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. Since November 2024 an inflated bid also costs more after year three: instead of dropping straight to the assessed market rent at the first renewal, it falls only halfway there until year seven. This guide walks through eligibility, the bid mechanics, the latest rent figures the government has published, and how to set a bid that the business can actually carry.
Update, 14 October 2026: a stall that draws a single bid when it is first released, or re-released after drawing none, is not awarded; NEA puts it back into the next month's tender, and you have to bid again. Most vacant cooked-food and market stalls in the hawker centres NEA manages directly are let by open tender, not first-come-first-served; centres run by NEA-appointed operators fill stalls through their own process. 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. If that bidder turns it down, the stall goes back into the tender pool rather than to the second-highest bid.
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. You also must not owe NEA any debts or arrears on a stall it manages.
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.
Update, 14 October 2026: every successful tenderer pays GST on the rent and service-and-conservancy charges, not only GST-registered hawkers as this guide said, and turning down a stall you won costs the $500 and a ban from government tenders. 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 NEA mails a Letter of Offer to your registered address, and you sign the tenancy agreement digitally through the Hawkers Online portal. At signing you pay the first month's rent and service-and-conservancy charges, a rental deposit of two months' rent (at least $200 for a cooked-food stall), the $39 three-year SFA stall licence and any stamp duty. Have a PayNow account linked to your NRIC, and for a cooked-food stall your SkillsFuture Singapore Food Safety Course certificate, ready before signing: without the certificate NEA will not issue the stall licence. Turn the stall down instead and you forfeit the $500 and are barred from government tenders for as long as the Government decides. From there your tendered rent is your monthly rent, payable through GIRO on top of utilities, table-cleaning and refuse charges, service-and-conservancy fees and GST on the rent and those fees. 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 |
| Single bid on a new release | Not awarded; stall re-tendered next month |
| Turning down a stall you won | Deposit forfeited, barred from government tenders |
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.
Update, 14 October 2026: this guide said the November 2024 rule cut inflated rents; for high bids it does the opposite, since they used to drop to the assessed market rent at the first renewal and now fall only halfway until year seven. There is no fixed price tag on a stall; the rent is whatever the winning bid says. As a reference point, the Ministry of Sustainability and the Environment said in 2024 that the median assessed market rent for non-subsidised cooked-food stalls had 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, with about one in five cooked-food stalls let at $500 or less. NEA itself put the median rent paid for a non-subsidised cooked-food stall at about $1,250 a month in November 2024. Popular centres pull far higher: in NEA's July 2024 tender the top bid for one Marine Parade stall was $10,680 (later withdrawn), and the next four ran from $8,113 to $10,158.
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 discourage runaway bids, for stalls won from that month's tender onward. Before, a rent above the assessed market rent dropped all the way to it at the first renewal. Now it drops by only half the gap for the second three-year term: bid $5,000 against a $1,000 assessed rent and you pay $3,000 from year four to six, not $1,000. Only from year seven, the third term, does it fall to the assessed market rent. So an overbid now costs you for six years. If fit-out needs funding, our small-business loan guide covers the options; size the bid before you size any borrowing.
Not every stall is tendered. Under NEA's Incubation Stall Programme, successful applicants get a stall with basic fittings at 50% of the market rent for nine months, then 75% for another six. The Hawkers' Development Programme is under review, and NEA takes registrations of interest in the meantime. If your goal is to test a concept cheaply, the incubation route can cost less than 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. For stalls won from November 2024, second-term rent falls by only half the gap between your bid and the assessed market rent (before, it fell all the way), and only the third term, from year seven, reverts to market rate. An overbid now costs you for six years.
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, so verify current rates against the official sources above before acting. See our full disclaimer.
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