Initial prototype Still under development. I am publishing it early and fixing it as people use it.
The Property Geek's corgi, in spectacles, holding an oversized magnifying glass

What primary schools are near my home, what are my real chances of getting into each one, and what should I actually do about Phase 2C in 2027?

What this page found, in five lines

Singapore’s primary school rules just changed. Most of what is circulating about it is half right, so here is what five years of MOE’s own ballot results actually show.

  • The 20 extra places are not a gift to everyone. 60 is the least a school must set aside, and this does not mean an extra 20 for everyone. 115 of the 179 schools get no extra places at all — 88 because they already had more than 60, and 27 because MOE is keeping smaller schools at 40.
  • Better odds. Still a ballot. In 2025, families within 1km had to ballot at 62 schools. Twenty more places only helps 13 of them skip the ballot for families living within 1km.
  • A 1km address buys a spot in the queue, not a place in the school. Living within 1km has never guaranteed a place. At 42 schools, families inside 1km had to ballot every year for the past five years, and 34 of those schools would still have to ballot within 1km with the 20 extra places.
  • The twelve two-track schools take from one group and give to another. Live near one and half the places you used to compete for are gone. Live far away and you can apply for the first time — around 482 places, open to anyone.
  • Nothing changes at three of the most oversubscribed schools. Chua Chu Kang, Northshore and Compassvale already offer more than the new 60-place minimum, and families within 1km still had to ballot. The 20 extra places would not add anything to schools that were already past the minimum.

Put your postal code in below and it works all of this out for your address specifically, then suggests four different ways to play it.

Why I built this

My daughter is three. She registers in three years, which means the rules being written now will shape the rules of the near future.

For years the strategy was straightforward: buy within 1km. It was obvious. Nobody needed a spreadsheet.

Then on 10 September 2026 MOE made two changes. Phase 2C now sets aside 60 places instead of 40 at most schools. And at twelve schools, Phase 2C is divided in two: half the places go to families within 2km, half to everyone else. Inside each group, how close you live no longer matters.

Living within 1km still helps. It is no longer the whole strategy, and what replaces it changes from address to address.

The four routes, and how I get to them

Phase 2C fills in a fixed order: citizens within 1km, then citizens 1–2km, then citizens beyond 2km, then permanent residents in the same three groups. If more families want a place than there are places left, the ballot decides who gets in. So the question worth asking about a school is not whether it is good, it is where the places ran out, and whether that was before or after your turn.

I read that against every school near you three ways: what happened last year, the records across the last three years, and the worst of the last five. Then four strategies to compare.

  1. Play it safe. Keeps only the schools where a citizen at your distance was offered a place outright in the 2026 Phase 2C exercise and in each of the last three, then chooses the one with the most demand. A school only gets in this list if you would have been offered a place. The list is then sorted by demand, most in demand on top. Every card shows the worst of the last five years, so you can see how safe it really is.
  2. Aim high nearby. A school shows up here only if people at your distance actually got in in previous years. If everyone who got a place lived closer than you, there was no chance to take, and the school is left out. Most demand at the top, your odds beside each. How high you aim depends on how much risk you want to carry.
  3. The nearest of the twelve. The obvious choice is the two-track school closest to you. This route names it, ranks it against the rest, and lets you judge whether nearest is really best.
  4. The best of the twelve. Ranked by how many places each school has against how many families want it. Living nearer does not improve your odds in this track, so distance is not part of the calculation.

Where the extra places come from. The reserved block is a floor, not an allocation — whatever Phase 1 and Phase 2A do not use flows down to Phase 2C anyway. Raising the floor takes 20 places out of the pool Phase 2A draws on, and because Phase 2B’s share is worked out from whatever Phase 2A leaves behind, some of that flows down too. A school with a busy Phase 2A gains the full 20. A school with a quiet one still picks up about 7. And a school already sitting above 60 gains nothing, because the floor never touches it.

One thing these numbers cannot capture. Squeezing 20 places out of Phase 2A also squeezes out roughly 20 families, and a family who fails at Phase 2A can register again at Phase 2C. So some of the extra places will be taken by the very people the change displaced. Nothing MOE publishes says how many of them come back to the same school, so it is not modelled here. Treat every 2027 figure as a ceiling rather than a forecast.

Where the percentages come from. MOE publishes how many families were inside the balloted band, and how many places they were fighting over, for the 2024 and 2025 exercises only — the 2026 release names the band but not the count. So any percentage you see is built from 2024 and 2025, then adjusted for the extra Phase 2C places that school gets in 2027. Where MOE has not published enough to support a number, the page says so instead of estimating one.

Most in demand throughout means families who registered per place across all four phases in 2026 — siblings, alumni, parent volunteers and open applicants together. Phase 2B asks a parent to put in at least 40 hours of volunteering at the school over the preceding year to qualify, so counting those registrations tells you which schools families will work to get into, not just which ones are nearby.

Type in where you live. It reads five years of MOE ballot results against your address and shows you where you stand at every school within 2km, plus the twelve that now take applications from anywhere.

Addresses are looked up through OneMap, the Singapore Land Authority's map service.

Before you act on any of this. This was built to gather the data in one place and lay it out in a way that actually makes sense to use. It is a starting point, not an answer. Do your own checks, and weigh the things that are not in here — the commute, an older sibling already in a school, whether the place suits your child at all. Distances are measured in a straight line to the school’s address, so anything sitting close to the 1km or 2km line is worth confirming for yourself. Every 2027 figure assumes families apply in the same numbers they did last year, which they will not. The numbers and the analysis here are refreshed every year once MOE publishes the new registration results, so check back when the next exercise closes. Use it with care.