Companion model · Saving Singapore's Hawker Heritage · Follow the Plate (Volume D)

Follow the Plate

Trace every dollar a diner pays at one cooked-food stall for one month. See who keeps it, and test the Plan's policies on six kinds of landlord.

A plan initiated by Uncle James, October 2026 · 2026 SGD, one stall, one month unless marked

1 · Pick a stall and its landlord

Switch policies on

The Plan, Part II

Each switch is a proposal from the Plan, tagged with its section. Switches combine. The ledger below shows the change over a year for one stall, against the same stall without them.

Gov Ask of Government Self Self-financing or voluntary Add Social protection and private landlords (§2.11; Hawkers and Social Protection, C.7)

Where your $1 goes

Follow the Plate, D.3

The same $200 a month, two ways

Hawkers and Social Protection, C.7

Attach $2,400 a year to the stall and a landlord on market rent can take much of it back at the next renewal. Pay it to the person as a retirement match and it reaches the hawker in full. Each row is one landlord type.

Hawker keeps, after tax and Workfare Income tax and Workfare effects Landlord recaptures at renewal

Shocks: who pays?

2026–27 outlook

Costs pass to plate prices at the rates implied by the MTI 2015 study: $1.25 of price for every $1 of extra ingredient cost, and 35 cents for every $1 of extra rent. A wage rise is assumed to pass through at 30 cents on the dollar. Diners then buy a little less, and the hawker absorbs the rest.

Diners' share of the burdenHawker's share

Who can squeeze the hawker harder?

Follow the Plate, D.5

Share of each sales dollar

Income lost to a 10% price rise

Ingredient suppliersLandlord (rent and its fees)

How much the hawker earns per hour, across 5,000 stalls

From the full model run, 5,000 draws

The model redraws plates sold, prices, costs, hours and rents 5,000 times for each stall type. Bars span the middle 80% of stalls (P10 to P90); the dot is the median. These results are precomputed and do not respond to the inputs above.

Today With the incumbent package PWM benchmark for a food-stall assistant, /h

National roll-out

From the full model run

Take-up rates are assumptions. Makan Vouchers reach every stall in the CDC voucher system because the envelope is national. The two $200 support designs are alternatives, shown for comparison; neither is in the package total.

A diner's household

§2.5 Affordability Compact

If some stalls raise prices under price freedom, what does that cost a household a year, and does the Makan Voucher cover it? The average household spends $491 a month at hawker centres, food courts and coffeeshops (HES 2023). The model's own stall sales work out lower per household, so the table shows both.

How to read this, and what it assumes

Reading the numbers

  • One cooked-food stall, one month, in 2026 dollars. Yearly figures are twelve months.
  • Hawker net income is what is left after every cost, before MediSave and income tax. Household income and savings subtracts income tax and adds Workfare and any retirement match; MediSave stays in because it is the hawker's own CPF money. Spendable cash takes out MediSave and income tax and counts only the 10% of Workfare paid as cash.
  • The assistant line is the PWM benchmark for a food-stall assistant: $2,220 a month over a 44-hour week, or about 190.7 hours, which is $11.64 an hour. PWM does not bind stalls run by the hawker alone; the model uses it as a yardstick.
  • Unwanted closures (10 days a year by default) remove selling days. Rent, wages and other fixed costs continue.
  • Net public cost is the programme's cost plus extra Workfare paid, minus extra income tax collected, minus any stall-attached support that returns to the state as landlord.
  • Leverage is the gain to the hawker household and diners per programme dollar, the figure a Budget line would show. It comes in two forms: income and savings, and spendable cash only. A third figure adds hours saved, valued at the hawker's own hourly income.
  • Relief-day gains assume the relief cook keeps the stall's custom.
  • Rent bands change who the stall is compared with. They compare a new entrant at Band B ($1,150) with one who won a tender at the 2023 median bid ($1,800). The incumbent package leaves them out.
  • Items marked Assumption have no published Singapore figure. The full model varies them in its Monte Carlo run.

Sources

  • NEA 2022 stall cost survey: raw materials 56%, manpower 20%, rent under 10% of operating costs; utilities about 7% (MSE replies 2 Jul and 9 Sep 2024; 4 Aug 2026).
  • MTI 2015 cost-driver study (Economic Survey feature, 1Q15): a 1% rise in raw-material cost goes with a 0.56% price rise; a 1% rise in rent with 0.03%. MTI sampled NEA centres only.
  • MSE parliamentary replies 2023–2026: the median non-subsidised cooked-food rent across NEA's centres, about $1,250 and stable for a decade (18 Sep 2023; 5 Feb 2025), the model's tendered stall; and the 2025 medians at the NEA centres comparable with the operator-run ones, rent $1,450, S&CC $200, table cleaning $520, against SEHC $1,700, $400 and $650 (8 Sep 2026).
  • NEA on operator-run centres (21 Jul 2026): rents capped, no profit on pass-through charges such as table cleaning; MSE (15 Oct 2024): an average operating surplus of about $100,000 a centre a year, 2019–23.
  • Grab merchant page (October 2026): a 30% service fee on GrabFood orders, plus GST.
  • MOM Progressive Wage Model (16 Mar 2026): food/drink stall assistant $2,220 from 1 Jul 2026, $2,360 from 1 Jul 2027 and $2,500 from 1 Jul 2028; Cook (QS) $12.95 an hour from 1 Jul 2026, the relief cook's rate. CPF Board: employer CPF of 17% at 55 and below (2026).
  • CPF: MediSave rates for self-employed persons by age (2026); Workfare Income Supplement for SEPs (WY2025 maximums by age). SFA: a stall licence cannot be renewed with MediSave arrears unless they are on GIRO.
  • IRAS resident income tax brackets (YA2024 onward) and Earned Income Relief ($1,000 below 55, $6,000 at 55–59, $8,000 from 60).
  • Household Expenditure Survey 2023: $491 a month on hawker centres, food courts and coffeeshops.
  • Coffeeshop stall rents: $3,400 at an HDB-rented coffeeshop is an assumption; a commercial guide puts HDB coffeeshop stall rents at $4,000 to $10,000 a month (Home & Decor, 2026).
  • Hack.gov 2025 interview study of 21 hawkers: about 13 working hours a day.

Model parameter notes

Fixed splits Assumption

2 · Follow the gift: the money that pays for the plan

The plan needs a $40M endowment, the Hawker Endowment, raised over its first three years, and running money until the endowment can pay its way. Here is who gives, how each dollar is matched and taxed, where it is held and what it buys, year by year for twenty years. The Plan, §7.6; the Budget Book, B.9.

Where the money comes from, and where it goes

The Budget Book, B.9

Twenty years of the endowment

Years 0–20

The top chart is the endowment in today's dollars against the $40M target. The bottom chart is the money that comes in each year, by who gives it. Investment returns are not counted as money in. Hover over a year for its numbers.

Show the numbers for every year

What the funding model assumes