Sarah Chen
More mortgage loans in Singapore are crossing the $1 million mark, and at the same time buyers are covering more of their purchase with cash and CPF (The Straits Times, 18 October 2026). Two parts of the same purchase are getting bigger at once.
The mortgage is the part the bank lends you. The down payment is the part you pay up front, out of your own cash and out of CPF, the compulsory savings scheme every working Singaporean and permanent resident pays into, part of which can go towards a home. If both halves are growing, buyers are finding the money somewhere, and where they find it says something about who is buying.
Our reading is that this points to a K-shaped economy: one group's fortunes rising while another's fall, from the same starting point. If you're doing well, your wealth is increasing. If you're poor, you are less well off than before.
That is a reading, not a reported finding. The report gives the direction of both figures but not their size, no split of buyers by income or wealth, and no comparison with earlier years. So no one can say from it how big the shift is, over what period, or whether it is new.
The banks' own read is in the same report: borrowers remain financially resilient (The Straits Times, 18 October 2026).
This piece is for HDB resale buyers and private property buyers. BTO purchases work differently and are not covered here.
Property gets more expensive, so the loan gets bigger. The up-front payment grows with it, because a bank will only lend up to a set share of the property's value, known as the loan-to-value limit. When the value rises, the cash and CPF you need to cover the rest rises too.
The exact share depends on your loan tenure and how many housing loans you already have. Check it against the Cashew mortgage guide before you budget.
Read that way, the two facts are really one fact stated twice, and "borrowers remain financially resilient" closes the story: prices rose, everyone put in more, everyone is managing.
Paying more of the price in cash and CPF is a choice you can only make if you have the cash and the CPF. It is what having more money looks like at the point of purchase.
Taking a loan above $1 million is what's left when you don't have it. The up-front money isn't there, so the loan covers more of the price.
So "buyers are putting more down" and "loans are getting bigger" need not describe the same household. They can just as easily describe two different sets of buyers in the same market, moving in opposite directions at the same time. That is the K: one line going up, one going down, from the same point.
The figures in this report are consistent with that pattern. They do not prove it.
Take the banks' comment at face value. Resilient means borrowers are keeping up with their payments today. It is a statement about repayment, not about whether the distance between the buyer paying cash and the buyer stretching to a loan above $1 million is getting wider.
The market-wide numbers are not wrong. They are averages, and an average tells you nothing about which side of it you're standing on.
A larger loan means a larger monthly payment, and more of each payment going to interest rather than to the amount you owe. That monthly payment is the thing that has to survive a rate change.
Paying more from CPF is not free. Money you take out of CPF for a home keeps accruing CPF interest even after it's withdrawn, and when you sell, you have to return what you used along with the interest it would have earned. The Cashew mortgage guide sets out how that refund works.
Paying more in cash is not free either. It is the buffer you no longer have if your income stops.
The bank also caps your borrowing against your income: TDSR, the total debt servicing ratio, for private property, which looks at all your debt repayments together, and MSR, the mortgage servicing ratio, for HDB flats, which looks at the home loan alone. Banks assess both against a rate higher than the one you're offered, not today's rate, so the loan you qualify for is already a stressed figure.
What you're giving up to cover the part the bank won't lend is the harder question to answer.
One line for HDB buyers. If you're buying an HDB resale flat with an HDB loan, your rate follows the rate paid on your CPF Ordinary Account, the CPF account your housing savings sit in, rather than SORA, the Singapore interest rate benchmark that bank floating-rate packages are priced off. The rate-risk part of this does not apply to you. If you take a bank loan on an HDB resale flat, all of it does.
Your actual cash from selling an HDB flat is the sale price minus the outstanding loan, the CPF refund plus accrued interest, and selling costs such as agent commission, legal fees and any resale levy. Because the CPF refund (with accrued interest) goes back into your Ordinary Account rather than as cash, the amount available as a budget for your next home can be significantly lower than the headline sale price.
Sarah Chen·18 Oct 2026
Upgrading in your 40s or 50s still works if you are already financially secure, because the amount a bank will lend depends on age plus loan tenure, not just income. If your age plus tenure exceeds 65, or tenure exceeds 35 years for private property or 30 years for HDB, the maximum loan-to-value drops from 75% to 55%, meaning you must fund 45% of the price from cash and CPF instead of 25%. The alternative is keeping a shorter tenure to stay at 75% LTV, but that means higher monthly payments, so the real decision is whether you can afford the bigger downpayment or higher payments while staying on track for retirement.
Sarah Chen·12 Oct 2026© 2026 Cashew. All rights reserved.
