A single number is doing a lot of work in conversations about the 2026 resale market: 3,222. That is the count of HDB flats in Punggol that will reach their fifth year — and with it, their Minimum Occupation Period — in 2026, according to HDB Property Information on data.gov.sg.
Before going further, the caveat that belongs at the front of any discussion of MOP figures: eligibility to sell is not an intention to sell, and it is not incoming supply. A flat that becomes eligible in 2026 may stay owner-occupied for another decade. The number tells you how many doors could open, not how many will.
With that fixed in mind, the scale is still worth understanding. Punggol's 3,222 flats represent 23% of the entire national 2026 MOP cohort, which stands at 13,756 flats across all towns. Nearly one in four flats reaching eligibility this year sits in a single planning area.
The next largest town in the same cohort is Queenstown, at 2,409 flats. That is a meaningful gap — Punggol's figure is roughly a third larger than Queenstown's, and Queenstown is itself a substantial number. The two towns together account for a significant share of the national total, though the remaining towns spread the rest across a wider geography.
What the concentration means in practice
When MOP eligibility is spread thinly across many towns, the effect on any single resale market is diffuse. When it clusters — as it does in Punggol in 2026 — the potential effect, if owners do choose to sell, is concentrated in one area's resale pool.
For a buyer looking at Punggol resale flats, this is worth holding in two directions at once. On one hand, if a meaningful share of newly eligible owners do list, there may be more choice than in a year when fewer flats turn five. On the other hand, the same concentration applies to competing buyers: Punggol has grown substantially, and demand within the town has grown with it.
For an owner in Punggol who reaches MOP in 2026, the relevant question is not what the aggregate figure implies about prices — it implies nothing reliable about that — but what their own circumstances require. Selling into a year when other newly eligible owners are also weighing the same decision is a different environment from selling in a quieter year, even if the difference is impossible to quantify in advance.
Queenstown reads differently
Queenstown's 2,409 flats carry a different character. Queenstown is a mature estate; flats reaching MOP there are likely sitting in a resale market with an established price history and a buyer pool that includes upgraders, investors and those seeking proximity to the central region. Punggol is younger, and its resale market is still forming its own comparables.
That distinction matters when owners or buyers try to interpret what a large MOP cohort means for their specific transaction. The same number of newly eligible flats behaves differently depending on the estate's age, its existing resale volume, and the profile of people who bought there five years ago.
The question to ask
The full 2026 MOP picture — town by town, flat type by flat type — is available on the Truestorey MOP tracker. The tracker draws from the same HDB Property Information dataset and lets you look at the cohort without having to aggregate it yourself.
The practical consequence of Punggol's 23% share is not a forecast. It is a prompt. If you are buying, selling or simply watching the Punggol resale market in 2026, you are operating in a year when more flats than usual have the legal freedom to transact — and the gap between that freedom and an actual transaction is where most of the real decision-making happens.
Source: HDB Property Information, data.gov.sg. MOP figures reflect flats reaching their fifth year in 2026. CEA Reg. No. R066925H, Huttons Asia Pte Ltd.
