You will be able to say how your monthly CPF contribution is split and what each account can and cannot pay for.
A month after her first payday, Hui Min logs in to her CPF account expecting to see S$1,480, the amount her payslip said went in, and finds three separate balances that add up to it. Her colleague Arjun, who started a year earlier, glances over and says the money "gets split". He is not sure how either.
Here is how the split works and what each account can pay for, kept to what matters in your first year. Lesson 5.1 of The Singapore personal finance system, end to end, Your CPF accounts at a glance, has the longer version. Any figure below is a made-up example.
Every month, your contribution and your employer's go into CPF together. The CPF Board then divides the total between three accounts, the Ordinary Account, the Special Account and MediSave, using allocation rates, which set what share of the month's money each account receives, and those rates depend on your age. While you are young, the Ordinary Account gets the largest share, and more shifts towards retirement and healthcare as you get older.
In Hui Min's example, her S$1,480 is split into S$900 for the Ordinary Account, S$250 for the Special Account and S$330 for MediSave. Those figures are invented to show the idea. The current allocation table is on cpf.gov.sg, and your own transaction history shows exactly how each month was divided.
The Ordinary Account, or OA, is the most flexible of the three. For most people its biggest use is housing: the down payment and monthly repayments on an HDB flat or private property, within limits on how much can be used.
It also pays for approved tertiary education at local institutions through the CPF Education Scheme, which module 5 covers in detail. If your parents used their OA to pay your fees, this is the scheme involved. And it can be used for some investments under the CPF Investment Scheme, and for certain insurance premiums, such as the Dependants' Protection Scheme that comes up in module 6.
Your rent, bills and groceries are another matter, because no CPF account pays for those, so your spending plan has to run on take-home pay alone.
The Special Account, or SA, is for retirement. It is much harder to use for anything else, and in return it earns a higher interest rate than the OA. That gap is the reason some people later choose to move money from the OA to the SA. It is a one-way move, so it only suits money you are sure you will never want for housing.
The interest rates on all the accounts are set by the CPF Board under published rules, and CPF pays extra interest on the first part of your combined balances. Check the current rates on cpf.gov.sg rather than quoting a figure from memory.
MediSave pays for approved healthcare costs, such as hospital bills and some outpatient treatment for chronic conditions, within limits for each type of use. It also pays premiums for MediShield Life, the basic national hospital cover, and part of the premium for an Integrated Shield Plan if you choose to have one. Module 6 comes back to both.
For a first jobber, this is useful to know now. When you start comparing health insurance later, part of the cost may come from MediSave rather than your take-home pay, and the limits on how much MediSave can pay are published on cpf.gov.sg.
CPF rules change. Allocation rates, interest rates, withdrawal limits and the uses each account allows have all been revised over the years, sometimes in ways that made older advice wrong. A friend's screenshot, a forum post from three years ago or something a relative remembers may describe a rule that no longer applies.
So treat two places as your source: the CPF Board website and your own account, which you can open on cpf.gov.sg or in the CPF app with Singpass. The website has the current rules and rates. Your account has your actual balances, each month's contribution and how it was split.
Arjun, it turns out, has never once checked whether his contributions arrived. Hui Min decides she will look every month, at least for her first year, and the first step is simply to see this month's numbers for herself.
Log in to your CPF account with Singpass and note this month's contribution and how it was split across the three accounts.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).