The NEA stall tender is the monthly online auction that decides who gets a vacant hawker stall and what rent they pay for the next three years. It runs from the 13th to the 26th of each month, you bid through FormSG with SingPass, and you pay a refundable $500 deposit for every stall you put in for. Win, and your tendered rent becomes your monthly rent. The catch most first-timers miss: the highest bid wins, so it is easy to overpay your way into a stall you cannot make money in. A 2024 rule change now claws back part of an inflated bid from your second term onward, but the first three years are still on you. This guide walks through eligibility, the bid mechanics, the real numbers as of June 2026, and how to set a bid that the business can actually carry.
Most vacant cooked-food and market stalls in the roughly 120 hawker centres NEA manages are let by open tender, not first-come-first-served. Every month NEA publishes a list of available stalls, hawkers submit a sealed monthly rent they are willing to pay, and the highest valid bid wins. There is no haggling and no waiting list. You decide the number, NEA ranks the bids, and the top bidder is offered the stall.
Since 13 December 2023 the whole exercise is online. You no longer buy a paper tender form at HDB Hub; you log into FormSG with SingPass, pick the stall, key in your rent, and pay the deposit by card or PayNow. NEA still posts the stall list in The Straits Times, Lianhe Zaobao, Berita Harian and Tamil Murasu on opening day, but the bidding itself is digital.
The award sets your rent for the full first tenancy term of three years. That is why the tender matters more than any other single decision in opening a stall: a number you type in a five-minute form locks in your single biggest fixed cost for 36 months.
NEA's eligibility list is short and absolute. You qualify if you are a Singapore Citizen or Permanent Resident, at least 21 years old, not debarred from holding an SFA hawker licence, not a former assistant or nominee who was de-registered by NEA, and not banned by the Government from business tenders.
The tender window opens on the 13th at 10.30am and closes on the 26th at 10.30am. If either date is a weekend or public holiday it shifts to the next working day. You can submit any time inside that window from a phone, tablet or computer.
Before you start, have four things ready: a device with internet, SingPass or the SingPass app, a valid email address, and a debit card, credit card or PayNow to pay the $500 deposit. No SingPass or no email means you sort that out first; there is no offline paper route since December 2023.
You may submit only one bid per stall. Put in two bids for the same stall and all of them are liable to be rejected. Once submitted you cannot edit your rent or your particulars; every submission is final and irrevocable. There is nothing to gain from a placeholder bid you plan to fix later, because there is no fixing it.
You can, of course, tender for several different stalls in the same month. Each one needs its own $500 deposit.
The $500 you pay at submission is a tender deposit, not rent, and what happens to it depends on the outcome. If you withdraw before the tender closes, you get the full $500 back to the same payment method. If you withdraw after closing but before the tenancy is awarded, you forfeit it. If your bid simply loses, NEA refunds the $500, usually within about seven weeks of the close, with an email confirming the refund and roughly ten more days for it to show on your statement.
Win the stall and the deposit converts toward your tenancy: NEA mails a Letter of Offer to your registered address, and you sign the tenancy agreement digitally through the Hawkers Online portal. From there your tendered rent is your monthly rent, payable on top of utilities, table-cleaning and refuse charges, service-and-conservancy fees and, if you become GST-registered, GST on rent. Budget those running costs alongside the rent before you decide your bid, the same way you would line-item any monthly budget.
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Tender window | 13th 10.30am to 26th 10.30am, monthly |
| Tender deposit | $500 per stall, by card or PayNow |
| Bids allowed | One bid per stall; final and irrevocable |
| Tenancy term | 3 years (first term) |
| Top 5 bids released | Within ~2 weeks of tender close |
| Final results | ~5 to 7 weeks after tender close |
| Deposit if you lose | Refunded, usually within ~7 weeks |
| Deposit if you withdraw late | Forfeited if withdrawn after close |
NEA releases the five highest bids for each stall within about two weeks of the tender closing, so you can see early whether you are in contention. The final award takes longer, typically five to seven weeks after close, because NEA verifies the top bidder's eligibility before confirming.
If you are awarded the stall, the tenancy starts on the 1st of the month after results are released. Results are posted at go.gov.sg/tendernotice and on the notice board at NEA's One-Stop Information and Service Centre at HDB Hub. Treat these as guide timelines; NEA can take longer where bids are complex or close.
There is no fixed price tag on a stall; the rent is whatever the winning bid says. As a reference point, NEA has reported that the median assessed market rent for non-subsidised cooked-food stalls has sat around $1,200 a month since 2019, with market stalls nearer $320, and that the median successful cooked-food tender was about $1,800 in 2023. Popular centres pull far higher. Among the top five bids for one Marine Parade stall, the highest was $10,680 (later withdrawn) and three others topped $8,000.
Those headline numbers are why bidding discipline matters. The stall does not earn more because you paid more for it; a bid that beats the market by thousands a month just becomes a fixed cost you carry for three years. The right way to set a bid is bottom-up: estimate daily covers and average spend, subtract ingredients, gas, manpower and the running charges above, and see what rent the projected profit can absorb. NEA publishes a Hawker Business Calculator for exactly this. If the only way to win is a bid the business cannot service, the honest answer is to bid lower and lose.
In November 2024 NEA changed the renewal rules to take some heat out of runaway bids. From the second three-year term, rent is adjusted down by half the gap between your tendered rent and the assessed market rent. Bid $5,000 against a $1,000 assessed rent and your second-term rent becomes $3,000. From the seventh year, the third term, rent reverts fully to the assessed market rate. The relief is real but delayed: it does nothing for your first three years, which remain at the full bid you typed in. Capital for that opening stretch, fit-out plus the rent gap, is often where new hawkers turn to a small-business loan, so size the bid before you size the borrowing.
Not every stall is tendered. NEA runs subsidised tracks, including the Incubation Stall scheme and the Hawkers' Development Programme, that let aspiring hawkers start at concessionary rent without a competitive bid. If your goal is to test a concept cheaply, those routes can beat winning an open tender at a stretched price. The full cost picture, from licence and food-safety course to fit-out, is covered in our guide on how much it costs to become a hawker.
You pay a refundable tender deposit of $500 for each stall you bid on, by debit card, credit card or PayNow, before the tender closes. If you lose, NEA refunds the $500, usually within about seven weeks. There is no separate form-purchase fee since bidding moved fully online in December 2023.
The tender runs monthly from the 13th at 10.30am to the 26th at 10.30am. If the 13th or 26th falls on a weekend or public holiday, the tender starts or ends on the next working day. You can submit your bid any time inside that window through FormSG.
Your tendered rent becomes your monthly rent for the full first three-year term, so a high bid is locked in for 36 months. From November 2024, second-term rent is cut by half the gap between your bid and the assessed market rent, and the third term reverts to market rate, but the first term gives no relief.
Only Singapore Citizens and Permanent Residents who are at least 21 can tender as stallholders. Foreigners cannot hold a stall. Long-term visit pass holders with a pre-approved letter of consent may work as hawker assistants, but they cannot be the registered tenderer or stallholder.
This is general financial information for Singapore, not personal financial advice. Figures change — verify current rates against the official sources above before acting. See our full disclaimer.