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The interior of a Singapore hawker centre in mid-afternoon, rows of steel tables and stools bolted to the floor under ceiling fans, stall shutters half down.
Explained

Singapore explained

Six systems, each described by how it works rather than by what it costs this month, because the mechanism lasts and the rate does not.

Explainers
6
  1. Certificate of Entitlement

    COE explained: how the vehicle quota sets the price of a car

    Singapore does not tax cars into scarcity. It caps how many exist, then auctions the right to own one, and the price is whatever the auction returns.

    Authority: Land Transport Authority Reviewed 2026-08-18
  2. Housing & Development Board

    HDB explained: how Singapore's public housing system actually works

    Around eight in ten residents live in flats built by a statutory board, and most of them own the lease. The queue, the resale market and the grants are three different systems that only look like one.

    Authority: Housing & Development Board Reviewed 2026-08-18
  3. Mass Rapid Transit

    MRT explained: the rail network, and what counts as a disruption

    Six lines carry most of the island's daily journeys. The interesting part is not the map; it is the unit the operators are held to.

    Authority: Land Transport Authority Reviewed 2026-08-18
  4. Electronic Road Pricing

    ERP explained: how Singapore prices a road by the half hour

    Congestion charging here is older than the electronics. The gantries were an upgrade to a scheme from 1975, and they are now being replaced in turn.

    Authority: Land Transport Authority Reviewed 2026-08-18
  5. Central Provident Fund

    CPF explained: where the monthly contribution goes, account by account

    One deduction funds three different things (retirement, a home and medical care), and the reason the system is hard to follow is that the accounts are allowed to pay for each other.

    Authority: Central Provident Fund Board Reviewed 2026-08-18
  6. Climate and sea level

    The temperature record explained: what the series actually measures

    The global temperature series is not a thermometer reading. It is an anomaly against a baseline, assembled from land stations and sea-surface measurements, and knowing that is what makes it readable.

    Authority: NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies Reviewed 2026-08-18
02

What each explainer is checked against

The mechanism is described from the authority's own rules; the figures used to illustrate it come from these registers, and are refreshed with the site.

Vehicle quota exercises 197 Every bidding exercise from Jan 2010 to Aug 2026, across all five categories: the series behind the quota explainer.
Resale flat sales 238,194 Approved transactions to Aug 2026, median S$640,000, with a median for each of the 26 towns and 7 flat types.
Rental contracts 206,942 Approved subletting contracts to Jul 2026, median S$3,250, the other half of the housing picture.
National indicators 4 Population, output, unemployment and consumer prices, taken from the statistics department's own tables rather than from a summary of them.

An explainer is written once and revised when the rule changes, not when the number moves. That is the split the two halves of this site are built on: a mechanism that holds for years is described here, and the figure it produced this month sits on the board it belongs to, the transport board for quota premiums, the property board for resale and rental medians, by the numbers for the national series. Where an explainer quotes a figure, it is drawn from the same register the board reads, so the two can never disagree.