If you’ve owned a car in Singapore you’ve paid for more than the car. A large part of what you handed over went on the right to own it at all, and some of that comes back when the car leaves the road. Exporting it to the UK counts as leaving the road, so it’s worth knowing what’s due before you set a date.
Rules change, and Singapore changed them as recently as February 2026. Treat this as the overview, and check your own figures on OneMotoring, which is the only place your actual numbers live.
COE: the right to own the car
The Certificate of Entitlement is bought through a bidding exercise, and the price you paid is called the quota premium (QP). A COE normally lasts ten years from registration. After that the owner either deregisters the car or renews the COE for another five or ten years by paying the prevailing quota premium.
The COE rebate. If a car is deregistered before its COE runs out, the LTA refunds part of the quota premium, pro-rated to the time left on the COE. There’s one wrinkle for very new cars: if a car is exported within two years of registration, the COE rebate is capped at 80% of the quota premium paid.
ARF: the registration tax
The Additional Registration Fee is a tax paid when the car was first registered, worked out from its Open Market Value. It’s often the biggest single number on the original paperwork, and it’s the number the PARF rebate is calculated from.
PARF: the part of the ARF you get back
The Preferential Additional Registration Fee rebate pays back a percentage of the ARF when a car is deregistered before it is ten years old. The older the car, the smaller the percentage, and at ten years it stops altogether. There’s no PARF rebate on a car running on a renewed COE.
Which schedule applies depends on when the car’s COE was obtained.
Cars on COEs obtained before the second February 2026 bidding exercise (which is most cars leaving Singapore today) use the long-standing schedule:
| Age when deregistered | PARF rebate |
|---|---|
| Up to 5 years | 75% of ARF paid |
| Over 5, up to 6 years | 70% |
| Over 6, up to 7 years | 65% |
| Over 7, up to 8 years | 60% |
| Over 8, up to 9 years | 55% |
| Over 9, up to 10 years | 50% |
| Over 10 years | Nothing |
Cars registered with COEs from the February 2023 exercises onwards also have the rebate capped at S$60,000.
Cars on COEs from the second February 2026 bidding exercise onwards use a much lower schedule: 30% of ARF up to five years old, falling by five points a year to 5% in the tenth year, with a cap of S$30,000. If yours is one of these, the rebate will be a far smaller part of your sums.
What exporting changes (and what it doesn’t)
When a car is deregistered, the LTA expects it to be scrapped, exported, or held in an Export Processing Zone while it waits to be exported. Exporting is one of the accepted ways of disposing of it, so for most cars the rebates work the same as they would for scrapping.
That’s the point people miss. In Singapore, a lot of a used car’s price is the rebate it carries. When you ship the car to the UK you still collect that rebate. You give up whatever a dealer would have paid on top of it, and you keep a car.
The ten-year line
Ten years is the date to circle. Under ten, a PARF rebate is still in play. One day over, it isn’t. If your car is close, plan backwards from that date, and tell us about it on the quote form so we can fit collection and shipping around it.
Ten years also happens to be the UK’s line. A car under ten needs an IVA test here before the DVLA will register it. Ten and over needs an MOT instead. So the same date matters at both ends of the trip.
Where to check your numbers
OneMotoring has a rebate enquiry for registered vehicles, and it’s the figure to trust. We’ll happily talk through what it means for your import, but we never guess at the LTA’s sums for you.