D.8The Plate Tracker

Twenty-one indicators would let anyone follow the plate year by year. Singapore publishes 3 of them regularly, 11 in part and 7 not at all. Most of the missing ones are already held by an agency.

D.8 The Plate Tracker: table 1
Indicator	Measures	Source today	Status	To close the gap
The diner
Hawker food prices	Hawker-food CPI and its components	SingStat, monthly	Published	Keep; add a split by type of landlord, and print the plates beside it: real sales at food courts and other eating places (SingStat, monthly; D.5.4)
The plate price by town and landlord	Price of a fixed basket of 10 dishes	IPS Makan Index 2.0 (prices of late 2022, published 2023; one-off)	Partial	Repeat yearly with NEA and HDB data
What households spend	Hawker-type share of food spend, by income	HES, every five years	Published	Keep
The stall
Cost shares	Ingredients, manpower, rent, utilities as % of costs	NEA's yearly survey, quoted by MSE for 2022, 2023 and 2024; not published	Partial	Publish NEA's survey yearly; a voluntary panel of about 300 stalls for what it misses, seeded by the Year 0 stall baseline (the Plan, §6.1)
Hawker income and hours	Net income, hours and days closed, shown as a spread – the bottom tenth, the quarters, the middle and the average – by type of stall and of centre	One middle figure: full-time hawkers who employ no one, 2021, about $1,470 (MOM, in the report of the Advisory Committee on Platform Workers, 2022, read from a chart); MSE's "second decile", the second-poorest tenth of earners (2022)	Partial	From the same panel and CPF self-employed records, published as a spread, not only medians
Health and cover	Days off a year; days lost to illness and injury; MediSave status; insurance held; the share over 65 with no successor in view	None	Missing	One block of questions in the stall panel; MediSave status from CPF, in aggregate
Platform and payment take	Delivery share and commission; e-payment share and fees	Industry sources only	Partial	Panel, plus Enterprise Singapore's SGQR data
Flows: entries, exits and transfers	Entries; exits within three years; time to let a vacant stall; successors in place; closures by reason; HSS transfers; by type of centre	Ad hoc parliamentary replies	Partial	Publish quarterly
Stalls at risk, and the Regulars' List	Stalls whose hawkers say no successor is in view and that they mean to stop within three years, or that a closure notice or a lease ending flags: national and per-centre totals, never naming a stall; and stalls on the Regulars' List, by grade, Bronze to Platinum, with orders a week and the regulars' share of orders by centre	None: MCCY confirmed on 7 Oct 2026 that the Government keeps no list of hawker trades at risk	Missing	The Seed Bank's yearly count, from the end of Year 1 (the Plan, §3.6)
The landlord
NEA rents and bids	Rent and bid distributions (quartiles and the mean, not only the median); the subsidised share; the newcomer's path under the November 2024 renewal rule	Ad hoc parliamentary replies	Partial	Publish quarterly by centre, as distributions
HDB coffeeshop rents	Tender rents; stall rents and fees	Tender results; stall data collected since Jan 2026	Partial	Publish stall-rent medians by town
Private coffeeshop and food-court rents	Stall rents, turnover shares, O&M fees	Listings and company reports	Missing	Voluntary disclosure by Heritage Anchor partners
Discount and support pass-through	Share reaching stallholders	HDB clawback rule (no data published)	Partial	Publish compliance rate
Site costs by type of centre	Everything a stall pays for its site, each charge on its own line, a month, before GST: rent, conservancy, table cleaning, dishwashing, point-of-sale fees, fines and supplier space, at NEA, Town Council and operator-run centres	MSE's 2025 medians for rent, conservancy and table cleaning (8 Sep 2026): together 1.6 times the rent at operator-run centres and 1.5 times at comparable NEA centres (derived); dishwashing, point-of-sale and other fees not published; ranges in NEA's tender notices	Partial	Publish every charge yearly, as a spread by type of centre (D.5.4)
The supplier
Imported food prices	Import price index, food and meat	SingStat, monthly	Published	Keep
Wholesale prices of hawker staples	Weekly prices for about 20 staples	None published	Missing	SFA weekly price sheet
The margin spread	Retail and wholesale prices of hawker staples against the food import price index, quarterly	Retail food CPI and import prices: SingStat, monthly; wholesale: none	Partial	Publish the spread each quarter (D.5.3)
Bought-in cooking	Share of stalls using central-kitchen bases	None	Missing	One question in the stall panel
The public purse
Support reaching hawkers	Rent support, grants, voucher redemptions at hawker stalls	Scattered replies and releases	Partial	One yearly table
Rent collected as landlord	NEA and HDB rents from cooked-food stalls	Not published	Missing	One yearly line
Hawkers' CPF position	MediSave compliance, Workfare take-up, CPF balances of hawker SEPs	Not published for hawkers	Missing	CPF aggregate, by licence type

The Plate Ledger: one page a year

From these indicators, a single yearly page: where a typical plate's dollar went, by type of landlord, with the change on last year. It would be produced by the plan's independent evaluator (the Plan's Part VI), as Method, Levers and Data, F.6 already provides, from published series, aggregated administrative data and a voluntary stall panel, and released with the Singapore Hawkers' Celebration and Awards. Its first stall-level numbers come from the Year 0 baseline (the Plan, §6.1): a two-week till count at the pilot centres' consenting stalls, of orders a day, plates an order and dollars an order, by dish type (D.4.2). It reports distributions, not medians: quartiles (a quarter of a ranked list) and the mean of rent, fees, income and hours, by type of stall and of centre, with the bottom tenth, because a median hides both the pioneer on a subsidised rent and the newcomer still paying his bid. Beside them it counts flows, entries and exits, and health, the days lost to illness, which a median of incomes cannot show. It respects the plan's rule against data mandates and surveillance (the Plan, §1.5): no stall is required to report, no individual stall's figures are published, and the panel is paid for its time.

D.8.1Three numbers to publish first

Hawker income and hours. CPF already holds self-employed net trade income (a self-employed person's yearly profit after costs) for every licensed hawker. An aggregate by licence type, with the voluntary panel's hours, would replace the estimate in D.4 with a measurement.
Coffeeshop stall rents by town. HDB said in January 2026 that it would begin collecting these. Publishing medians would show diners and policymakers what D.3 can only estimate.
Rent collected as landlord. NEA and HDB know what they collect. Setting it beside the support they pay out would show the net position of the state in the trade.