/5 min read/Updated
Adding a Lift to a Landed Home
In short
Why a lift is far cheaper installed during an A&A than retrofitted afterwards, and what decides how hard it is: whether the house already has a vertical void the shaft can rise through. Without one, cutting new openings through the floors is structural work, designed by a professional engineer and approved by BCA before work starts — and the lift itself needs a BCA permit to operate. It sets out the four common lift types against TMB's planning allowances, and makes the case for building the shaft now and leaving the lift for later.
In this article
Topics
- Alterations & Additions
- Asset enhancement
- Planning
Why it is cheaper now than later
During an A&A the structure is open, the finishes are off and the services are being rerouted anyway. Retrofitting a lift into a finished house means doing all of that again to a building somebody is living in: hoarding off rooms, protecting floors, breaking out finishes that were new a few years ago, and putting them back.
The lift itself costs much the same either way. What changes is everything around it, and that is most of the bill.
The question that decides the cost: is there a void?
The cheapest lift is the one that rises through a space the house already has. A double-height stairwell, an atrium or a light well can often take a shaft with little or no cutting of the floors, because the hole is already there. The work is then mostly a pit, a structural frame for the shaft, and the lift.
Where there is no void, the shaft has to be made, which means cutting a new opening through every floor it passes. That is a different kind of job.
Cutting through the floors is structural work
A floor slab in a landed house is part of the structure. Opening it up for a shaft changes how the floor carries load, and the slab around the opening usually needs new beams or thickening to carry it.
In Singapore that is structural work under the Building Control Act. It has to be designed by a professional engineer in the civil or structural discipline, who submits the structural plans to the Building and Construction Authority and certifies that the building can take the change. Work can only start once BCA has approved the plans and granted a permit to carry out the works. Works that do not materially affect the key structural elements can be exempt, but a shaft cut through several floors almost always does.
Two things are worth knowing before the engineer arrives. First, the original structural drawings save weeks; ask the seller for them, or check whether they can be retrieved. Second, a slab that turns out to be post-tensioned — uncommon in a house, but not unheard of — cannot be cut anywhere without mapping its tendons first, and may push the shaft somewhere else entirely.
What the shaft itself needs
A continuous structural route from the lowest level served to above the highest. A pit below the lowest landing. Headroom above the top landing for the car and the machinery. Placing the shaft against an existing stair core is usually the least disruptive route, because the stair already gives the house a vertical structure to lean on.
The type of lift changes the details. The figures below are the allowances in our own planning tool for the lift alone, before the builder's work around it; they are planning numbers, not quotations.
| Lift type | Planning allowance (lift only) | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|
| Hydraulic home lift | about S$45,000 | Simple and quiet; the least expensive of the four. |
| Machine-room-less (MRL) | about S$58,000 | The usual choice in a new house: no separate machine room. |
| Gearless traction | about S$72,000 | Smoother and faster, for taller houses and heavier use. |
| Panoramic glass | about S$95,000 | A shaft that is part of the architecture, priced accordingly. |
The lift needs a permit too
A passenger lift in a landed house is not exempt from BCA's lift regulations. Before it is used, the owner needs a permit to operate from BCA, and the permit has to be kept current for as long as the lift runs. The narrow exceptions are small stairlifts and vertical platform lifts that travel less than a metre and serve a single home.
Build that into the programme: the permit comes at the end, after the installer's testing, and a house can be finished with a lift nobody is yet allowed to use.
Does a lift change whether it is still an A&A?
On its own, rarely. URA's test for an A&A is about scale: added floor area, external walls replaced, and structural changes, each kept within half of the existing house. A lift shaft is a small share of any of those. It is the rest of the brief that tips a project into reconstruction, and that is worth knowing before the lift is drawn. Rebuild or A&A? How to Decide sets out the line.
The argument for provision even if you skip the lift
Building the shaft and leaving it as storage costs a fraction of the full installation and removes the hard part from a future decision: the structure, the approval and the mess are done once, while the house is open anyway. On a house intended for several generations it is close to essential. Designing for Multi-Generational Living covers the rest of that brief.
Key takeaways
- Install during an A&A, not after. The structure is open and the finishes are coming off anyway.
- An existing void — a stairwell or a double-height space — is the cheapest route up.
- Without one, the new openings through the floors are structural works, designed by a PE and approved by BCA first.
- A passenger lift in a landed house needs BCA's permit to operate.
- A shaft built now, with the lift left for later, is a cheap hedge on a future decision.
First published in the KAPA Journal, written with KAPA Design Collective, the practice that designs and builds our residences.
Published by TMB Development at tmbdevelopment.com/journal/adding-a-lift-to-a-landed-home. Quoting a passage with a link back is welcome; republishing it is not — see the terms.
