the whole incentive problem in one sentence: an agent earns close to nothing from helping you renew the existing tenant's lease, because no new letting transaction occurs, but earns a full month's commission from a fresh re-let. An agent's advice to 'test the market' at renewal is sometimes exactly right, and sometimes exactly what pays them regardless of whether it's right for you. Ask any agent advising you at renewal, directly, how they're paid on a renewal versus a fresh letting, before you weigh their read on the market.