Singapore: Increase in Employment Pass application salary requirements

The Ministry of Manpower (MOM) announced that the Employment Pass (EP) minimum qualifying salary will be revised upwards from the current SGD 5,000 to SGD 5,600 per month, effective 1 January 2025 for new EP applications and for renewal applications, from 1 January 2026. The minimum qualifying salary for EPs for the Financial Services sector will be revised from SGD 5,500 to SGD 6,200 per month.

In brief

MOM's latest revisions to the qualifying salaries for EP applications reflects MOM's continued policy to ensure that the quality of our foreign workforce improves in tandem with Singapore's local workforce, as noted in our earlier alert. MOM has traditionally used the quantum of fixed monthly salary as a proxy for quality.

To ensure a level playing field for Singapore's citizens and permanent resident employees, the MOM bases this qualifying salary on wage benchmarks pegged to the salaries of the top one-third of professionals, managers, executives and technicians (PMET) correlated by age.

The revision, announced by the Minister for Manpower in his budget speech on 4 March 2024 at the Committee of Supply 2024, takes into account the latest increases in the wage benchmarks.

To place these age-correlated revisions in context, we summarise below two-staged eligibility criteria which also include the latest MOM observations on the Complementarity Assessment framework (COMPASS), meant to assess EP candidates on individual and firm-related attributes.


Contents

Click here to access the full alert.

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