Sarah Chen
When your HDB flat sells, the money doesn't land in your bank account first. It clears your outstanding housing loan, it goes back into your own CPF account, and it pays your selling costs. What's left over is the cash. That's why it's worth working out your own number before you commit to anything, and Cashew's sales proceeds calculator will do the sum for you.
Most people treat the resale price as the budget for their next home. It isn't. The outstanding loan, the CPF refund with its accrued interest and the selling costs all come out of the sale first, and the CPF part is the one that's easiest to miss.
This piece is about HDB flats, not private property. The breakdown applies whether your flat is on an HDB loan or a bank loan, because either way the outstanding balance has to be cleared when the sale completes.
The sum most people do in their head is simple. Sale price, minus whatever is left on the loan, equals cash.
That's because the loan is the deduction you get a statement for every month, so it's the number that's front of mind when you think about selling.
It's also incomplete. Two more deductions sit behind the loan, and one of them is money you already own.
CPF is the national savings scheme that most Singaporeans use to help pay for a home. The money sits in your Ordinary Account, the part of CPF you're allowed to spend on property.
If you used CPF savings for your downpayment or your monthly instalments, that money left your Ordinary Account and went into your flat.
When you sell, that CPF money has to go back into your Ordinary Account. It returns to you, in CPF, not to HDB and not to the buyer.
On top of the amount you took out, you also refund the interest that money would have earned if you had left it sitting in CPF instead of putting it into the flat. That's what's meant by accrued interest.
Accrued interest keeps building for as long as you hold the flat. So the longer you've owned it, and the more CPF you used, the larger the refund.
The refund isn't a fee and it isn't money lost. It goes back to you, just as CPF rather than cash you can spend on a deposit or a renovation.
That's why two sellers can agree the same price and walk away with very different amounts of cash. The one who used more CPF, for longer, gets more of their proceeds back as CPF and less of it in the bank.
The third deduction is the cost of selling. Agent commission, if you use an agent, and the legal fees for the conveyancing, which is the legal work that transfers the flat from your name to the buyer's. Both come out of the sale, and both need to be in your sum rather than treated as an afterthought.
There's one more to check rather than assume. HDB charges a resale levy to some sellers who go on to buy another subsidised flat. Whether it applies to you depends on the flat you bought and the one you're buying next, so check your own position with HDB rather than guessing.
So the honest version of the sum is this: sale price, minus the outstanding loan, minus the CPF refund with its accrued interest, minus your selling costs. What's left is your cash proceeds. For a seller who has held a flat for a long time and used CPF throughout, that cash figure can be a good deal lower than the sale price, with a large share returning to CPF instead.
Four deductions are a lot to hold in your head at once, which is where the calculator comes in.
Cashew's sales proceeds calculator does this sum for you. You enter six figures: your sale price, your outstanding loan, the CPF you used, the CPF accrued interest, your selling costs and your legal fees. It gives you a clear answer on the cash you keep. Open the calculator
Those six entries come from four places. Two of them you can look up exactly today.
Your outstanding loan balance. From HDB if your flat is on an HDB loan, or from your bank's statement if it's on a bank loan. An exact figure.
Your CPF principal and accrued interest. Both are on your CPF statement, under the property you own. Also exact.
Your expected sale price. Your own working figure, based on what comparable flats in your block or estate have actually sold for.
Your selling costs. Agent commission and legal fees, plus the resale levy if HDB tells you it applies. Use the quotes you have, or your own estimate until you have them.
A rough cash figure now is more useful than an exact one you only get after paying an option fee (the deposit you put down to reserve a place) on a flat you can't actually afford.
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
HDB calculates EHG based on average gross monthly household income over a 12-month window, but each person's income is averaged only over the months they actually worked, not spread across all 12 months. This means short stints of part-time or contract work count at full monthly value rather than being diluted, which can push a household into a lower income band and significantly reduce the grant amount.
Sarah Chen·4 Oct 2026© 2026 Cashew. All rights reserved.
