COE Expiring Soon? How to Work Out Whether to Renew or Sell
How to compare the real cost of renewing your COE against selling or deregistering — PQP, PARF rebates, and the 2026 rebate schedule change explained.
When your Certificate of Entitlement is approaching the end of its 10-year term, you have three choices: renew it, sell the car as-is (COE transfers to the buyer), or deregister and scrap/export it. Renewal is not automatically the “safe” option — it comes with real trade-offs that are easy to miss. Here is how to actually run the numbers.
What renewal costs
To renew, you don't bid again — you pay the Prevailing Quota Premium (PQP) for your vehicle category, which LTA sets monthly as the 3-month moving average of that category's COE bidding results. You can renew for 5 years (paying 50% of the PQP, a one-time option after which the car must eventually be deregistered) or for 10 years (paying the full PQP, renewable indefinitely thereafter). PQP moves with the market, so the exact cost depends on the month you renew in — always check the live figure on OneMotoring before deciding.
The trade-off most owners underestimate: you give up your PARF rebate
The Preferential Additional Registration Fee (PARF) rebate is only payable when you deregister a car before it turns 10 years old and its COE has never been renewed. The moment you renew, that rebate is permanently forfeited for the life of the vehicle. For a car with meaningful ARF paid at registration, this can be a five- or six-figure sum you are giving up in exchange for keeping the car on the road.
It's also worth knowing that the PARF rebate schedule itself changed. Under Budget 2026, cars registered with a COE obtained from the second bidding exercise of February 2026 onwards follow a reduced rebate schedule — roughly 45 percentage points lower across the board — with the maximum payable rebate halved from S$60,000 to S$30,000. If your car was registered before that date, you remain on the older, more generous schedule, which makes the PARF you'd be giving up by renewing even more significant.
A simple way to compare renewal against selling
Line up two numbers side by side:
- Cost to renew = the PQP for your category (50% for a 5-year renewal, 100% for 10 years).
- Value of selling/deregistering now = your PARF rebate (if eligible) + your pro-rated COE rebate for the unused months remaining + whatever a dealer is actually willing to pay for the car itself.
If the second figure comes close to or exceeds what you'd spend renewing — especially once you factor in that an older car also tends to need more maintenance in its second decade — selling or deregistering while your COE still has value can work out ahead. If you genuinely want to keep driving the same car for years to come, renewal remains a reasonable choice; the point is simply to compare it against a real number rather than a guess.
Get the real comparison, not an estimate
Rebate calculators give you an estimate of your deregistration value, but they can't tell you what your car is actually worth to a buyer today. Submitting your car on CarBidGo gets you live, independent offers from our dealer network in the same time it takes to check your PQP — so you can compare “renew” against a real market offer, not a theoretical one, before your COE runs out.