Where to Get the Floor Plan of Your HDB Flat

Buy it from HDB, not from a listing

HDB sells residential floor plans through its Purchase of Residential Floor Plan e-Service. You log in with Singpass, pay by card, and in most cases the plan arrives in your inbox straight away. Where a plan is not readily available, HDB says it can take up to three working days.

The price has been $5 including GST, though that is the kind of number that moves and is worth checking on the e-Service itself rather than taking from an article. If you would rather not do it online, there is a Sale of Architectural Plan counter at the third storey atrium of HDB Hub.

The floor plan in a property listing is a marketing drawing. It is often redrawn, frequently not to scale, and occasionally wrong about which walls are actually there. It is fine for deciding whether you like the layout and no good at all for anybody who has to price work against it.

What you get

An A4 sheet, drawn at 1:100. That means one centimetre on the paper is one metre in the flat, which is what makes the drawing useful to anybody with a scale rule or a tape measure and a bit of patience.

It shows the layout as built: the rooms, the walls, the door and window positions, the wet areas and the overall dimensions. It is the document your interior designer or contractor will ask for, and producing it unprompted is a small thing that visibly saves everyone a site visit.

Print it at Actual Size, or do not print it

Here is the detail almost nobody is told. HDB’s own guidance is that to print the plan at its original 1:100 scale, you have to set the page sizing option in your print settings to "Actual Size".

Leave it on the default, which in most print dialogs is some version of "Fit to page", and the printer shrinks the drawing slightly so it clears the paper margins. The sheet still says 1:100. It is no longer 1:100. Anyone who then measures off it with a scale rule gets readings that are consistently a few per cent short, and nothing about the page announces that.

If you are emailing the PDF to a contractor, none of this matters and you should email the PDF rather than a photograph of a printout. If you are printing it to mark up by hand, set Actual Size.

• —Send the PDF, not a photo of a print
• —If you must print, set Page Sizing to Actual Size
• —Check one printed dimension against the paper with a ruler before trusting a printout

What the plan does not decide

A floor plan tells you what is there. It does not tell you what you are allowed to remove, and that is a separate process: HDB has its own renovation approval route, and works such as hacking walls are governed by it rather than by what looks structural on a drawing.

So the plan is the starting point of the conversation with your contractor, not the end of it. The honest sequence is: get the plan, walk the flat with whoever is quoting, and let the approval question be answered by HDB rather than by anyone’s reading of a line weight.

Why your contractor wants it on day one

Because quantities come off it. A quotation is priced in units: carpentry by the foot run, tiling by the square foot, electrical by the point. Every one of those is a measurement, and a contractor who has the plan can arrive at the site visit already knowing roughly what the flat contains.

It also makes the quotation checkable. When the plan says the kitchen wall is 3.6 metres and the quotation prices twelve foot run of bottom cabinet along it, those two numbers agree and you can see that they agree. That is most of reading a quotation properly.

Better contractors will photograph the plan and trace it to scale, so the drawing they quote from is the flat rather than an impression of it. If yours offers to walk you through the result in 3D before anything is built, that is worth saying yes to.

Condominium and landed

HDB only sells HDB plans. For a private condominium the plan usually comes from the developer or the managing agent, and for landed property the route is the approved building plans held by the relevant authority, which is a slower and more formal request.

In both cases the fallback is the same as it has always been: somebody measures the place with a tape. It takes an hour, it costs nothing, and it is the only version that is definitely current.