Yes - but not evenly, not everywhere, and not always for the buyer’s benefit. The school premium is real at some addresses and pure habit at others, and telling the two apart is worth serious money.
Where the premium actually comes from.
It is a scarcity story, not a prestige story. When a school is oversubscribed at Phase 2C, places go to homes within one kilometre first. Draw that ring on a map and count the residential buildings inside it - the number is finite, often just a few hundred blocks and projects. That fixed supply of qualifying addresses meets a fresh cohort of anxious parents every single year.
And at some schools, that queue never shortens. I keep a dataset of every P1 exercise since 2009, and fifty-two schools in Singapore have been oversubscribed at Phase 2C in all seventeen completed years - an unbroken run. Seventeen of those go further still: a dozen years or more of it, at double the places on offer or worse. At the sharpest of them, Princess Elizabeth Primary, 232 children applied for 41 open places in 2025. Demand like that is not a fashion. It is structural, and the addresses inside those rings price it in.
Who actually pays for it.
Owner-occupiers with young children are the obvious buyers, and they pay for certainty: the right address turns a lottery into a priority queue. But the quieter engine is rental demand. Registration requires genuine residence, not ownership - and MOE expects the family to stay at least 30 months. So every year, a new wave of families rents inside the tightest rings for three years or more. For a landlord, that is long tenancies, low vacancy, and tenants who chose the address for reasons that will not change with the market. If you are buying to let, an address inside a perennially balloted ring is one of the few school stories that genuinely supports yield.
Resale works the same way. The parents who paid for the ring eventually sell - to the next cohort of parents. School demand is generational and self-renewing in a way few other location factors are.
When the premium is not worth paying.
- When the school never actually ballots. Some well-known names have room at 2C most years - the priority the ring confers is worth little if everyone who applies gets in anyway.
- When the reputation is old and the data is new. Some heartland schools out-ballot famous names year after year; some storied names have cooled. Pressure is measurable - check it, don’t assume it.
- When only part of a development qualifies. In larger estates, some blocks sit inside the kilometre and some do not. The premium belongs to the qualifying blocks, not the project name on the gate.
- When you are stretching to buy what you could rent. If the school is the whole reason, a three-year tenancy inside the ring can achieve the registration outcome without the mortgage - provided it is somewhere your family genuinely intends to live, because MOE does check addresses used only to win a school place.
My rule for clients: pay a school premium only where the data shows persistent oversubscription, and only for an address whose band you have verified - not the metres on a map, and never the project name alone.
All of the pressure history I mentioned - seventeen years of it, school by school, with every HDB and condo block inside the ring mapped - is on the school map. Look up the ring you are considering before you pay for it.