Property
What is Singapore Overnight Rate Average (SORA)?
The benchmark interest rate that most Singapore home loans are now pegged to, published every day by MAS. When SORA rises, floating-rate mortgages get more expensive; when it falls, they get cheaper.
How SORA works
SORA is the volume-weighted average rate of actual overnight interbank Singapore-dollar borrowing, published by MAS every business day. Home loans typically reference a compounded 1-month or 3-month SORA plus a fixed bank spread (for example, “3M SORA + 0.8%”), so your interest rate resets periodically as SORA moves rather than changing day to day.
Why it replaced SIBOR
SORA is based on real transactions and is transparent and hard to manipulate, which is why it replaced the older SIBOR benchmark (phased out by 2024). A compounded SORA averages the rate over the past one or three months, so it’s smoother than a daily rate and tends to lag turning points slightly — your mortgage feels rate changes with a short delay.