Four taps → monthly estimate + first-month landing cash. Free, no email, mid-2026 figures from real relocations.
The monthly estimate is rent plus the recurring costs that move with household size and lifestyle: utilities and internet, mobile, groceries and eating out, transport, and — where you have said there are children in international school — tuition pro-rated across twelve months. It is a household figure, not a per-person one.
It deliberately leaves out the things that vary too much to model from four taps: car ownership (a COE alone can run into six figures), domestic help, insurance, travel home, and anything you would call discretionary beyond the lifestyle setting you chose.
This is the number that catches people out, and it is almost entirely deposits. A standard Singapore lease asks for one month's deposit per year of lease plus the first month's rent at signing, and the tenant pays stamp duty on the full lease value. On a two-year lease at SGD 5,500 a month, that is roughly SGD 16,500 before the keys turn.
Add an agent's commission where one applies, a utilities deposit, furnishing the gaps, and — for a family — an international school application fee of around SGD 500 plus one-time enrolment and facility fees of roughly SGD 3,000 to 5,000. Most of the rent deposit comes back at the end of the lease. You still have to have it on day one, which is the point.
Rent bands are the ranges we see people actually signing this quarter, not asking prices. Everything else is built from published provider rates and from the commitments of real relocations, modelled on mid-range choices — not luxury, not scraping. Figures are in SGD, rounded, and revised quarterly alongside the Arrival Cost Index, whose Q3 2026 headline first-month figure for a couple is SGD 21,078.
The assumptions are published rather than implied, because a budget number you cannot interrogate is worth very little. If one of them does not match your situation, the number will be wrong in a direction you can predict.
Three things move it most, in this order: the lease you sign, whether children are in international school, and whether you run a car. Rent is the single largest line for almost every household, and the gap between a fringe condo and a central one is wider than any other choice on the form. School tuition runs SGD 30,000 to 50,000 per child per year and is not a lifestyle variable.
Treat the output as a planning range, not a quote. It is accurate enough to tell you whether an offer works and useless for negotiating one.