.png)
Road tax renewal is easy to ignore until the deadline is almost up. Then you're at your desk on a Tuesday night working out whether your insurance covers the right period, what the figure should even be, and whether that parking fine from six months ago is still floating around unpaid.
It doesn’t have to be this way. To renew road tax in Singapore, you just need three things in order and about five minutes.
What you need before you can renew your road tax
LTA won't take your payment until three things are in order. Sort them at least one working day before you plan to pay, because LTA's records take a working day to update.
- Valid insurance covering third-party liability for death and bodily injury, for the entire period you're paying for
- A passed vehicle inspection, if one is due
- No outstanding fines or warrants from LTA, HDB, URA, or the Traffic Police
For your insurance, check the start date as well as the coverage, as any gap on the day after your road tax expires will be interpreted… very literally. Premiums also vary a lot depending on your car's COE category, so it's worth shopping around at the same time.
Inspections follow a schedule tied to your car's age: none in the first three years, then once every two years until the car turns 10, and annually after that. LTA sends an inspection notice about three months before your road tax expires, and any LTA-authorised inspection centre can do it. Weekend and off-peak cars need their number plate seals checked too.
Where to renew your road tax
- Online through LTA's Digital Services is the quickest route. Credit card, debit card, or internet banking, available round the clock except between midnight and 1am.
- AXS keeps the same hours and takes payment at AXS stations, through the AXS app, or via AXS e-Station.
- GIRO is the set-and-forget option. LTA deducts automatically, either every six months by default or annually, and sends you a payment schedule about a month before your road tax expires. eGIRO gets you instant approval with participating banks instead of a wait for paperwork. If you signed up from 29 December 2024 onwards, your vehicle has likely already been automatically enrolled on the GIRO network already.
- Road Tax Collection Centres handle payment in person. Since 1 February 2025 they no longer accept cash, cheques, or cashier's orders.
Renewing your road tax late gets expensive quickly
Miss your expiry date and the fee stacks by how long you've left it. For a 1,001 to 1,600cc car, that's $20 within the first month, $70 between one and 2.5 months, $90 past that, and $240 once you're more than three months late. Smaller engines pay a little less, larger ones a little more.
Beyond the fee, keeping or using a vehicle whose road tax has expired is an offence in its own right, carrying a fine of up to $2,000.
How your road tax figure is calculated
Road tax in Singapore is worked out on a six-monthly basis, then doubled if you pay for a full year. LTA publishes five brackets for petrol cars, and each bracket has its own starting figure plus a rate for every cc above the bracket floor.
Here's the schedule from LTA's published tables, where EC means engine capacity in cc.
The rate per cc climbs as you move up the brackets. At the bottom of the scale each extra cc costs 12.5 cents every six months, by the time you cross 1,600cc it's 75 cents, and above 3,000cc it's a full dollar. That progression is why the jump from a 1.6-litre engine to a 2.0-litre hurts more than the jump from a 1.0-litre to a 1.4-litre.
Worked example
Take a Honda Civic with a 1,598cc engine. That lands in the 1,001 to 1,600cc bracket, just barely.
- Start with $250
- Add $0.375 × (1,598 − 1,000) = $224.25
- Subtotal: $474.25
- Multiply by 0.782: $370.86 for six months
- Double it: $741.73 a year
Shift two cc up to a 1,600cc engine and nothing changes. Add three more and you're in the next bracket, where the base figure resets to $475 and the rate per cc nearly doubles. Car makers know this, which is why so many models sold here come in at 1,496cc, 1,598cc, or 1,998cc rather than at a round number just past a threshold.
What’s the 0.782?
That multiplier is a permanent road tax rebate baked into the formula. Singapore cut road tax in stages through the late 1990s and 2000s, and rather than rewriting the base rates each time, LTA kept the original figures and applied a cumulative discount factor. What's left is 0.782, a standing 21.8% reduction on the headline numbers, and it's been part of the official formula for years.
If you compare our figure against an older calculator and find the other one about 28% higher, that's the missing piece.
How electric cars are taxed
Electric cars have no engine capacity, so LTA switched the input to power rating: the maximum power output of the motor, in kilowatts. Cars with more than one motor add them together for a combined figure.
Same shape as the petrol schedule, with kilowatts in place of cc. The third band is unusually wide, which matters, because most mainstream EVs land comfortably inside it. LTA widened it on 1 January 2022 by merging the old 30 to 90kW and 90 to 230kW brackets, cutting road tax for more powerful electric cars by up to 34%.
Then there's the Additional Flat Component, or AFC: $350 every six months, so $700 a year, on top of the calculated road tax.
The reasoning is fair enough. Petrol drivers pay fuel excise duty every time they fill up, and that duty works as a usage tax. EV drivers pay nothing of the sort, so the AFC covers that gap instead. Because it's flat, a driver clocking 5,000km a year pays exactly the same as one doing 30,000km.
A 150kW EV works out like this:
- $250 + $3.75 × (150 − 30) = $700
- × 0.782 = $547.40 for six months
- × 2 = $1,094.80 a year
- Plus the $700 AFC
- Total: $1,794.80 a year
That's comfortably more than our 1,598cc Civic, so it pays to run the numbers before you switch, alongside the charging logistics and the money you'll save on petrol.
Petrol-hybrids get calculated twice
If you drive a hybrid, the calculator gives you a figure based on engine capacity. LTA runs the sum twice, though: once on engine capacity, once on the electric motor's power rating. Whichever produces the higher number is what you pay.
For most conventional hybrids with modest motors, engine capacity wins and you're done. For a performance hybrid with a beefy electric motor, the power rating can take over. Run both sides through the calculator using the two tabs, then take the higher result.
The age surcharge past 10 years
Once your car passes its tenth birthday, road tax starts climbing 10% a year until it caps out at 50%.
Our 1,598cc Civic at $741.73 a year becomes about $964 once it crosses 12 years. At 15 years and beyond, roughly $1,113.
The surcharge exists to discourage very old cars from staying on the road, and in practice most owners deregister at the 10-year mark anyway, when their COE expires. If you're looking at a used car with a renewed COE, factor this in. What you'll renew on a 13-year-old car isn't the road tax the first owner paid.
What the calculator doesn't cover
The calculator leaves out two categories, and if you drive either one it will undercount.
Diesel cars pay road tax plus special tax
Diesel cars are taxed on engine capacity using the same schedule as petrol cars, so the calculator's petrol figure gives you the road tax portion. What it leaves out is special tax, which diesel vehicles pay on top. It's charged six-monthly and pegged to emissions standard.
Off-peak cars get a rebate
Off-peak cars, revised off-peak cars, and weekend cars trade flexibility for savings. You give up driving between 7am - 7pm on weekdays, and on Saturdays until 3pm for the older schemes, in exchange for up to $500 off your annual road tax. The rebate can't wipe your bill out entirely, because the minimum payment is $70 a year. These schemes also renew road tax on a 12-monthly basis only.
If you need to drive during restricted hours, an e-Day Licence costs $20 and covers you for the day.
Getting it done before the deadline
Road tax is real money, but it's rarely the deciding factor. On a typical 1.6-litre car, it's a few hundred dollars a year, next to a COE that can run past $100,000, plus insurance, parking, servicing, and fuel. Our full breakdown of what a car actually costs in Singapore puts it in proportion.
The renewal itself is the easy part, as long as your insurance and inspection are sorted first. Check your figure with the calculator above, then confirm the exact amount for your vehicle on LTA's OneMotoring portal before you pay. And if you'd rather stop thinking about this altogether, put it on GIRO.
See you on the road,
Amanda 💙
Related articles
- The average COE price is over $100,000. Here’s what you could buy with that money instead.
- Here’s where to find cheap parking in Orchard
- 24/7 car washes in Singapore for late-night drivers
- Your guide to towing services in Singapore
- Traffic offences in Singapore: Demerit points and composition fines explained (2026)
