🇸🇬 Payroll in Singapore: employer costs, taxes & compliance (2026)

Running payroll in Singapore as a foreign employer means handling a monthly salary run, deducting employee contributions from gross pay, adding your own contributions on top, and keeping those numbers properly filed. The system is built around the Central Provident Fund, which draws contributions from both sides of the employment relationship every month. Get those calculations right and the cycle is fairly predictable. Get them wrong and you are dealing with back-payments and interest.

This guide walks through what Singapore payroll actually costs an employer, how the pay cycle works in practice, what leave and termination rules mean for your payroll runs, and when it might make sense to hand the whole thing to a specialist. The data tables on this page carry the exact rates and statutory figures.

The gap between what an employee sees in their bank account and what you actually spend is wider than the gross salary figure suggests. On top of gross pay, you are contributing roughly a fifth again in employer-side social security. That is a meaningful addition to your staff budget, and it compounds quickly once you have several employees on the books. The table below shows the exact employer contribution rate.

The employee side also carries a notable contribution, deducted from gross pay before the worker receives anything. Taken together, the total tax wedge on employment income is substantial. In plain terms, a dollar of take-home pay costs the business considerably more than a dollar. Factor that into any hiring cost model before you post a salary offer.

Singapore payroll runs monthly, so you are processing one cycle per month per employee. There is no statutory thirteenth-month salary, but it is widely treated as customary, meaning many employees will expect it even if the law does not require it. Build that into your annual cost projections if you want to stay competitive locally. Singapore does not have a national minimum wage in the traditional sense, so salary floors depend on sector-specific rules rather than a single headline number.

Annual leave starts at 7 days and accrues over the course of the year, so your payroll system needs to track balances and pay out any unused entitlement when someone leaves. There are 11 public holidays in the calendar year, and those have to be accounted for in each pay run. On the termination side, the statutory notice period is 3 weeks, and there is no mandatory severance payment, so final pay is largely about clearing salary owed through the notice period plus any outstanding leave. That keeps offboarding calculations relatively straightforward compared to many other markets.

If you do not have a Singapore entity yet, you cannot run payroll there directly, which is where an employer of record becomes the practical route in. Even with an entity in place, keeping up with contribution rate changes, filing requirements, and leave rule updates takes real local knowledge. A global payroll provider or EOR absorbs that administrative weight, keeps your calculations current, and means you are not relying on a spreadsheet that someone built three years ago. For companies with a small Singapore headcount or a short-term project, the cost of a provider is usually well below the cost of getting it wrong.