BCA's Plan Purchase System sells the approved building and structural plans held for private property in Singapore. Two fees apply: S$45 including GST per address to search, then S$65 including GST per plan reference number to buy. One address with one plan reference number therefore costs S$110.
Everything below is taken from BCA's own pages, linked at each point. Fees change, so treat the figures here as correct as at August 2026 and confirm them on bca.gov.sg/pps before you pay. Third-party figures circulating online are frequently taken from an older BCA fee schedule, that is explained in full below.
What the Plan Purchase System holds
The service landing page is bca.gov.sg/pps, new applications are submitted at go.gov.sg/bcapps, and approved plans are retrieved through a View/Download Plan portal that authenticates with Singpass. What you are buying is the architectural and structural drawings that were approved for the building.
Read that last sentence carefully, because it is the single most useful thing to understand before you spend the money. An approved plan records what was permitted, not what was built. BCA's own Periodic Structural Inspection regime includes assessing whether addition and alteration works were carried out to the building structure according to approved plans, which is the regulator's own acknowledgement that the two often diverge.
BCA is also not the only record holder. Planning records, meaning the Grant of Written Permission and the plans approved under it, sit with URA under a separate e-service called Buy Planning Records (DC 15), which charges its own search fee of S$109 inclusive of 9% GST. There is no single government search fee for property plans. If you own an HDB flat, neither route applies to you: see HDB floor plan purchase instead. For a condominium unit, where the right route depends on which document you actually need, see condo floor plans in Singapore.
The two fees, and why S$65 can be charged twice
BCA publishes these two figures on the Plan Purchase System page, quoted here verbatim:
| Fee | Amount | Charged |
|---|---|---|
| Search fee | "$45.00 (Inclusive of GST)" | "Per Address (payable upon application)" |
| Plan purchase fee | "$65.00 (Inclusive of GST)" | "Per Plan Reference Number (per set) (payable after selection of plans for purchase)" |
The two figures are not competing answers to the same question. They are two stages of one transaction. You pay S$45 up front, per address, to find out whether plans exist at all. If they do and you want them, you then pay S$65 for each plan reference number you select. A single property can carry several plan reference numbers, so the second fee is not necessarily paid only once. A blog that says the cost is S$45 and a blog that says the cost is S$65 are each describing one half of the same process.
S$45 + S$65 = S$110 is our arithmetic from BCA's two published figures, not a total BCA itself quotes. It is the realistic minimum for one address with one plan reference number.
Why some sites quote S$22 or S$28
Because BCA has two plan-copy services reachable at the same time, with different fees. Both URLs responded on 14 August 2026. The older one is an Application for Inspection and Making Copies of the Approved Building & Structural Drawings from Building Control Records, generally called the Legal Search route.
| Plan Purchase System | Legal Search application | |
|---|---|---|
| Search fee | S$45.00 per address, incl. GST | S$22.00 per address |
| Copy fee | S$65.00 per plan reference number (per set), incl. GST | S$28.00 per set of drawings |
| Print fee | Not stated | S$4.00 per A2 sheet, from a digital record |
| Fees dated | Not stated on the page | Page states fees revised from 1 April 2016 |
| Turnaround | 10 working days to be contacted on availability | 5 working days for the search outcome by email |
| Delivery | View/Download Plan portal, Singpass-authenticated | A2 hardcopy prints, collected in person at BCA HQ Service Centre, 52 Jurong Gateway Road S608550 |
Any figure of S$22 or S$28 is the 2016 Legal Search schedule. It is not wrong historically; it is simply not the Plan Purchase System fee. We are not going to tell you the older service is discontinued, because that is not established: the Legal Search page still instructs users to use Internet Explorer 7, which reads like a legacy page, but BCA's own Periodic Structural Inspection Building Owner's Guide dated September 2024 tells professional engineers to buy structural layout plans at the Legal Search URL. Start at bca.gov.sg/pps and confirm the fee that applies to your case with BCA before paying.
Who can apply: the four applicant types
BCA sets out eligibility and the supporting documents in a PDF on the Plan Purchase System site. There are four types, and you must fit one of them.
| Type | Who you are | What BCA requires |
|---|---|---|
| Type 1 | Registered Proprietor: currently registered as sole owner or co-owner in SLA's property ownership record | Current Property Tax Statement showing your full name as in NRIC and the property address, as documentary proof of ownership. A Type 1 Authorisation Form only where required. |
| Type 2 | Staff of a Registered Proprietor that is a corporation or organisation, expressly including religious and non-profit organisations | All three are mandatory: a Corporate Owner's Authorisation Form authorising you to buy plans, a current Property Tax Statement showing the corporate owner's full name and the property address, and the corporate owner's ACRA Biz File. |
| Type 3 | Chairman of the Management Corporation Strata Title (MCST) | Current Property Tax Statement for the address showing the name of the MCST, or a Certificate of Constitution of Management Corporation from the Singapore Land Authority. |
| Type 4 | Authorised Person representing a Type 1, Type 2 or Type 3 proprietor | The authorisation form matching that owner's type, signed by that owner, plus that owner's own supporting documents. BCA's wording: signed authorisation and all supporting documents must be obtained from the owner type you choose before making the application. |
For a consultant, Type 4 is the practical route, and the sequencing matters: you gather the owner's signed form and the owner's documents first, then apply. Professional standing on its own does not qualify you.
How long it takes
BCA states: "If the application is in order, we will contact you within 10 working days on the availability of the plans." Read the wording precisely. Ten working days is the time to be told whether plans exist, not the time to receive them. Plan your submission programme around that distinction rather than around a delivery date BCA has never promised.
If you are buying, and not yet the owner
This is a real gap and it catches buyers doing due diligence. The Plan Purchase System eligibility list contains four types: owner, corporate owner's staff, MCST chairman, and an authorised person acting for one of those. Prospective purchasers are not among them. The older Legal Search page says the opposite in as many words: "Only the existing property owner, prospective purchaser of a property and the Chairman of a MCST can apply", and it accepts a Notice of Transfer or Certificate of Stamp Duty from a prospective owner who bought the property not more than 3 months ago.
We are not going to tell you which rule governs your case, because BCA has not published that. Contact BCA. In practice, many buyers simply ask the seller to apply. Tenants appear on neither list, and normally obtain drawings through the owner or the MCST, or have the space measured.
What BCA does not tell you before you pay
Four things are genuinely absent from the published pages, and it is more useful to say so than to guess:
- File format. The pages do not state what you receive: PDF, TIFF or scanned raster.
- Whether the copies are certified. Not stated. Do not assume they are. URA, by contrast, sells a certified true copy of an approved plan explicitly, at S$5.45 inclusive of 9% GST per sheet. If a certified copy is what your matter needs, establish that before you buy.
- Refunds. The Plan Purchase System page states no refund position. URA states plainly that its fee "is not refundable or transferable regardless of whether the search is unsuccessful". That is URA's statement, not BCA's: do not transfer it. Ask BCA, and budget on the assumption that the search fee is spent either way.
- Form numbers and Corppass. BCA calls it the BCA Plan Purchase Application Form and the authorisations Type 1, 2 and 3 Authorisation Forms. There is no numbered form code, so do not go looking for one. Corppass is not mentioned anywhere in the flow either: the corporate path is handled through a Type 2 authorisation form and an ACRA Biz File.
Older buildings: the record may not be at BCA at all
According to the National Library Board, the Building Control Division collection of roughly 246,000 plans prepared between 1884 and 1969 is held by the National Archives of Singapore, and only a handful of those plans have been digitised. The collection has been microfilmed and is consulted at the Archives Reading Room. The earliest is an 1884 house on Morrison's Hill submitted by Cheang Hong Lim.
That is an archives fact, attributable to NLB and the National Archives rather than to the building regulator, and its practical meaning is blunt, if your building was designed before about 1970, the plan may exist only as a microfilm frame in a reading room. A microfilm frame is a historical document. It is not something a Qualified Person can dimension, scale or submit.
When the archived plan is enough, and when it is not
The plan you buy from BCA is exactly the right answer, and the cheap answer, when you need the original approved design intent: a QP has asked for the approved plans to open an A&A submission, you need to prove what was permitted for a regularisation or a dispute, or you want to check whether a wall was in the original design. If that describes you, spend the S$110 and stop here. We would rather say so than sell you a survey you do not need.
Measurement becomes the answer at five specific points:
- BCA tells you the plans do not exist, or the search returns nothing for your address.
- The plan arrives and does not match the building, which is common enough that the regulator inspects for it. See what to do when the floor plan is missing or wrong.
- Your QP needs existing-condition dimensions to design against. A 1978 approval will not tell an architect where services now run, what the true floor-to-ceiling height is behind a false ceiling, or how the fit-out has changed the plan.
- You need as-built structural layout plans for a Periodic Structural Inspection and cannot obtain them. BCA's own Building Owner's Guide describes a second-stage investigation as "assessing the structural adequacy of the building by checking the structural plans and calculations, and reconstructing the structural plans if they are not available". The regulator itself contemplates that the plans may have to be rebuilt from the building.
- You need an area verified rather than asserted, for a lease, a sale, a GFA question or a strata matter.
That is what a measured survey produces. 3D laser scanning captures the building as it stands today, and as-built documentation turns the capture into the plans, elevations and sections a QP can work from; where the deliverable is a model rather than a drawing set, that is Scan-to-BIM. If a Periodic Structural Inspection is what triggered the search, the capture supports the structural inspection workflow.
One boundary to be plain about: measurement produces drawings, not approvals. It does not replace the Professional Engineer's structural assessment under the Periodic Structural Inspection regime, the Qualified Person's submission to the Commissioner of Building Control, or a Registered Surveyor's cadastral or strata endorsement. Those roles stay exactly where the law puts them. What changes is that they finally have a dimensioned record of the building to work from. Tell us the address, the age of the building and what the QP has asked for and we will tell you whether a survey is warranted at all.