Every MOE primary school, badged by how hard its P1 ballot ran. Each one shows how many children applied per place at each stage, and every tracked new launch within a straight-line 1km and 2km, with prices. In 2026, 106 of 179 schools had to ballot. Pick a school to draw its rings and open what sits inside them.
A new launch is one way into a school's distance band. A completed condo is the other. Both are listed here together, tagged, so the choice can be read in one table rather than held in your head. The launches carry prices or launch estimates; the completed developments carry something a launch cannot — a resale record, showing how their owners' sales actually turned out. Pick a school above to fill it.
Select a school to load this section.
| Development | Type | Distance | Completed | Tenure | Avg psf | Gross yield | Matched exits | Made money | Median annualised |
|---|
Rows tagged Resale are completed private condos and apartments from our paired sales records: 683 developments and 149,329 matched purchases and later sales. 87.3% of those sales made money and 12.7% did not. Every return figure counts winners and losers together, with the profitable share shown next to it. Profit here is before stamp duty, agent fees, legal fees, loan interest and renovation. Treat any development with few sales as a hint, not a conclusion. Rows tagged New launch come from our tracked-launch dataset instead: they have no completed resale record, so the yield, exits, made-money and annualised columns are left blank rather than filled with a zero they never earned. Distances in both cases are straight-line estimates, not the official MOE home-school distance — verify with the OneMap School Query.
Data updated —
The registration phases, in one line each
Here is the part that matters for property. When a phase gets more applicants than places, MOE decides by two things: citizenship, and how far you live from the school. Singapore Citizens within 1km go first. Then citizens between 1km and 2km. Then citizens beyond 2km. Permanent Residents follow, in the same order.
That is the whole mechanism. It is why an address inside 1km of a popular school carries a price in the property market. You are not buying a guaranteed place. You are buying a better position in a queue.
Every school on the map plots as a black circle. The demand badge sits on its card and in its map popup, written out in words.
The badge is read from Phase 2C only. Phase 2C is the round for children with no family link to the school. It is also the only round where the distance from your home decides who gets in. That makes it the round a buyer is actually shopping for.
Phases 1, 2A and 2B do not affect the badge. Those rounds go to siblings, former pupils, staff, parent volunteers and church or clan members. You cannot buy any of that by moving nearby. Every round is still shown in full on each school card, so you can see the whole picture.
Two things decide the badge. The first is how deep the ballot cut. MOE fills Phase 2C in a fixed order: citizens within 1km, then citizens 1km to 2km away, then citizens beyond 2km, then permanent residents. So the group that had to ballot tells you who was safe and who was not. The second is how long the queue was, measured as applicants per place.
| Badge | What has to happen at Phase 2C | What it means for a buyer | Schools |
|---|---|---|---|
| Very high demand | The ballot cut into citizens living within 1km, and at least 1.5 applicants turned up per place. | Living within 1km was not enough to be safe, and the queue was deep. Both halves must be true. | 45 |
| High demand | Citizens were balloted, but the rating above was not met. | Some citizens had to gamble. A closer address would have been safe. | 26 |
| Moderate demand | No citizen was balloted, but the round all but filled (0.8 applicants per place or more), or it ran on to the supplementary round, or only permanent residents were balloted. | Every citizen who applied got in. There was little room to spare. | 40 |
| Vacancies available | Places were left over. | Everyone who applied found a place. | 68 |
The 1.5 figure is our own cut-off, not an MOE one. We set it so the top badge means a standing queue rather than a single close year. Here is why it matters. In 2026, 57 schools balloted into the citizens-within-1km group at Phase 2C. At 45 of them the queue was 1.5 applicants per place or deeper, and those 45 carry the top badge. The other 12 sit one band down. Compassvale Primary is one of them: its Phase 2C ballot did reach the 1km group, but only 99 families applied for 70 places, or 1.41 per place. That is a real contest. It is not the same contest as Princess Elizabeth Primary at 3.98 applicants per place.
Three counter-points worth holding on to. A badge describes one year, and a school can move between bands from one year to the next, so read the 2025 line on the card alongside the 2026 one. A badge is not a measure of teaching quality; MOE’s position is that every school is a good school, and this rating only tracks how many families competed. And the rating is blind to why demand is high, which may be a new estate filling up rather than the school itself.
In 2026, 106 of 179 schools balloted in at least one round, and 80 balloted at Phase 2C.
On each school card, the four phase chips carry their own colour, based on that phase alone rather than the school's overall tier. Green means everyone who applied in that phase got a place. Orange means slightly more applicants than places. Red means well over. So a school can look calm overall while the one phase you would actually register in runs hot. The cards show both the completed 2026 exercise and the 2025 one before it, so you can see whether a school runs hot every year or had one unusual round.
Three shapes, one meaning each. A black circle is a primary school. A building is a tracked new launch. A house is a completed development with a resale record, and that layer is off until you switch on Show resale homes beside the map. Pick a school and the map draws its 1km and 2km rings, opens a panel listing every tracked launch inside 2km, and — if the resale layer is on — plots the completed developments in the same rings. The table lower down lists both together.
Each card shows applicants divided by places, for Phases 2A, 2B, 2C and 2C(S). A ratio of 1.88 at Phase 2C means 188 children applied for every 100 places. Anything above 1.0 forced a ballot.
The "ballot" tag then tells you which group the ballot fell on. SC under 1km, SC 1 to 2km, or SC over 2km, for Singapore Citizens by distance. PR means Permanent Residents. This answers the question families actually ask: was the ballot for 1km applicants, or only for those further out? A 2C tag of SC 1 to 2km means every citizen within 1km got in, and the draw only touched those living between 1km and 2km.
One thing to watch. Each ratio compares demand against that phase's own places, not the whole school. So a gentle 2B can sit next to a brutal 2C. Schools must hold at least 20 places each for 2B and 2C, and popular schools often sit right at that floor.
It answers the same question from both directions. If you have picked a school, you can see every tracked launch inside its 1km and 2km rings, with prices. 42 of the 107 projects in our tracker sit within 1km of at least one very-high-demand school, and 87 sit within 2km. If you have picked a project, you can see which ballots its address would plausibly help with, on that project's own page.
The demand tier belongs to the school, not to any address. A school's ballot history is public, annual and counted. That makes it one of the few things about a location you can actually measure rather than simply claim.
Two honest limits. The first is distance. Our rings are straight-line estimates. MOE measures from address points held by the Singapore Land Authority. A project we show at 0.97km can fall outside 1km officially, and the reverse happens too. The OneMap School Query is the only check that counts.
The second is price. Being near a popular school goes together with everything else that makes an area expensive. So a price gap near a school is not purely a school premium. Our research note on schools and launch demand works through the numbers, including the places where the premium does not show up at all. Ballot results also move year to year with cohort sizes and MOE intake changes. A tier is a record of what happened, not a promise about next year.
What to take away
Do it in this order. Pick the school first, then the home, not the other way round. Check that school's Phase 2C ratio and which group its ballot reached, because that tells you whether 1km is genuinely needed or whether 2km would have been enough. Then verify the exact distance for the specific address on OneMap before you commit to anything. A shortlist built on our straight-line rings is a fine starting point and a poor final answer.
Distance disclaimer. The 1km and 2km rings and every distance on this page are straight-line estimates worked out from school and project coordinates. They are not MOE's official home-school distance and carry no guarantee of accuracy. Before relying on 1km or 2km status for P1 registration, check your specific address with the School Query tool on OneMap, which applies the official measurement.
When a school gets more applicants than places in a phase, MOE settles it by citizenship and by how far you live from the school. Singapore Citizens within 1km go first, then those between 1km and 2km, then those beyond. Permanent Residents follow in the same order. The draw happens inside whichever group the places run out in. So an address within 1km of a busy school genuinely improves your odds. It does not guarantee a place.
MOE uses address-point data from the Singapore Land Authority. You can check it with the OneMap School Query tool. The distances on this page are straight-line estimates from map coordinates, so treat them as a guide. Always check your specific address before relying on 1km or 2km status.
It is the number of applicants divided by the number of places in that phase. A Phase 2C ratio of 1.88 means 188 children applied for every 100 places, so a ballot was needed. Below 1.0, everyone who applied in that phase got in.
By Phase 2C ratio, the five hardest were Princess Elizabeth Primary at 3.98, Northland Primary at 3.36, Nan Hua Primary at 3.00, Chongfu School at 2.85 and Rosyth School at 2.61. In total, 106 of 179 schools balloted in at least one phase in 2026.
Special Assistance Plan schools teach both English and Chinese at first-language level. Fifteen schools taking P1 pupils carry the label, and most of them are heavily oversubscribed. Use the Programme filter to see only those.
The effect is real, but smaller and patchier than most people assume. Among suburban launches now selling, projects within 1km of a very-high-demand school average about $2,297 per square foot, against roughly $2,197 for the rest. That is a gap of 4% to 5%. On the city fringe the pattern reverses. The clearer effect is on who buys: the share of buyers coming from HDB flats runs about 7 percentage points higher near very-high-demand schools. Our research note works through the figures.
Damai Primary, Kranji Primary and Townsville Primary have paused P1 registration from 2025 to 2027 while they relocate. Damai moves to Tampines North and Townsville to East Canberra, tentatively from 2029 according to MOE. Existing pupils stay at the current campuses.
Yes. MOE lets you use the address of a property you have bought, including one still being built, or one you are partway through buying on the resale market, provided you meet its conditions. What differs is when the 30-month stay requirement starts. For a new property, it starts when your family moves in. For a resale property, it starts at the beginning of your child's P1 school term. Check MOE's current conditions before you rely on this, because the details matter and they change.
They solve different problems. A completed resale home can be lived in now, which matters if registration is one or two years away rather than four. It also comes with a real sales record you can check: how many owners sold at a profit, what the middle seller made per year including the losses, and the rental yield. A new launch is usually three to four years from completion, so it suits families registering later. It may also be cheaper per square foot at entry. The honest answer is that timing decides this, not preference.
School details come from MOE's General Information of Schools dataset on data.gov.sg. Ballot figures come from MOE's published places-and-balloting data for the completed 2025 and 2026 exercises. The data date appears in the strip at the top of the page.
The research on this page tells you what the data says. If you want to work through what it means for your own situation — a school shortlist, budget, ABSD position, or timing an HDB sale around a P1 registration window — you can request a one-to-one consultation.
Disclosure: advisory consultations are provided by Jamus Lee (CEA Reg. No. R065771E, ERA Realty Network Pte Ltd, Licence No. L3002382K), the publisher of PropertyInsider.sg, via JamusProperty.com. This is a separate service from our editorial research and has no influence over what we publish. See our editorial policy. Submitting this form shares your details with the advisory practice; see our privacy policy.
