You will be able to check what SkillsFuture Credit and course subsidies can pay for in your case.
Siti remembers getting a letter about SkillsFuture Credit years ago, and a later one about a top-up. She has never used any of it. When she finally logged in, she wasn't sure how much she had, whether any of it had expired, or whether it could go towards a master's degree at all. A colleague said it was "only for short courses". Another said he had used his on a part-time diploma.
They could both be right, because what the credit covers depends on the course. This lesson shows you how to check, in your own account, what SkillsFuture Credit and course subsidies would actually pay towards a course you are considering. It quotes no amounts, because they depend on your age and on what has been announced, and they change.
SkillsFuture Credit is a government credit that Singapore citizens can use to pay for approved skills-related courses. It is not cash. It sits in your MySkillsFuture account and can only be used for courses that are listed as eligible on the MySkillsFuture portal.
The government has added to it over the years, sometimes with top-ups for everyone and sometimes with additional credits for particular age groups or for mid-career workers, which can come with their own rules on which courses they cover. Some top-ups have had expiry dates. All of this is shown in your own account, so you don't need to piece it together from news reports.
Log in to MySkillsFuture with Singpass. Your account shows how much credit you have, broken down by type if you have more than one kind, along with any expiry dates and the eligibility rules attached to each.
Write down what you find: each type of credit, its balance, any expiry date, and the date you checked. If a portion is due to expire soon, that is worth knowing before you plan a course for next year.
Then look at the course you are considering. On MySkillsFuture, eligible courses are marked as such, and the course page shows whether SkillsFuture Credit can be used for it. A course that isn't listed can't be paid with credit, however relevant it is to your work. Degrees, diplomas and short courses can all appear on the portal, so check the particular course rather than assuming from its type.
Many approved courses also carry government subsidies, which reduce the fee before your credit is applied. The course page usually shows a full fee and a lower fee after subsidy. What you pay depends on things such as your citizenship and age, and the subsidy often comes with conditions, such as attending a minimum share of the classes and sitting the assessments.
Read those conditions before you sign up. If you miss them, the training provider may ask you to pay the subsidy back, which would turn a cheap course into an expensive one.
So for a subsidised course, the order is: listed fee, minus subsidy, minus SkillsFuture Credit, equals what you pay in cash.
Here is Siti's check, with figures made up for the example.
She logs in and finds a credit balance of S$500, with no expiry date on it. She then looks at a short course on marketing analytics, which is listed for S$3,000. With the subsidy she qualifies for, the course page shows a fee of S$900. She applies her S$500 of credit, which leaves S$400 for her to pay.
The S$3,000 course costs her S$400 in cash. Without checking, she might have planned for the full S$3,000, or decided she couldn't afford it.
For the master's from lesson 7.1, The full cost of a course is fees plus lost income, she searches the portal and finds the programme listed as eligible for credit, though without the subsidy the short course had. Her S$500 would knock S$500 off a S$42,000 fee. Useful, but not a funding plan on its own. Lesson 7.3 looks at whether her employer might pay part of it.
Credit amounts, top-ups, subsidies and eligible courses all change. New credits are announced in Budget statements, conditions are revised, and courses are added to and removed from the portal.
So check MySkillsFuture before you build the credit into a plan, and again before you register. Don't plan around a figure a colleague mentioned, or the amount you remember from a letter years ago.
For the activity, log in with Singpass and have one course in mind that you would genuinely consider taking.
Log in to MySkillsFuture, note your credit balance and find one approved course with its net fee.
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