P1 Registration 2027: Does Living Within 1km Still Come at a Premium?

For families hoping to live near a preferred primary school, the 1km line has long carried particular significance.

From the 2027 Primary 1 registration exercise, the distance calculation will change for 12 schools. Source: MOE.

The schools are spread across Central, Bukit Timah, and Marine Parade areas. They are Singapore Chinese Girls’ School, Anglo-Chinese School (Primary), Anglo-Chinese School (Junior), St. Margaret’s Primary School, Nanyang Primary School, Raffles Girls’ Primary School, Methodist Girls’ School (Primary), Tanjong Katong Primary School, Pei Hwa Presbyterian Primary School, Tao Nan School, CHIJ (Katong) Primary and Ngee Ann Primary School.

Under the new scheme, these schools will divide their Phase 2C places between children living within 2km and those living farther away. Within the 2km track, living within 1km will not give an applicant priority over another child living between 1km and 2km.

That creates an interesting property question:

We compared active condo sale listings on PropertyGuru within 1km of each of the 12 affected schools with listings in the 1km-to-2km band.

The data shows a much more mixed picture than you might expect.

Only four of the 12 schools have a higher average asking PSF within 1km,

and even among those four, the difference varies sharply.

Around Methodist Girls’ School (Primary), the average asking price is approximately $2,309 psf within 1km, compared with $2,022 psf in the 1 km-to-2 km band.

That’s a difference of about $287 psf.

But around Nanyang Primary School, the difference is only around $21 psf. Around Pei Hwa Presbyterian Primary School, it is around $26 psf.

So even where a 1km premium appears in the listing data, it isn’t necessarily a large one.

Surprisingly, seven of the 12 school areas showed the opposite pattern: the average asking PSF is higher in the 1km-to-2km band.

The clearest example is around Singapore Chinese Girls’ School.

Within 1km, the average asking price is approximately $2,547 psf.

Between 1km and 2km, it rises to approximately $2,948 psf, around $401 psf higher.

A higher average asking price farther from the school doesn’t necessarily mean home-school distance is driving the difference.

School distance is only one feature of the surrounding property market. The units available on either side of the 1km line may vary in age, size and features, so moving closer won’t necessarily mean paying more per square foot. Homes on either side of the 1km line can be very different.

The takeaway is that for property hunters,

the 1km line alone doesn’t tell you whether homes will have higher asking prices.

Viewed as one 2km search area, the difference between the locations becomes clear. The same school-registration radius can expose families to very different property price points depending on the neighbourhood.

The highest average asking PSF within 2km among the 12 schools is around Singapore Chinese Girls’ Primary School, at about $2,830 psf.

Anglo-Chinese School (Primary), Anglo-Chinese School (Junior) and St. Margaret’s School (Primary) also sit above $2,650 psf.

At the other end, several of the Marine Parade school areas are below $2,100 psf.

A 2km boundary on a map can mean very different property markets.

And price isn’t the only difference.

Our listing data also shows that housing choice varies substantially from school to school.

The number of condo developments identified within 2km ranges from just 46 in Bukit Timah around Raffles Girls’ Primary School to 285 around Anglo-Chinese School (Junior), which is located in the more residential Central district of Novena. That’s a 6.2-fold difference in the number of developments identified.

Families aren’t looking only at the cost per square foot, they’re choosing among actual homes.

More developments mean a broader set of development styles, unit types and price points to compare and select from.

We also examined 12 schools outside the new two-track scheme to assess how the stats around the island fared.

We found only five neighbourhoods had higher average asking PSF within 1km of schools, compared with four of the 12 affected schools.

As several comparison areas had relatively few developments in one distance band, this is best treated as a broad observation rather than a conclusion about individual schools.

The analysis also shouldn’t be read as proof that a "1km school premium" never exists.

However, across the schools we examined here, higher average asking prices within 1km are not a consistent pattern.

For the 12 affected schools, the new Phase 2C rules make the full 2km area more relevant to the initial property search.

That doesn’t mean every home within 2km is equivalent, so

it may help to think about your home search a little differently.

Start with the registration rules for your preferred school, then verify the actual home-to-school distance through OneMap in the year of registration and check any MOE conditions that apply when using a new address.

From there, compare the homes themselves: price, size, development, commute, neighbourhood and how well the property works for your family beyond Primary 1.

No single pattern applies to every school.

For some schools, the average asking PSF is higher within 1km. For others, it’s actually higher between 1km and 2km. And around Ngee Ann Primary School, the average is the same across both distance bands.

Housing choice also varies considerably depending on the location you’re looking at.

So rather than treating the 1km or 2km boundary as a signal of what homes might cost, it may be more useful to use it as a starting point for your search, then compare the actual homes, prices, and developments available within that area.

Source: PropertyGuru internal active listing data, 10 September 2026. Asking prices are not transacted prices and are rounded to the nearest dollar. Developments were identified using property-name matching.