D.2The Money Map

Diners spend about $3.5 billion a year at the 14,200 cooked-food stalls the model covers. Ingredients take 45%; landlords together take 17%; hawker households keep 13%.

D.2.1Does the map match the official totals?

Roughly, and the gap is itself a finding. SingStat's industry survey for 2021 puts the operating receipts of cafés, food courts and other eating places at roughly $3–4 billion; we could not confirm the exact establishment count and receipts from the published infographic, so the range is ours. The 2023 Household Expenditure Survey puts resident households' spending at hawker centres, food courts, coffee shops, canteens, kiosks and street vendors at $491 a month, or about $8.8 billion a year across SingStat's 1.49 million resident households (2025); that mixes a 2023 spend with a 2025 count. The model's $3.5 billion covers cooked food only. It leaves out drinks stalls, the operators' own drinks and economy-rice counters, and sales to non-residents. The two official totals differ by a factor of two, and neither isolates hawker stalls. No public series measures what Singapore spends at its hawker stalls.

D.2.2The state is the biggest landlord, and sets two very different rents

The model puts NEA's income from cooked-food stalls at about $89M a year in rent and service-and-conservancy charges (S&CC, the fee for cleaning and upkeep). That fits the published medians: about $1,250 a month for a stall at the full rate across NEA's centres, stable for a decade (MSE, 18 Sep 2023 and 5 Feb 2025), and $192–$384 for a subsidised stall, plus S&CC (service and conservancy charges, for a centre's cleaning and upkeep) of about $200. A second figure applies only to a comparison: at the NEA centres most like the operator-run ones, the median rent in 2025 was $1,450, against $1,700 at the operator-run centres themselves (MSE, 8 Sep 2026). The model uses the $1,450 for that comparison and nothing else. It attributes about $94M of HDB-rented coffeeshop stall rents to HDB. That is less than HDB's tender receipts: the 22 recent coffeeshop tenders averaged about $48,000 a month, or roughly $215 million a year if typical of all 374 HDB-rented coffeeshops. Most of the 22 are in new towns, so that is an upper estimate. Operators fund the difference from their own drinks and food counters. So the Government, as landlord, collects between $193M and about $314M a year from the trade. Set that beside the rent support NEA announced in July 2026: $200 a month for each cooked-food stall and $100 for each market stall, from September 2026 to February 2027, to help with higher electricity and gas bills. About 15,000 stalls qualify (NEA). That is about $13 million for six months, $8.3 million of it for cooked-food stalls. The model's 2026 baseline leaves it out, because it ends before the pilot begins. Its $200 a month is the same size as the test case in D.7.2, which pays the help to the stall, and the plan's table-cleaning fee subsidy follows on from it at the pilot centres.

The table-cleaning fee subsidy is a Budget item, not rent a landlord gives up. Most of a centre's fees pay for its services: MSE (Ministry of Sustainability and the Environment, NEA's ministry) says the conservancy and table-cleaning fees fund "a significant part" of a centre's running costs (5 Feb 2024), and NEA's tender notice says the table-cleaning fee "may be lower or higher depending on the table-cleaning contractor". At an operator-run centre the operator only passes the fee on, and may not profit from it (NEA, 21 Jul 2026). So the plan does not ask a landlord to give the fee up. It asks the Government, as the main landlord, to pay $200 a month towards each pilot-centre stall's cleaning fee (D.14; the $200 is our assumption), following on from the temporary support above. It also asks that the pilot centres' cleaning contracts be put out to tender again, for the cleaning that remains once diners return their own trays. Who holds the contract differs: at an HDB hawker centre, which a Town Council manages, NEA's tender notices say the table-cleaning service "is managed by the respective Hawkers Association" on the stallholders' behalf (Dec 2022 and Aug 2024), so the association re-tenders, with NEA convening. Chinatown Complex and Tekka are such centres; at Geylang Serai, which NEA manages, the notices name only the contractor. At four NEA-managed centres the fee was flat before GST (goods and services tax) from December 2022 to August 2024 while the cleaner's Progressive Wage rose by a third (D.5.4), so a re-tender may find no saving at all. Granted, the Minister told Parliament in July 2021 that "we do not anticipate any reduction in cleaning costs to stallholders", because cleaners still sort crockery at the return points, and the cleaners' Progressive Wage has risen by more than half since July 2022 ($1,312 to $2,080, MOM). The re-tender tests that; any saving it finds shrinks the subsidy, so the cost below is an upper bound (the most it could be). For the three pilot centres, 408 cooked-food stalls in all (Chinatown Complex 226, Geylang Serai 63 and Tekka 119), each managed by NEA or a Town Council, the subsidy costs $0.98M a year, or $2,400 a stall. Adding Old Airport Road and Maxwell would make five centres and 679 stalls, at $1.63M a year. A later, national decision would cover all 6,900 stalls in public centres, operator-run ones included, at $16.6M a year. Either way the contractor and the fee collector are paid as before (D.7.4).