How Singapore Spends: Everyday Payment Data (2026)

Last updated 23 October 2026 · nearly 600 users · 1 July 2025 to 30 September 2026

Graiden is an expense tracker that logs spending from forwarded receipts and bank alert emails. We pooled the expenses logged by our users in Singapore to see what everyday spending looks like: what a meal or a ride usually costs, how small most payments are, and how much of it runs on PayNow. Only aggregate numbers are shown. No person, merchant or transaction can be picked out, and every figure describes at least 20 users.

What everyday things cost

The median is the middle payment: half cost less, half cost more. The range shows the middle half of payments. Amounts are rounded to the nearest dollar.

Small payments dominate. For the typical user, 49% of logged payments are under S$10 and 28% are under S$5, the price range of a coffee, a bus or MRT fare, or a hawker meal.

Where the payments go

This counts payments, not dollars. A few large transfers or card bill payments would swamp a dollar total, so the count is the more honest picture of day-to-day spending.

"Other" is large for a reason specific to Singapore: about half of a typical user's "Other" payments are PayNow or PayLah! transfers, where the bank alert names a person or a phone number rather than a shop, so there is nothing to categorise on.

How people pay

Roughly a quarter of a typical user's payments are PayNow or PayLah! transfers. Treat that as a floor: it comes from the words in each expense's description, and about two thirds of descriptions (receipts and many card alerts) do not name a payment method at all.

When in the day people spend

Food spending leans to lunch: among users with at least 10 timed food payments, 31% of food payments fall between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., against 27% between 5 and 9 p.m. Days of the week barely differ: each day holds about 14 to 15% of payments, with weekend days at the lower end.

Methods and limits

• Who is counted. Graiden users whose account time zone is Singapore and who logged at least 30 expenses across at least two months between 1 July 2025 to 30 September 2026: nearly 600 users and more than 175,000 expenses.
• Every user counts once. Shares and medians are worked out per user first, then combined, so a few very active users cannot dominate. Payment-amount medians pool all payments from users with SGD as their display currency (nearly 200 of them).
• What was removed. Deleted entries, detected duplicates, recurring templates, zero or negative amounts, and single amounts over S$10,000 (mostly foreign-currency amounts that were not converted, or misread alerts).
• Categories are automatic. Graiden's AI sorts each expense into a category and users can change it. Some payments are miscategorised, which is one reason we report medians and counts rather than totals.
• This is not all of anyone's spending. Graiden sees only the receipts and bank alerts a user forwards, plus anything they add by hand. Cash and accounts that are not connected are missing. People who use an expense tracker are not a random sample of Singapore.
• Privacy. Only aggregate numbers are published, and sample sizes and amounts are rounded. No figure describes fewer than 20 users, and no merchant, description, amount or account of any individual is shown. Descriptions were scanned only to count payment methods. See our privacy policy.
• Updates. We plan to re-run the same queries each quarter. The date at the top shows the last refresh.

More for Singapore: guides, comparisons and tools.

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