Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority quietly updated its Home Office Scheme guidance in June 2026, a reminder that using a residential address for a registered company is a real, government-sanctioned option, not just a workaround. It’s also, for most founders, not the option they end up choosing once weighed against a mailing address in Singapore from a commercial provider.
Under the scheme, HDB flat owners and private property owners can register a small-scale business at their residential address, provided they get prior approval from HDB or URA respectively. The administration fee is a flat S$20, and approval typically takes two to four weeks.
The Restrictions That Rule Most Businesses Out
The scheme comes with real limits. Businesses can hire no more than two non-resident employees working from the flat. Activities must be strictly administrative, meaning no client visits, no signage, no noise, and no foot traffic that could disturb neighbours. F&B, retail, beauty services, and anything generating meaningful pedestrian activity are excluded outright, regardless of how compliant the paperwork otherwise looks.
For a consultancy, software company, or holding entity run entirely online, those restrictions aren’t necessarily disqualifying. What tends to change a founder’s mind is a detail that has nothing to do with URA’s rules at all: once a home address is used to register a company, it becomes permanently visible on ACRA’s public BizFile database, purchasable by anyone for a few dollars, including competitors, creditors, or unhappy customers.
Why the Privacy Trade-Off Usually Wins
That’s the calculation most founders make once they understand it. A residential address saves the monthly provider fee, but it permanently exposes exactly where the founder and their family live, on a government registry anyone can search.
Weighed against that, a professional address service costing somewhere in the range of S$20 to S$30 a month starts to look inexpensive rather than like an avoidable overhead. It keeps the business’s public-facing address separate from the founder’s personal one, and it sidesteps the HDB or URA approval process entirely, since a commercial provider has already cleared that bar on the founder’s behalf.
Where the Home Office Scheme Still Makes Sense
None of this makes the Home Office Scheme irrelevant. For a genuinely solo founder who never plans to host anyone at the address, doesn’t mind the public exposure, and wants to avoid any monthly service fee at all, it remains a legitimate, government-backed path that plenty of small Singapore businesses use without issue.
The more common pattern, though, based on how the scheme’s restrictions map against typical early-stage company needs, is that founders treat the Home Office Scheme as the fallback they investigated and ultimately passed on, not the default they land on. The privacy cost turns out to matter more, in practice, than the modest fee it would take to avoid it.