Singapore’s Hidden Levels of Wealth

In Singapore, wealth comes in levels, and the government has priced nearly every one. You can tell where a family stands from three things: the type of flat, the plate on the car, and the postal district.

Underneath those levels sits a huge workforce outside the system. Over 300,000 migrant men, mostly from Bangladesh and India, live in dormitories and build the country for 400 to 500 Singapore dollars a month. One charity, Transient Workers Count Too, still publishes reports of overcrowded dorms, including a single room housing 26 men. Foreign domestic workers on about $600 a month sleep in their employers’ homes, often in the storeroom or the household bomb shelter.

For Singaporeans themselves, the system built a middle class other countries copy. About 80% of residents live in Housing and Development Board flats, close to 90% own their flat, and homeownership rose from under a third in 1970 to roughly 90%. Median monthly household income hit 11,297 Singapore dollars in 2024, and most families pay the mortgage out of forced retirement savings, the Central Provident Fund.

At the top sit the Good Class Bungalows, the country’s most expensive houses: only about 2,800 exist, each on at least 1,400 square meters, and since 2012 only citizens can buy one. By the official numbers, the system works. After taxes and transfers, the Gini coefficient, the standard measure of the gap between rich and poor, fell below the 0.371 of 2023, its lowest on record.

But above the bungalows sits one more level. Family offices, private firms managing a single family’s money, went from about 400 in 2020 to more than 2,000 by the end of 2024, up 43% in one year. That wealth sits in trusts, not salaries, so it never reaches the household tables. The government’s own figures leave out the richest money in the country, and the real gap between rich and poor is wider than the official number shows.