Singapore Employment Pass & S Pass Salary Requirements: 2026 Rules and the 2027 Increase

What is the minimum salary for an Employment Pass right now?

Short answer: new Employment Pass applications need at least S$5,600 a month in the general sector for candidates aged 23 and under, rising with age to S$10,700 for candidates aged 45 and above. Financial services starts higher, at S$6,200, and tops out at S$11,800. Salary is the entry condition, not the decision.

The minimum is age-graduated: it climbs continuously between those two anchor points, so a 35-year-old candidate sits well above the entry figure and well below the ceiling. We publish only the verified floor and ceiling here — an age-by-age ladder circulating on other sites is not something MOM publishes in that form, and quoting a wrong intermediate figure is how offers get rebuilt at the last minute. For a specific age, price the offer against MOM's self-assessment tool before it is signed.

Two things employers regularly get wrong. First, clearing the floor does not qualify anyone: the application must also reach 40 points on COMPASS, and a salary that only just meets the minimum scores zero on the salary criterion. Second, Employment Pass holders are excluded from CPF — employers cannot contribute for them — so the real monthly cost of an EP hire is salary plus the Skills Development Levy, not salary plus CPF. Our Singapore CPF rates guide covers the citizen and PR side.

What changes on 1 January 2027? Current vs announced minimums

Short answer: nothing changes until 1 January 2027. From that date, new EP applications need S$6,000 in the general sector or S$6,600 in financial services, and new S Pass applications need S$3,600 or S$4,000. Renewals are assessed against the higher bars only for passes expiring from 1 January 2028.

Read the second row carefully, because it is the one that costs money quietly. The renewal trigger is the pass expiry date, not the renewal filing date. A pass expiring in November 2027 renews on today's minimums; one expiring in February 2028 does not. If you employ foreigners in Singapore, the single most useful thing you can do this quarter is sort your pass population by expiry date and draw a line at 1 January 2028.

The current S Pass minimums have applied since 1 September 2025 — the same date the levy was flattened — so employers who last checked their S Pass costs before then are working from two obsolete numbers at once.

How does COMPASS score an Employment Pass application?

Short answer: COMPASS applies to EP applications and sets a 40-point pass mark across six criteria — four foundational criteria worth 20, 10 or zero points each, plus two bonus criteria that can add points on top. Meeting the salary minimum alone does not produce a pass; the total score does.

Six criteria, not four. A lot of published guidance describes COMPASS as a four-criteria framework because the two bonus criteria were added to the model after the earliest write-ups. Ignoring C5 and C6 is not a rounding error: a candidate on a shortage-list skill or a firm on a strategic economic programme can pick up the 10 or 20 points that turn a 30-point rejection into a 40-point approval.

Two of the four foundational criteria — C3 Diversity and C4 Support for Local Employment — score the employer, not the candidate. That is why a newly incorporated subsidiary with three staff and one nationality tends to score badly regardless of who it is hiring, and why the same candidate can be refused under one sponsor and approved under another. When the salary minimums rise in January 2027, C1 moves with them: an offer built to today's floor will score lower next year even if the salary itself has not changed.

What are the S Pass salary, levy and quota rules?

Short answer: the S Pass minimum is S$3,300 a month in the general sector and S$3,800 in financial services, rising with age to S$4,800 and S$5,650. Every S Pass holder also costs a flat S$650 monthly levy and occupies a share of your sub-quota, which is what usually caps hiring first.

The levy is flat — the two-tier table is gone

Since 1 September 2025 the S Pass levy has been a single flat rate of S$650 per month across all sectors and all tiers, pro-rated at S$21.37 per day for part-months. The former Tier 1 / Tier 2 structure, where the levy jumped once you passed a share of your workforce, no longer exists. Several widely-cited comparison sites still publish that two-tier table; if a cost model on your desk shows two different S Pass levy rates, it predates September 2025 and is understating or overstating your bill. Budget S$650 per S Pass holder per month, full stop.

Quota: Dependency Ratio Ceiling and the S Pass sub-quota

The Dependency Ratio Ceiling (DRC) caps total foreign workers as a share of your total workforce, and a tighter sub-DRC caps S Pass holders specifically. Both are calculated from your local headcount, which is where the Local Qualifying Salary comes in.

For a services company the binding constraint is almost always the 10% S Pass sub-DRC rather than the 35% overall ceiling — one S Pass holder effectively requires nine locals on the books. Employment Pass holders are not subject to a quota, which is why some employers reach for an EP where an S Pass would have been the natural fit, and then run into the higher salary floor and COMPASS instead.

What is the Local Qualifying Salary and how does it affect quota?

Short answer: the Local Qualifying Salary has been S$1,800 a month since 1 July 2026, up from S$1,600, with a part-time rate of S$10.50 an hour. It is already in force. It does not set a national minimum wage — it decides how much each local employee counts toward the headcount your work pass quota is calculated from.

The consequence is arithmetic rather than legal. When the LQS moved from S$1,600 to S$1,800 on 1 July 2026, every local employee paid between those two figures dropped from one full head to half a head — and a services employer sitting exactly at its 10% S Pass sub-quota can lose entitlement without hiring or firing anyone. If your quota utilisation is tight, recount your local headcount at the S$1,800 threshold before you file the next S Pass application, not after it is rejected.

Note that this is a quota-counting rule, not a payroll deduction. Foreigners on an EP or S Pass are excluded from CPF entirely, so an increase in local pay to preserve quota has a CPF cost on the local side that the foreign hire does not carry. The CPF rates page has the current employer and employee percentages.

What should employers do now to prepare for 1 January 2027?

Short answer: map every pass by expiry date, reprice offers that sit near today's floor, and file applications you were going to file anyway before 1 January 2027 — they are assessed on current minimums. Then rerun COMPASS for anyone near the 40-point line, because C1 Salary moves when the floors move.

One planning point that is easy to miss: a salary increase made to clear a 2027 renewal threshold is a permanent cost, while the levy and quota position may change again. Model the two separately. And remember that Singapore has no monthly income-tax withholding — employer tax duties are the annual IR8A / Auto-Inclusion Scheme filing by 1 March, and IR21 tax clearance when a non-citizen employee leaves, which requires notifying IRAS at least a month before cessation and withholding the final salary until clearance completes. Departure planning, not monthly payroll, is where Singapore tax compliance actually bites.

No Singapore entity yet? A work pass has to be sponsored by a Singapore-registered employer, and COMPASS scores that employer's workforce profile — a three-person subsidiary scores badly on C3 and C4 no matter how strong the candidate is. Aniday's Singapore entity, Aniday Pte. Ltd., acts as the legal employer, sponsors the pass and runs payroll: see Employer of Record Singapore or, if you already have an entity and want to keep it, PEO services in Singapore.

Sources

• Ministry of Manpower (MOM) — work pass requirements and COMPASS
• MOM Committee of Supply 2026 factsheet, 3 March 2026 — announced salary increases
• CPF Board — contribution rates (citizens and permanent residents)
• Aniday — Doing Business in Singapore (country hub)