Cat A COE supply to dip for May to July period; overall quota up 1.2%

SINGAPORE – The number of certificates of entitlement (COE) available for the three months from May to July will rise to 19,052.

This is 1.2 per cent more than the 18,824 certificates available from February to April.

The Land Transport Authority (LTA) announced on April 24 that there will be 7,434 Category A COEs, meant for smaller and less powerful cars and electric vehicles (EVs), available for bidding between May and July.

This is a 2 per cent decrease from the 7,585 Category A certificates available between February and April, and translates to about 25 fewer certificates in the category for each of the upcoming tender exercises during the quota period.

COEs give people the right to own a vehicle in Singapore. Tender exercises are conducted twice a month.

As for Category B certificates, meant for larger and more powerful cars and EVs, the supply will rise by 7 per cent in the next three months, from the current 4,864 certificates to 5,205.

The Open category (Category E) COE supply will go up by 6.3 per cent, from the current 1,435 certificates to 1,526.

While Open category COEs can be used to register any vehicle type other than motorcycles, dealers typically consider such certificates as part of the overall supply for larger, more expensive cars.

Taken together, the supply of Category B and E COEs will increase by 6.9 per cent. This works out to 72 more COEs available for each tender than in the current quota period.

For the May to July period, there will be 1,742 commercial vehicle (Category C) COEs available for bidding, unchanged from the February to April period.

The number of motorcycle COEs (Category D) will be 3,145, down 1.7 per cent from 3,198 in the current period.

The COE supply in a given three-month period is mainly determined by the rolling average number of deregistrations in the previous four quarters.

LTA has made several moves that has had an impact on the COE supply in recent years. From May 2023, to tackle supply troughs, some COEs that were due to expire in the next projected supply peak were brought forward for redistribution.

From February 2025, LTA also started injecting additional COEs across the vehicle categories. Under this initiative, up to 20,000 more COEs will be added to the overall supply over the next few years.

The latest COE supply announcement came two days after the latest tender, when the Category A premium came in at $123,010, exceeding the Category B price of $121,001.

It was the second time in two months that COEs for mass-market cars cost more than those for premium cars. The last instance was at the tender exercise on Feb 20.

Experts attributed the high Category A price to the popularity of EVs that fall in this COE bracket.

In March, Acting Transport Minister Jeffrey Siow said during the debate on his ministry’s budget that LTA will look into improving the categorisation of cars in the COE system and gather views from motorists, dealers, car manufacturers and academics.