Singapore Statutory social-insurance contributions

What this value means

The single biggest trap: CPF IS NOT PAYABLE FOR FOREIGNERS AT ALL. It is payable only for Singapore Citizens and Singapore Permanent Residents (CPF Board, employer obligations: "CPF contributions are payable to employees who are Singapore Citizens and Singapore Permanent Residents (SPRs)"). An Employment Pass, S Pass, Work Permit or ONE Pass holder attracts ZERO CPF — no employee deduction and no employer contribution. Engines that model Singapore as "37% social security" and apply it to an expatriate produce a grossly wrong net pay and a grossly wrong employer cost. The employer's obligation for foreigners is a different instrument entirely (the MOM foreign worker levy for Work Permit/S Pass holders, nothing at all for EP holders), plus SDL, which does apply to foreigners, plus MBMF for Muslim employees of any nationality. Second: THE STATUTE EXPRESSES THE EMPLOYER'S LIABILITY AS THE TOTAL, NOT AS AN EMPLOYER SHARE. First Schedule column 2 is "Contributions payable by the employer for the calendar month" and equals the FULL 37% (or 34%, 25%, 16.5%, 12.5%); column 3 is the "Amount recoverable from the employee's wages". The employer share is a residual. This drives the rounding rule in para 5, which payroll engines routinely get wrong: compute the TOTAL first and round it to the nearest dollar (para 5(b), 50 cents counts as a dollar), then compute the employee share and round it DOWN (para 5(c), "a fraction of a dollar is to be ignored"), then set employer share = total − employee share. Rounding each side independently at 17% and 20% will disagree with CPF Board's own calculator by a dollar and will fail e-Submission reconciliation. Third: AGE-BANDED, and the band changes from the FIRST DAY OF THE MONTH FOLLOWING the birthday month (First Schedule para 5(a)(i)), not on the birthday and not on 1 January. Para 5(a)(ii): an employee born on 29 February changes from 1 March in the year they attain the age. Bands are 55-and-below / above 55–60 / above 60–65 / above 65–70 / above 70, and there is no upper age cut-off. Fourth: THE SENIOR-WORKER RATES ARE MID-SCHEDULE AND MOVED ON 1 JANUARY 2026. Above 55–60 went from 32.5% total / 17% employee (employer 15.5%) under S 970/2024 to 34% / 18% (employer 16%) under S 886/2025; above 60–65 went from 23.5% / 11.5% (employer 12%) to 25% / 12.5% (employer 12.5%). In both bands the employee share rose 1 point, the employer share 0.5 points and the total 1.5 points. Above 65–70 and above 70 did not move. Any table dated 2025 is now wrong for exactly two bands, which is the failure mode most likely to survive a casual review. Beware also of pairing figures across years: 22% total was the 2024 rate for the above-60–65 band, not the 2025 rate. Fifth: FOUR DIFFERENT CEILINGS/LIMITS, ALL LIVE AT ONCE, AND THEY ARE NOT INTERCHANGEABLE. (a) Ordinary Wage Ceiling: $8,000 PER MONTH, applied per employer per month to recurring wages — First Schedule para 5(ea)(iv), and it is now terminal, the statute says "in respect of each month in the year 2026 and every subsequent year, is $8,000", ending the four-step Budget 2023 climb ($6,000 → $6,300 from Sep 2023 → $6,800 in 2024 → $7,400 in 2025 → $8,000 in 2026). (b) The "applicable amount" of $102,000 PER YEAR — para 5(da), "in respect of the year 2016 and every subsequent year", unchanged since 2016 and not indexed. (c) The Additional Wage Ceiling, which is NOT a fixed number: para 2(1) charges no contribution on AW "in excess of the applicable amount less the amount of ordinary wages for the current year from that employer", where OW above the OW Ceiling is disregarded by para 4A(d). So the correct AW ceiling formula is $102,000 − (OW subject to CPF for the year). For an employee at or above $8,000/month all year, OW subject to CPF is $96,000 and only $6,000 of bonus attracts CPF. Calling $102,000 "the annual salary ceiling" and capping total pay at it is the classic error; $102,000 is a bonus-capping parameter, not a wage cap. The AW ceiling is applied PER EMPLOYER PER CALENDAR YEAR, is recomputed whenever AW becomes payable, at the end of the last month of employment and again at year end (para 2(4)), and can be aggregated across related contributors only on an application granted by the CPF Board (para 3). (d) The CPF ANNUAL LIMIT of $37,740 (= 37% × $102,000), which caps MANDATORY PLUS VOLUNTARY contributions to a member's accounts in a calendar year. It is not a payroll-deduction parameter and does not bind a normal employee on mandatory contributions alone, but it is the ceiling that bites on top-ups and voluntary contributions, and it is unchanged for 2026. Sixth: PR EMPLOYEES ARE ON GRADUATED RATES FOR TWO YEARS, ON AN ANNIVERSARY-MONTH CLOCK. Year 1 (G/G, para 1A) is 9% total / 5% employee for a PR aged 55 and below; year 2 (G/G, para 1B) is 24% / 15%. The period runs to the last day of the "first anniversary month" — defined in para 5(db) as the calendar month containing the anniversary of the day the employee became a PR — not to 31 December. Para 1F is the employer–employee AGREEMENT provision: on agreement, contributions follow para 1 (Full/Full, the citizen rates) or paras 1C/1D (Full employer / Graduated employee, years 1 and 2 respectively). Full/Full additionally requires CPF Board approval of a joint application. An engine that stores only "is PR = true" cannot compute this; it needs the PR grant date and the elected rate basis. Seventh: THE WAGE BANDS BELOW $750 ARE NOT A SIMPLE EXEMPTION FLOOR. Total Wages of $50 or less: nothing at all. Above $50 to $500: the EMPLOYER pays the full percentage of Total Wages but the employee share is NIL — a low-paid employee gets employer CPF with zero deduction. Above $500 to $750: a phase-in formula, employee share = 0.6×(TW − $500) for the 55-and-below band (0.54, 0.375, 0.225 and 0.15 for the successively older bands). Only above $750 do the headline percentages apply. Eighth: DEDUCTIBILITY. The employee's compulsory CPF contribution IS relieved before income tax — IRAS grants CPF Relief capped at the compulsory employee CPF contributions made on Ordinary Wages and Additional Wages under the CPF Act, so contributions above the OW/AW ceilings get no relief. Compulsory employer CPF contributions are not treated as taxable employment income of the employee; IRAS's Form IR8S explanatory notes work the other way round, requiring employers to report and tax only the EXCESS ("the compulsory employer's CPF contribution rate of an employee who is 55 years old and below is 17%. If the employer contributes more than the compulsory CPF contribution rate for the employee, the excess portion … is taxable"). CPF on wages in respect of non-Singapore employment is neither deductible nor taxable here. The employer-side SDL and foreign worker levy are business expenses, not wage items. The self-help group deductions are not modelled here as tax-relieved. Ninth: THE SELF-HELP GROUP FUNDS ARE FIXED BY LEGISLATION, NOT BY THE FUNDS' OWN POLICY — a point the original record got backwards. CDAC, SINDA and the Eurasian Community Fund each have their rates set out in the Schedule (Part 2, from 1 January 2015) to Rules made under Central Provident Fund Act 1953 s 76(4); MBMF's rates are in the Third Schedule to the Administration of Muslim Law Act 1966, imposed by s 78(1) and last amended by S 144/2016. They are collected with CPF and are employee-borne. The opt-out position DIFFERS between them: the CDAC/SINDA/ECF Rules oblige the employer to deduct only from an employee "who desires to contribute" and give an express opt-out in rule 4, whereas AMLA s 78(1) says the employer "must pay" for every Muslim employee and contains no opt-out — any MBMF waiver is administered by MUIS, not conferred by the instrument. Assignment is by the race on the NRIC for CDAC/SINDA/ECF (and the CDAC and Eurasian definitions are limited to Citizens and PRs), by religion for MBMF. Scope differs materially: MBMF reaches foreign employees of any nationality; the SINDA Rules' "Indian community" definition carries no citizenship qualifier, which is why SINDA reaches Employment Pass holders; CDAC and ECF are Citizens/PRs only. MBMF is the single line a Singapore payroll for expatriate Muslim staff most often omits. Tenth: SCOPE EXCLUSIONS AND THINGS THAT ARE NOT PAYROLL. Singapore has NO unemployment insurance branch and NO employer pension levy beyond CPF. MediShield Life and CareShield Life are compulsory national insurance but are paid out of the member's MediSave account, never withheld from wages, so they must not appear as payslip lines. The OA / Special / MediSave / Retirement Account split of a CPF contribution is an internal allocation and is itself age-banded — it changes where the money lands, never how much is deducted. Work injury compensation is a compulsory employer INSURANCE, not a contribution, with no statutory premium. Platform workers (delivery riders, private-hire drivers) are on a separate CPF regime under CPF Act s 8A ("Contributions in respect of platform workers … every platform operator must pay to the Fund contributions in accordance with the Fourth Schedule") with its own phase-in — out of scope for an ordinary employee but a real branch if the engine ever sees gig income. Eleventh, RETRIEVAL GOTCHAS (kept because they cost real time): sso.agc.gov.sg returns 403 to WebFetch and to bare curl, but serves 200 to curl with an ordinary desktop browser User-Agent — no browser automation is needed. The same trick is required for cpf.gov.sg PDFs. Those PDFs must then be parsed with a real PDF text extractor; WebFetch returns binary. The SSO provision text is present in the plain HTML for Act pages but the SCHEDULES to subsidiary legislation are not — for the community-fund Rules you must request ?ViewType=Pdf (AMLA1966-R4 returns HTML even when Pdf is requested; take its Schedule from the parent Act page instead, ProvIds=Sc3-). The CPF past-rates slug is /employer/employer-obligations/how-much-cpf-contributions-to-pay/past-cpf-contribution-and-allocation-rates and the 2025 file is jan2025_contributionandallocationrates.pdf (NOT CPFcontributionratesfrom1Jan2025.pdf, which 404s). SUB-NATIONAL VARIATION: none — Singapore is a unitary city-state with no sub-national payroll contribution variation. Rates vary by employee AGE BAND, by CITIZENSHIP/PR status and PR seniority year, by elected rate basis for 1st/2nd-year PRs (G/G, F/G or F/F), by community/religion for the self-help group funds, and (for the employer-only foreign worker levy) by SECTOR, skill tier and pass type — but never by geography. WHAT WE DO NOT PUT A NUMBER ON: 1. FOREIGN WORKER LEVY — Work Permit rates: refused a number. There is no single national rate. MOM's own COS 2026 factsheet states the framework has "24 different levy rates today", depending jointly on sector (construction, manufacturing, marine shipyard, process, services), the worker's skill classification (Basic-skilled R2 vs Higher-skilled R1) and the employer's dependency-ratio tier. Only the S Pass levy has one national figure ($650/month across all sectors and levy tiers since 1 September 2025, daily rate $21.37), which I have reported from MOM's own page. I did not read MOM's full Work Permit levy schedule instrument, so I put no Work Permit number on the record. 2. WORK INJURY COMPENSATION INSURANCE — refused a rate. Genuinely none exists: WICA 2019 mandates cover, but the premium is commercially underwritten by MOM-designated insurers on nature of business, headcount and aggregate wages. A null here is the correct answer, not a gap. The $2,600 coverage threshold IS published and is served. 3. SELF-HELP GROUP FUNDS — THIS REFUSAL IS WITHDRAWN. The original record refused to characterise CDAC/MBMF/SINDA/ECF as statutory and said "no instrument fixes them". That was wrong and I have corrected it: all four scales are in legislation (CDAC/SINDA/ECF in the Schedule Part 2 to Rules made under CPF Act 1953 s 76(4); MBMF in the Third Schedule to the Administration of Muslim Law Act 1966, s 78(1), [S 144/2016]). I read all four Schedules and they match the served bands exactly. rate_total remains null for all four only because the amounts are flat sums, not percentages — that is a units point, not a refusal. 4. MEDISHIELD LIFE and CARESHIELD LIFE — refused premium figures. They are compulsory but are age-banded / cohort-banded individual premiums charged to a MediSave account, not employment contributions, and putting a number in a payroll field would invite a wrong deduction. Listed with nulls so the branch is visibly present. 5. THE STATUTORY MECHANISM EXCLUDING FOREIGNERS FROM CPF — STILL OPEN, and I re-tested it. I state the exclusion with confidence (CPF Board, employer obligations: contributions are payable "to employees who are Singapore Citizens and Singapore Permanent Residents"), but I could not reach the exempting instrument. I read CPF Act s 7(1) in full — "Subject to any regulations made under section 77(1), every employer of an employee must pay to the Fund monthly in respect of each employee contributions at the appropriate rates set out in the First Schedule" — so the carve-out sits in regulations under s 77(1). The First Schedule defines "foreign employee" at para 5(dc) as "an employee who is not a citizen of Singapore or permanent resident" but nowhere excludes them from charge, and I searched the CPF Act's subsidiary-legislation index without finding the operative exemption. I have therefore cited the fact to the administering authority and NOT invented a regulation number. 6. SDL EXEMPTIONS — SUBSTANTIALLY CLOSED. The original record attributed the exclusions to an SSG FAQ and flagged the list as possibly incomplete. They are in fact in the statute: Skills Development Levy Act 1979 s 2 defines "employee" as one "rendering in that month services wholly or partly in Singapore" (plus leave attributable to earlier such service), and expressly excludes "any domestic servant, gardener or chauffeur, wholly and exclusively employed by an individual otherwise than in connection with his or her trade, business, profession or vocation". I read the definition directly. I did not exhaustively check for a separate ministerial exemption power elsewhere in the Act, so I do not claim the list is closed — but it is now sourced to the instrument rather than to an FAQ. 7. NO NUMBER GIVEN for the CPF OA/SA/MA/RA allocation rates. They are age-banded and change on the same schedule, but they allocate an already-computed contribution and are not a payroll deduction; I did not read the current allocation table and will not guess it. ALREADY LEGISLATED, NOT YET IN FORCE: CPF RATES FROM 1 JANUARY 2027 — CONFIRMED AND DOCUMENTED, BUT STILL NOT ENACTED. CPF Board has published "CPF Contribution Rate Table from 1 January 2027" (https://www.cpf.gov.sg/content/dam/web/employer/employer-obligations/documents/jan2027cpfcontributionrates.pdf), which I downloaded and extracted independently. From 1 January 2027, for Citizens and 3rd-year-onwards SPRs: employees above 55 to 60 go from 34% total / 18% employee to 35.5% / 19% (employer 16% → 16.5%; max monthly OW contribution $2,720 → $2,840 total and $1,440 → $1,520 employee; >$50–$500 band 16% → 16.5%; >$500–$750 multiplier 0.54 → 0.57). Employees above 60 to 65 go from 25% / 12.5% to 26% / 13% (employer 12.5% → 13%; max $2,000 → $2,080 total and $1,000 → $1,040 employee; >$50–$500 band 12.5% → 13%; multiplier 0.375 → 0.39). The 55-and-below (37%/20%, max $2,960/$1,600), above 65–70 (16.5%/7.5%, max $1,320/$600) and above 70 (12.5%/5%, max $1,000/$400) bands are UNCHANGED. The Ordinary Wage Ceiling stays at $8,000 and the applicable amount stays at $102,000. CPF Board's "how much CPF contributions to pay" page carries the forward notice: "there will be an increase to the CPF contribution rates from 1 Jan 2027". LEGAL STATUS CAVEAT, RE-TESTED ON 8 AUGUST 2026: the consolidated First Schedule on Singapore Statutes Online (current version as at 08 Aug 2026) still shows the 2026 figures. I searched the whole First Schedule text for "2027" and "wef 01/01/2027" — zero occurrences — and the latest instruments annotated against paras 1(b) and 1(c) remain [S 970/2024 wef 01/01/2025] and [S 886/2025 wef 01/01/2026]. The Act's amendment timeline runs no further forward than 01 Jul 2026. So no gazette notification amending the First Schedule with effect from 1 January 2027 had been made, or published to SSO, at the time of this check. Treat the 2027 rates as authoritative CPF Board policy with a published rate table but not yet as enacted subsidiary legislation. RE-VERIFY DEADLINE: check SSO for a "Central Provident Fund Act 1953 (Amendment of First Schedule) Notification" bearing wef 01/01/2027 by 30 November 2026, and re-verify again on 2 January 2027 that the notification was made and the CPF Board table did not shift. NOT SCHEDULED ANY MORE — CORRECTED: the original record listed the Local Qualifying Salary rising from $1,600 to $1,800/month on 1 July 2026 as a future change. That date has passed. MOM's Local Qualifying Salary page (last updated 1 July 2026) now states "The LQS is $1,800 today", with a part-time equivalent of $10.50/hour gross. It is in force. It remains a foreign-worker QUOTA-COUNTING threshold, not a CPF threshold, and changes no contribution calculation — flagged only so it is not mistaken for one. ANNOUNCED AT MOM'S COMMITTEE OF SUPPLY, 3 MARCH 2026 (none of these is a contribution rate, but all are commonly confused with one): (a) EP minimum qualifying salary rises $5,600 → $6,000 (Financial Services $6,200 → $6,600); S Pass minimum qualifying salary rises $3,300 → $3,600 (FS $3,800 → $4,000) — applying to new applications from January 2027 and to renewals for passes expiring from January 2028. These are eligibility thresholds, not levies or ceilings. (b) Work Permit levy framework to be streamlined FROM 2028: Basic-skilled (R2) monthly levy up $100 in Marine Shipyard and $150 in Process, with no change for Higher-skilled (R1); Manufacturing and Services levy tiers cut from three to two. No change to the S Pass levy was announced, so $650/month stands. (c) Eight occupations added to the Non-Traditional Source Occupation List from September 2026. SOURCING CAVEATS: CONFIDENCE IS "primary" — every served figure was read either in the statute/subsidiary legislation on Singapore Statutes Online or on the administering authority's own current page (CPF Board, MOM, IRAS), and in most cases both. Residual limits on that: 1. The instrument excluding FOREIGNERS from CPF was not reached (refusal 5). CPF Act s 7(1) is expressly "Subject to any regulations made under section 77(1)" and the exclusion sits in regulations I could not locate in the SSO subsidiary-legislation index. The fact itself is stated by the CPF Board on its own employer-obligations page and is not in doubt; only its instrument citation is unsourced. No regulation number has been invented. 2. The 1 January 2027 CPF rates are published CPF Board policy but are NOT yet enacted subsidiary legislation. Verified absent from the First Schedule as at 8 August 2026. Do not serve them as statute-backed before a "Central Provident Fund Act 1953 (Amendment of First Schedule) Notification" wef 01/01/2027 appears. Re-verify by 30 November 2026 and again on 2 January 2027. 3. No single Work Permit foreign worker levy figure is served, by design — MOM operates 24 rates on its own account. Only the S Pass levy ($650) is a national figure. 4. WICA carries no rate at all: premiums are commercially underwritten. The $2,600 in floor_monthly is an insurance-COVERAGE threshold, not a contribution floor or ceiling, and WICA compensation liability itself is salary-blind. 5. The SDL $2.00 statutory minimum is not machine-readable in a numeric field — floor_monthly is null on purpose, because that field carries a wage threshold everywhere else and $2 is a levy amount. A consumer that reads only rate_employer and ceiling_monthly will compute $1.50 for a $600 earner instead of the correct $2.00. The base field states the full "greater of" rule and that the minimum binds below $800 of monthly wages. If the schema ever gains a levy-amount floor field, this is the value to move. 6. The self-help group amounts are flat sums, so rate_employee and rate_total are null for all four funds; the bands live in the base field. They are legislated (not fund policy, as the original record wrongly said), but CDAC/SINDA/ECF carry an express statutory opt-out and MBMF does not — a payroll engine needs a per-employee override for the first three and should not assume the same mechanism for MBMF. 7. SDL exemptions are sourced to the statutory definition of "employee" but I did not exhaustively rule out a separate ministerial exemption power elsewhere in the Skills Development Levy Act, so that list is not claimed to be closed. 8. CPF OA/SA/MA/RA allocation rates are not served. They are age-banded and move on the same schedule, but they allocate an already-computed contribution and are not a deduction. 9. Platform workers are a separate regime (CPF Act s 8A and the Fourth Schedule) and are out of scope of this record. 10. Retrieval: source_url_loads is true, but only for a client sending an ordinary desktop browser User-Agent. sso.agc.gov.sg and the cpf.gov.sg PDF host both return 403 to WebFetch and to bare curl. Any automated freshness check on this record must set a UA or it will report a dead source. Researched against primary instruments and then attacked by an independent adversarial verification pass before being served (2026-08-08). Where that pass found a defect, the correction it proved from the instrument has been applied. Employee and employer shares are stated separately: the employee figure is what leaves the payslip, the employer figure is cost of employment and is not a deduction.

Get it programmatically

curl https://asiaref.dev/v1/sg/social-contributions
# $0.005 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History:    curl https://asiaref.dev/v1/sg/social-contributions/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://asiaref.dev/provenance/sg/social-contributions

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