P1 Registration 2027

What changes

• 60 places reserved for Phase 2C at most schools, up from 40 today. MOE says the extra 20 come out of the earlier phases, so at a school where Phase 2A fills, alumni, staff and committee families compete for 20 fewer places than they did.
• Schools with an intake under 180 places keep 40. In the 2026 exercise that was 27 of the 179 schools.
• Twelve schools split Phase 2C into two tracks, one for families living within 2km of the school and one for families beyond 2km.
• Phase 2B is unchanged, with 20 reserved places, and Phases 2A and 2B keep their priority ahead of Phase 2C.

MOE's stated reason for the two tracks, in its own words: "For schools located in neighbourhoods with significantly less public housing than the national average, applying the current home-school distance priority may not substantially broaden access for children from different socio-economic backgrounds."

Does this affect you

Three checks, in order. It applies from the registration exercise held in 2027, which MOE says is for children starting Primary 1 in 2028. Under MOE's cohort rule that is children born between 2 January 2021 and 1 January 2022, not a flat "born in 2021": a child born on the 1st of January registers with the cohort ahead. The exercise held in 2026 is finished and ran under the current rules. Then: is the school you have in mind one of the twelve below. And if it is, do you live within 2km of it or beyond, because from 2027 that decides which queue you are in rather than where you sit inside one queue.

How a place is decided at the twelve schools

Phase 2C places at those schools, including the reserved places, are split equally between the two tracks. Where more Singapore citizens apply in a track than it has places, MOE holds a ballot inside that track, and there is no home-school distance priority within either track. Where a track still has places after every citizen in it is admitted, those places go to citizens in the other track. Permanent residents are considered after that, for whatever is left, as they are now. Both tracks feed Phase 2C Supplementary as they do now.

At the start of the exercise that is 30 places and 30 places, being the 60 reserved split evenly. It is not the number that finally decides it: Phase 2C also receives whatever Phases 2A and 2B do not use, and the even split covers that whole allocation. In the 2026 exercise Raffles Girls' Primary finished with 137 Phase 2C places and Ngee Ann with 103, so an even split at that scale is nearer 68 and 51 a side than 30. Those are 2026 figures; MOE has published nothing for 2027.

What Phase 2C looked like at those twelve in 2026

MOE has published no 2027 vacancies for any school, so the table below is the 2026 record, not a forecast. It is here because it is the only way to see the scale of what the change affects. These are MOE's final Phase 2C figures for the 2026 exercise, published on 5 August 2026. That is the date this column belongs to, not the later stamp the rest of our 2026 data carries, which is the day MOE published Phase 2C Supplementary.

Two of the twelve are worth noticing for the opposite reason. CHIJ (Katong) Primary and Raffles Girls' Primary both finished Phase 2C with places left over, 82 applicants against 92 places and 128 against 137, so neither held a ballot at that phase. Not all twelve are hard to get into, and the split will work differently where a track is undersubscribed.

What it means in practice

If you live a long way from one of the twelve, Phase 2C there has a route in that it did not have. At 7 of the 12, Phase 2C in 2026 ended inside the band of Singapore citizens living within 1km: at 6 of them a ballot decided it inside that band, and at the other the places simply ran out there without a ballot. MOE fills the distance bands in order, so in both cases no applicant living beyond 1km received a Phase 2C place at those schools. Two things to be exact about, because this is a conclusion drawn from how the priority order works and not a per-band count MOE publishes. It is about Phase 2C only, and at 6 of the 6 ballot schools MOE published no Phase 2C Supplementary places either, so there was no later door. And distance was not the only thing deciding it: citizenship is ranked above distance, so at those schools no permanent resident received a Phase 2C place either, however close they lived. From 2027 half of the Phase 2C places at those same schools are set aside for applicants beyond 2km, with no distance ordering inside that track. Check the daily journey before you apply from far away: St. Margaret's School (Primary), Raffles Girls' Primary School, Anglo-Chinese School (Junior) and Nanyang Primary School are farther from their nearest MRT station or bus stop than the average primary school, according to The Straits Times.

If you live within 2km of one of the twelve, you compete for half the Phase 2C places, against every other citizen within 2km, and living closer no longer moves you up. The family that loses most is the one within 1km: in 2026 it was placed ahead of everyone else in Phase 2C and, at 7 of these schools, took every place. From 2027 it ballots on equal terms with a family 1.9km away. Living within 2km still decides which track you are in, and that is the only distance priority left at these schools.

At every other school with 180 or more places, the change is 20 more open places at the start of Phase 2C, taken from the earlier phases, and nothing else. The distance bands work exactly as they do now. At the 27 smaller schools nothing changes.

What is not settled yet

MOE's own registration pages have not been updated, so the exact wording on how unfilled places move between tracks, and on how a ballot inside a track runs, will come from them rather than from a news report. Nothing has been published about the 2027 key dates. MOE has also said it will review the list of twelve schools from time to time as the housing around them changes, without saying when. This page carries what was announced and is dated so you can see how old it is.