A forecast that Singapore’s medical tourism market will hit USD 15.4 billion by 2035 has been doing the rounds of aggregator sites for months, and an earlier version of this article passed it along at face value. That deserved a proper check rather than a quiet deletion. So I traced the number back to its publisher and set it against figures somebody actually audits: Ministry of Health bill data, the accounts of the listed hospital groups that dominate Singapore’s private wards, and what the competition in Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok reports. The forecast does not survive the trip. The market that emerges from the checkable numbers is smaller, slower and considerably more interesting.
Where the USD 15.4 billion figure comes from
The projection belongs to Market Research Future, a market research firm, and reached most readers through a press release syndicated on openPR: a Singapore medical tourism market of roughly USD 6.3 billion in 2024, compounding at 9.1 per cent a year to USD 15.4 billion by 2035. The internal arithmetic works. The provenance does not. Market Research Future’s own report page for the same market currently shows a 6.34 per cent growth rate, base and forecast values labelled 0.267 and 0.527 in units the page cannot keep consistent, and, further down, a claim that the market will reach USD 7.2 billion by 2035. Another syndicated release built on the same publisher’s Singapore report put the 2035 figure at USD 527.49 billion, more than thirty times the number this article once carried.
None of these documents defines who counts as a medical tourist, which spending is in scope, or how the base year was measured. When one publisher’s projections for one small market span 7.2, 15.4 and 527 billion dollars depending on which page you load, the spread is the finding. These reports exist to be bought, and the press releases exist to sell them. I would not price a clinic, an insurance product or a paragraph of journalism on any of the three numbers.
What the market measurably earns
The checkable figures are two orders of magnitude smaller. A December 2024 feature in The Business Times cited RHB analysts putting Singapore’s medical tourism revenue for 2023 at US$250 million to US$270 million, behind Thailand at US$850 million and Malaysia at US$444 million. Official statistics cannot settle the matter, because there are none to consult: the Singapore Tourism Board’s receipts releases, totalling S$23.9 billion for January to September 2025, break out sightseeing and food and beverage but carry no medical line at all.
The listed operators fill in some of the gap. IHH Healthcare, owner of Mount Elizabeth, Mount Elizabeth Novena, Gleneagles and Parkway East, said medical tourism made up 18 per cent of its Singapore top line as at the third quarter of 2024, against an average of 17 per cent from 2019 to 2023; the Singapore hospital segment booked RM4.7 billion, about S$1.4 billion, in revenue for the period. Raffles Medical Group closed FY2024 with group revenue of S$751.6 million, up 6.3 per cent, of which hospital services contributed S$345.7 million, and its results release concedes that “the strong Singapore dollar coupled with higher healthcare services costs has made Singapore a less attractive medical hub in the region”. Tay Wee Kuang of CGS International told the same Business Times feature that foreign patients supplied 25 to 30 per cent of local operators’ revenue before the pandemic, and 20 to 25 per cent since.
Run the arithmetic and even the sober estimates refuse to reconcile: 18 per cent of IHH’s S$1.4 billion Singapore segment is roughly S$250 million on its own, which already approaches RHB’s figure for the entire country. Definitions differ, periods differ, and nobody outside the hospitals’ finance departments knows the true total. But every estimate that arrives with a methodology lands in the hundreds of millions of US dollars, growing at single digits, with the foreign share of revenue drifting down rather than up. USD 15.4 billion by 2035 would require the measured market to grow more than fiftyfold in a decade. Nothing in the accounts points anywhere near it.
The Mount Elizabeth price tag
Singapore’s price tier is public record, which is rare in this industry. The Ministry of Health publishes what patients actually paid: for a primary total knee replacement, the typical bill in a one bedded private ward is S$49,789 at Mount Elizabeth, S$49,314 at Mount Elizabeth Novena and S$45,610 at Gleneagles, GST included, before insurance. A subsidised public ward does the same operation for around S$7,285, but subsidies are for locals; the private tier is the market a foreign patient meets. Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok will do that knee for a fraction of the bill, and everyone in the industry knows it. What the premium buys is the top of the complexity curve. IHH opened a proton therapy centre for cancer care at Mount Elizabeth Novena in May 2023 and had treated more than 100 patients within a year. Thomson Medical, where medical tourists are about 10 per cent of Singapore patients, expects the regional hubs to specialise, “with Singapore doubling down on more complex care”, as group chief executive Melvin Heng put it.
That is the honest pitch, and I think it is the right one. Nobody has flown to Singapore to save money in years. Patients fly in because the diagnosis is frightening and the system at home has run out of answers, and at that point the S$49,000 knee is not the reference point; the oncologist is. A market that has stopped competing on price competes on outcomes and trust, and those are slower to copy than a discount.
Malaysia and Thailand are not waiting
The volume, meanwhile, is being carved up next door. The Malaysia Healthcare Travel Council counted 1.6 million healthcare travellers in 2024, up 14 per cent, generating RM2.72 billion in revenue, up 21 per cent, with an official target of RM12 billion by 2030. Thailand loosened its medical visa rules in 2023, offering foreign patients a one year visa with multiple re-entry. The currency does the rest of the damage: Singapore Medical Group’s chief executive Beng Teck Liang says patient numbers from Vietnam, more than half of the group’s non-local base, fell 15 to 20 per cent from January 2024 as the dong weakened against the Singapore dollar. And the patients Malaysia is winning are mostly Indonesian, precisely the market Singapore leans on; the Singapore Tourism Board ranks Indonesia its second largest source of tourism receipts, at S$2.09 billion for January to September 2025.
The most eloquent signal comes from IHH itself. The owner of Mount Elizabeth agreed to pay RM3.9 billion in cash for Island Hospital in Penang, and the foreign patient share of its Malaysian operations has climbed to 7 per cent of top line from a 3 per cent average across 2019 to 2023. When the group with the clearest view of regional patient flows writes its biggest cheque in Penang rather than off Orchard Road, it is telling you where it expects the growth in bodies to be. Singapore keeps the hardest cases and the highest margins, Malaysia takes the volume, Thailand holds the middle. That division of labour can hold for years. It is not a 9.1 per cent compounding story for Singapore.
What This Means
Strip out the press release arithmetic and Singapore’s medical tourism market looks like this: a few hundred million US dollars of measurable annual revenue, a foreign share of private hospital income around a fifth and no longer rising, prices published by the health ministry at levels no regional rival tries to match, and a moat built from complex oncology, cardiology and proton beams rather than package deals. USD 15.4 billion by 2035 is not a forecast so much as a headline engineered to be repeated, and this article repeated it once. The numbers worth watching instead are three: whether IHH’s Singapore medical tourism share holds near 18 per cent, whether Malaysia gets anywhere near its RM12 billion target by 2030, and what the Singapore dollar does against the rupiah, the dong and the baht. If those break the right way, Singapore’s market can double by 2035 on complexity and yield alone. Fifteen billion is a different universe, and nobody actually treating patients in Singapore is claiming to live in it.
