Your tenant is leaving

Sixty to ninety days out from expiry is the highest-leverage moment this property gives you all year. Your tenant has to decide whether to stay, you have to decide whether to let them, and the market is about to tell you what a stranger would actually pay for the same unit. Handle this window well and you either lock in a fair renewal with someone who already pays on time and treats the place decently, or you re-let at a rent that reflects where the market is now, not where you assumed it still is. Handle it badly and you either under-price a renewal out of inertia and paperwork fatigue, or you sit through a void that costs more than the rent increase you were chasing in the first place. This page is about making that call deliberately, with the tax, financing, legal and market mechanics laid out in the order they actually bite.

The mechanics of the window

A Singapore tenancy typically runs one or two years, with a notice-to-renew or notice-to-vacate clause commonly set at two months before expiry — sometimes one, sometimes three, whatever your signed agreement actually says. That clause is the real start of your decision window, not a calendar guess. Once it fires, three things need to happen roughly in parallel: you need a read on where market rent for a comparable unit actually sits today, not where it sat when you last signed; your tenant needs to tell you, in writing, whether they intend to renew and at what; and you need to decide whether renewing at their number, countering, or letting them go and re-letting cold is the better economics. All three depend on the same input — current market rent for your specific unit type, size and location — which is why the window starts with a rent check, not with a renewal letter.

• Rent check first: pull comparable transacted rents for your project or street, not asking rents on a portal — asking and transacted rent diverge, and the gap widens the longer a listing has been live
• Notify per your lease clause, in writing, inside the window it specifies — a verbal understanding with a good tenant is not a renewal
• Get the tenant's intention in writing before you take the unit off any informal hold
• If re-letting, start marketing 60-75 days out so a void does not open between the old tenancy ending and a new one starting
• Decide the reno question (below) before you market, not after — a fresh coat of paint changes what a viewing tenant will pay

The two paths

Renewing with your sitting tenant

A renewal is the cheaper path on paper: no void, no marketing, no agent fee if you deal with the tenant directly, and a known quantity on payment history and how they treat the unit. The cost is usually a below-market rent, because inertia works both ways — landlords who have not checked comparable rents in two years routinely under-price a renewal, and a tenant who knows the market has moved will ask for the old rate precisely because they expect you not to have checked. The fix is mechanical: price the renewal off the same comparable-transaction check you would run before re-letting, offer it as the number, and let the tenant weigh a modest increase against the hassle and cost of their own move.

Re-letting to someone new

Re-letting captures the full market rent and resets the relationship, but it is not free. Singapore rentals typically sit listed 21-28 days for a well-priced unit in a good location, about 14 days for an MRT-adjacent city-fringe condo, and 45-60 days for an overpriced or poorly located one — and every one of those days is a day of rent not collected while the mortgage, property tax and maintenance keep running. Private-rental vacancy sat around 7% in early 2026 market-wide, ranging from 4-5% in high-demand city-fringe pockets to 8-10% in newer outer-region developments, and a landlord who has priced above where the vacancy rate in their own segment says the market is will sit in that longer tail. One published landlord-guide framing is blunt about the trade: every month of vacancy at an aspirational rent costs more than accepting a 5-8% reduction to a qualified tenant immediately, and a worked example in the same vein has a six-week void on a S$4,500-a-month unit costing roughly S$6,200 — which, at a flat 3% rent increase, takes years to claw back, not months.

• URA's private residential rental index rose 0.7% quarter on quarter in Q2 2026, against 0.3% in Q1 — non-landed +0.4%, landed +2.7%, with Core Central Region running hottest at +1.2% and Outside Central Region flat to slightly negative
• Full-year 2026 forecasts cluster around +1% to +3% for private residential rent, tempered by softer corporate housing budgets and a preference for lower-cost accommodation
• Average gross yield on a non-landed private condo runs about 3.36%, with meaningful regional spread — 4.0-4.5% in OCR near an MRT station against 2.5-3.5% in CCR
• None of this tells you what your specific unit rents for — it tells you which direction to lean before you pull the actual comparables

Eligibility — can you even let this out again

Private property carries no letting-eligibility gate at all: Singapore Citizen, PR or foreign owner, the right to re-let or renew a tenancy is the same. What does apply, regardless of ownership profile, is URA's occupancy rule — a minimum stay of three consecutive months, no daily or weekly lets, and an occupant cap of six unrelated persons for a unit under 90 sq m, temporarily extended to eight for units of 90 sq m or more through 31 December 2028. There is no URA tenant-registration requirement for private property.

An HDB flat is a different animal. Only a Singapore Citizen owner who has cleared the Minimum Occupation Period may rent out the whole flat — a Singapore PR flat owner may not, full stop, regardless of MOP. Standard MOP is five years from legal completion; a non-subsidised flat bought on the open market without a grant before 30 August 2010 clears at three years. Owners of HDB Plus and Prime flats may never rent out the whole flat, even after their (longer, 10-year) MOP — spare bedrooms only, and only with HDB approval, and only while the owner continues living in the flat. If the non-citizen tenant quota for the block or neighbourhood has been reached, the flat can only be let to Singaporeans and Malaysians.

Citizenship status — SC, PR, foreigner, FTA nationals

For a private-property landlord, citizenship status mostly does not touch the re-let-or-renew decision itself — it touches what happens if the cash this tenancy generates gets deployed into a second property. Nationals of the US, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Iceland (and their PR-equivalents) are taxed at Singapore Citizen stamp-duty rates under Singapore's free-trade agreements, a parity that matters the moment you consider buying another property with the proceeds of this one — see the tax section below. Citizenship status also decides how this property's rental income itself is taxed if you are not a Singapore tax resident: a non-resident individual earning rental income from a Singapore property is taxed at a flat 24% (down from 22% before Year of Assessment 2024 rose it, then up again — check the current year of assessment before filing), against the progressive resident rates a Singapore tax resident pays, and must still file a return reporting that rent to IRAS regardless of where they live.

For an HDB flat specifically, citizenship is not a side issue — it is the gate. Only a Singapore Citizen owner can rent out the whole flat at all; a PR owner cannot, whatever their MOP status.

Taxes

Property tax — the lever this decision actually pulls

This is the tax question that is genuinely live at the sixty-to-ninety-day mark, because it is the one your choice changes. Owner-occupier property tax rates apply to only one property you own and occupy yourself; the moment you let a property out, or hold a second home you occupy, it moves to non-owner-occupier residential rates — a materially higher schedule. If your tenant is leaving and you are weighing moving back in yourself rather than re-letting, that switch is the single biggest line-item this decision controls. And there is no relief for a gap: a vacant residential property between tenancies is taxed at the non-owner-occupier rate throughout the void, with no vacancy concession — and the one-off 2026 property tax rebate (15% for owner-occupied HDB, 10% capped at S$500 for owner-occupied private residential) does not apply to a non-owner-occupied property either.

• Owner-occupier 2025 schedule: 0% on the first $12,000 of Annual Value, 4% on the next $28,000, 6% on the next $10,000, 10% on the next $25,000, 14% on the next $10,000, 20% on the next $15,000, 26% on the next $40,000, 32% above $140,000
• Non-owner-occupier 2024 schedule: 12% on the first $30,000 of Annual Value, 20% on the next $15,000, 28% on the next $15,000, 36% above $60,000
• A property that sits vacant between tenants pays the non-owner-occupier rate for every day of the void — there is no lower vacant-property band

Rental income tax

IRAS pre-fills a 15% deemed-expense deduction against gross rent from a tenanted residential property, as a simplified alternative to claiming actual expenses — but the choice is binding across every tenanted residential property you own: claim actual expenses on any one of them and that treatment applies to all of them, you cannot mix deemed on one and actual on another. Mortgage interest can still be claimed separately on top of the 15% deemed expenses. Search-result summaries of IRAS's own guidance (not independently confirmed against a rendered IRAS page this run) suggest that, from Year of Assessment 2022, a landlord may also deduct repair, insurance, maintenance and the property tax paid during a genuine void between tenants — conditional on having made reasonable efforts to re-let. If you are not a Singapore tax resident, rental income is taxed at a flat 24% rather than the resident progressive bands.

Stamp duty on the tenancy agreement itself

Both a renewal and a fresh letting need a stamped tenancy agreement — this is not optional paperwork, it is what a bank later needs to count the rent toward your borrowing capacity (see below). IRAS's lease duty runs at 0.4% of the total rent payable over the term where the lease is four years or less, or 0.4% of four times the Average Annual Rent where the term runs longer or is indefinite; no duty is payable where the Average Annual Rent is S$1,000 or less. It is payable within 14 days of signing in Singapore, 30 days if signed overseas.

If the real answer is sell, not re-let

A tenant leaving is also the cleanest moment to sell — vacant possession, no sitting-tenant discount, no need to coordinate viewings around someone else's schedule. Seller's Stamp Duty is the number that decides whether this is even on the table: for residential property bought on or after 4 July 2025, the holding period is four years, at 16% in year one, 12% in year two, 8% in year three, 4% in year four, computed on the higher of price and market value. If you are past year four, SSD is nil and selling is a live option purely on timing. If the sale funds a second purchase, Additional Buyer's Stamp Duty on that next property depends on your own citizenship profile — 20% for a Singapore Citizen's second residential property, 30% for a PR's, 60% for a foreigner's — on top of ordinary Buyer's Stamp Duty, which runs 1% on the first $180,000, 2% on the next $180,000, 3% on the next $640,000, 4% on the next $500,000, 5% on the next $1,500,000 and 6% above $3,000,000.

Borrowing

A vacancy between tenants is not just a cash-flow gap — it can also cut you off from refinancing this property or borrowing against it at the exact moment you might want to. MAS requires a minimum 30% haircut on rental income counted toward Total Debt Servicing Ratio, and the rental income only counts at all if it is backed by a stamped tenancy agreement with at least six months remaining on it. A landlord who lets the unit sit empty, or signs a short six-month renewal to buy time, is quietly weakening their own TDSR position for any refinancing or new borrowing done during that stretch. TDSR itself is capped at 55% of gross monthly income, tested at a 4% floor rate for residential property regardless of the rate actually quoted.

If the plan is to pull equity out of this property rather than simply refinance it, an equity or cash-out term loan is capped at 75% LTV where you have no other outstanding housing loan, 45% where you have one or more — separate from and lower than the ordinary purchase-loan LTV caps of 75% for a first housing loan, 45% for a second, 35% for a third. Cash-out refinancing is available only on private property and ECs past their five-year MOP, not on HDB flats, and the CPF-funded share of the property cannot be drawn out as cash. The Mortgage Servicing Ratio, capped at 30%, only ever applies to an HDB flat or an EC still within its MOP — it is not a constraint on a private-property refinance at all.

Illustration, not a bank quote: on a S$825,000 second condominium let at the 3.36% average gross yield (S$27,720 a year), financed by a S$640,000 cash-out loan and a S$371,250 purchase loan, the monthly cash gap between rent and instalments runs about S$1,620 a month at a 1.5-2.0% blended rate — and widens to about S$2,840 a month once MAS's 4% stress rate is applied to size the loan. That gap is the number a void, or an under-priced renewal, makes worse before it makes anything else worse.

Reno and A&A — the only window you actually get

A tenant leaving is functionally the only time you can touch the inside of this unit without negotiating around someone else's furniture, schedule and goodwill. That makes the sixty-to-ninety-day window a control decision as much as a pricing one: spend now, between tenancies, or live with the unit as-is for another one-to-two-year term. Cost ranges reported for a condo renovation run roughly S$24,800-71,100 for a 2-bedroom and S$32,200-84,100 for a 3-bedroom; an HDB resale refresh runs roughly S$45,000-75,000 for a 3-room and S$70,000-120,000 for a 5-room — figures from renovation-industry guides, not a government series, and a full refit at that scale is rarely what a re-letting refresh needs. A contractor's own claim that strategic kitchen, bathroom, paint and flooring work lifts achievable rent or resale value 5-10% with a 70-80% return is a contractor's claim, not independently verified, and the same caution applies to any pre-letting spend: match the work to what a viewing tenant will actually pay more for, not to a full renovation.

If the unit is HDB, renovation work must go through a contractor on HDB's own Directory of Renovation Contractors, wall-hacking and demolition need HDB's prior written approval with limits on tools and consecutive days, and restricted works (hacking walls, removing finishes, heavy drilling) are only permitted 9am-5pm on weekdays — not weekends, not public holidays. On financing: a bank renovation loan is meaningfully more expensive money than drawing against a mortgage refinance at a similarly low rate — one worked comparison puts S$30,000 over five years at about S$1,080 of mortgage-priced interest against roughly S$3,869 of interest plus S$900 of fees on a standard bank renovation loan, and a renovation loan is capped at S$30,000 or six times monthly income, whichever is lower. Section 14N's tax deduction for renovation and refurbishment capital expenditure is only available to a business using the property for its own trade — a passive landlord letting the unit out to someone else does not qualify, so this spend is not tax-deductible against the rental income the way mortgage interest is.

Conveyancing

A renewal or a fresh letting needs no conveyancing lawyer at all — it needs a tenancy agreement and a stamped lease-duty payment, nothing that touches title. Selling instead is a different order of process: a private transaction with a mortgage typically runs 10-12 weeks from signing the Sale and Purchase Agreement to completion, private conveyancing has no government-set fee schedule and runs roughly S$2,000-5,000 all-in for a straightforward purchase-and-mortgage job, and any mortgage taken out or discharged along the way carries its own mortgage duty of 0.4% of the loan amount, capped at S$500.

Estate

Two estate questions are worth having answered before, not during, a crisis. First, if you lose mental capacity while the property is mid-tenancy, a donee acting under a registered Lasting Power of Attorney can manage the letting on your behalf — renting out, renewing, refinancing — once your incapacity is established, sending the LPA and supporting medical documentation to the relevant institutions as needed. Second, if you die while the property is owned in your own name and still tenanted, IRAS continues owner-occupier property tax treatment for up to two years from death or transfer as a grace concession where it already applied, but a rental property was never getting that rate to begin with — it stays on the non-owner-occupier schedule your estate now administers. An HDB flat specifically must be sold within six years of the owner's death if held by the estate, with a full estate sale commonly running six to nine months from marketing to completion once probate is granted. [⚠ estate.probate.eligibility_2026_06_15: sources differ; awaiting a ruling]

The twelve questions before you sign anything

Strip away the tax schedules and the financing caps and this decision reduces to two questions, asked the way a person actually asks them, not the way a textbook does. Nobody buys an asset believing it will fall, so 'are you investing or living in it' sorts nobody. The two that actually sort you: are you borrowing to hold this property, or did you buy it in cash — and once you hold it, are you lending it out, or keeping it for yourself? Cash plus own-use is pure appreciation with no carry at all. Cash plus let-out is yield, positive carry by construction. Borrow plus own-use is negative carry by construction — most owner-occupiers with a mortgage sit here and rarely say so. Borrow plus let-out, the position almost every reader of this page is actually in, is the spread play — and the gap between what the tenant pays you and what the bank charges you is the whole game this renewal-or-re-let decision is fought over.

• THE PLAY — this unit is a cash-flow play, not a balance-sheet one: the decision in front of you is about what rent comes in each month, not about the property's long-run price
• BALANCE SHEET — nothing here moves what you own or what you owe; the loan balance and the property's value are unchanged by renewing, re-letting or leaving it vacant
• CASH FLOW — what actually moves is the rent cheque and the mortgage instalment; a void or an under-priced renewal is a cash flow event before it is anything else
• P&L — profit is rent minus expenses minus depreciation-equivalent wear, which is not the same figure as the cash that lands in your account, since a stamped tenancy agreement, agent commission and reno spend land at different times than the rent itself does
• CARRY — income minus financing cost; a S$2m unit at the average 3.36% gross yield against a loan priced anywhere near the MAS 4% stress floor is running thin or negative carry before property tax, maintenance and any void are even counted
• GIVE / GET — you give up the certainty of a known sitting tenant and the cost of re-letting; you get either full market rent or the goodwill and lower friction of a renewal
• EXPOSED TO — a longer void than planned, a tenant who defaults mid-lease, and a rate move on any refinance timed around this decision
• FOR HOW LONG — whatever term you sign, one or two years typically, which is also how long you are locked out of both the reno window and a sale without SSD or fresh marketing
• FAILURE CASCADE — a void or an under-priced renewal is negative carry, which hits cash flow first, accumulates into a worse P&L over the term, and only becomes a balance-sheet problem — negative equity, illiquidity, insolvency — if it runs long enough or stacks on other debt
• LIQUIDITY — a tenanted or freshly re-let property is not a liquid asset regardless of how healthy the rent is; turning it back into cash still means a sale, SSD if inside the four-year window, and the 10-12 week conveyancing timeline above
• CONTROL — this is the one lever you actually pull in this decision: renewing at the checked market rate instead of the stale one, timing a reno to the vacancy window, and choosing sell-versus-relet are all things you control; the rent a stranger will pay is not
• THE EXIT — selling costs SSD if inside four years, a conveyancing timeline, and an agent's commission if you use one; renewing or re-letting costs nothing to exit because you never left — the property just keeps generating carry, positive or negative, until you choose to sell it

The letting agent in this transaction

A property agent's role in a letting, under CEA's own framing, ends the moment the tenancy agreement is signed and the property is handed over — property management after that point is not estate agency work and is not CEA-regulated at all. If you engage an agent for a fresh letting, they should walk you through CEA's Prescribed Estate Agency Agreement (Form 4 for the tenant's side), verify a foreign tenant's passport and work pass against MOM and ICA, and arrange a signed inventory where a deposit is involved.

Here is the part worth saying plainly, including against the agent's own interest: a fresh letting to a new tenant typically pays the landlord's agent one month's rent where rent is above S$3,500 and the lease runs two years or more, and around half a month for a shorter lease. A renewal with your existing tenant typically pays a reduced commission — half a month to one month depending on how involved the agent stays — and if you deal with your own sitting tenant directly, without an agent at all, no commission is owed to anyone. That asymmetry means an agent's honest financial incentive, unprompted, points toward finding you a new tenant rather than facilitating a renewal with the one you already have — even in the cases where renewing at a fairly-priced number is genuinely the better economics for you. It does not make the advice wrong. It does mean asking the question directly: does this recommendation change if you renewed instead of re-let.

What the agent actually earns

CEA sets no fixed or recommended commission rate for any letting, sale or type of property — the rate is agreed and documented in the Prescribed Estate Agency Agreement before the agent starts work, and it is negotiable: CEA's own survey found close to 8 in 10 consumers aware commission is negotiable, and 85% of those who negotiated succeeded in lowering it. Payment goes to the licensed property agency, never to the individual salesperson directly, and one agent may never collect commission from both the landlord and the tenant on the same deal — that is an offence under CEA's rules, not merely bad practice.

Disputes over unpaid rent or a withheld deposit, whether you used an agent or not, fall to the Small Claims Tribunals for amounts up to S$20,000 (S$30,000 with both parties' written consent) on tenancies of two years or less — typically resolved in four to twelve weeks from filing, for a filing fee of roughly S$10-100.