The median monthly household income in Singapore is $12,446 as of the 2025 figures, the latest released by the Department of Statistics in February 2026. That is the median household market income, the measure SingStat now leads with. Adjusted for household size, it works out to $4,160 per household member. If you only care about income from a job, the older income-from-work figure for resident employed households is $12,027 a month. The reason there are two numbers, and why they both went up this year, is the actual story most articles skip. This guide gives you the exact 2025 figures, explains the methodology change SingStat made this year, shows you where your own household sits in the income distribution, and walks through what the median income does and does not tell you about how a Singapore household lives.
Singapore's median monthly household market income is $12,446 for 2025, up from $11,558 in 2024. That is a 7.7% rise in nominal terms, or 6.8% after adjusting for inflation. Market income covers everything a household earns before any government transfers or taxes: employment income (including one-twelfth of annual bonuses and employer CPF contributions) plus non-employment income such as investment returns, rent and regular CPF payouts.
Median means the middle of the distribution. Line up every resident household by income, and the one sitting exactly in the middle earns $12,446 a month. Half of all households earn more, half earn less. This is not the average. The average is dragged up by very high earners, so it always sits above the median. The median is the better gauge of a typical household, which is why SingStat reports it.
If you account for household size, the number that matters for comparison is income per household member. That rose from $3,837 in 2024 to $4,160 in 2025, an 8.4% nominal increase or 7.5% in real terms. Per-member income is the cleaner figure for comparing households, because a $12,446 household income spread across two people is a very different life from the same income spread across five.
| Measure | 2024 | 2025 | Nominal change | Real change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Per household | $11,558 | $12,446 | +7.7% | +6.8% |
| Per household member | $3,837 | $4,160 | +8.4% | +7.5% |
Here is the part most write-ups get wrong this year. SingStat changed what it reports. Up to the 2024 report, the headline measure was household income from work: employment income only, among resident employed households (households with at least one working person). From the 2025 report onward, the lead measure is household market income, which adds non-employment income and broadens coverage to include resident households with no employed person at all, such as retiree households living on CPF payouts.
So you will see two different numbers floating around, both correct, both for 2025. The new headline market-income median is $12,446 per household. The older income-from-work median, still published on the SingStat Table Builder for continuity, is $12,027 a month among resident employed households, up 6.3% in nominal terms from $11,314 in 2024.
The change matters because the two measures count different households and different income. Market income is the better picture of how much money actually flows into a Singapore household, since plenty of households earn meaningful income from CPF interest, the CPF LIFE and Retirement Sum schemes, rental and dividends on top of, or instead of, a salary. It also aligns Singapore's reporting with international standards used by the OECD. When you quote a 2026 median household income figure, $12,446 is now the official headline, but be clear about which measure you mean.
| Measure | What it counts | Which households | 2025 median/month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Household market income | Employment + non-employment income | All resident households | $12,446 |
| Household income from work | Employment income only | Resident employed households | $12,027 |
Market income is income a household receives before the government adds transfers or takes taxes. It has two parts. Employment income is wages and self-employment earnings, counted with one-twelfth of any annual bonus and with employer CPF contributions folded in. That last detail is why the official figure looks higher than the take-home pay you see in your bank app: it includes the CPF your employer pays on top of your salary.
Non-employment income is everything else: interest on savings and CPF balances, dividends from investments, rental income, contributions from other household members, pensions, annuities, and regular payouts from CPF and insurance such as CPF LIFE, ElderShield and CareShield Life. In 2025, employment income made up 79.6% of household market income per member, down from 81.1% in 2024, as non-employment sources grew in importance, partly because of an ageing population drawing more on CPF payouts.
Put in dollars per household member, the average market income of $4,160 in 2025 broke down into about $4,439 from employment, $751 from investments (of which $470 was interest on CPF balances), $223 from rent, and $167 from other sources such as CPF LIFE payouts and family contributions. Those source averages are computed across all households, including ones that earn nothing from a given source, which is why they look high next to the median; the point is the mix. Investment and other income have grown faster than wages over the past decade, which is the quiet story behind the methodology switch.
| Source | 2015 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Employment income | $3,277 | $4,233 | $4,439 |
| Investment income | $394 | $632 | $751 |
| of which CPF interest | $237 | $446 | $470 |
| Rental income | $146 | $212 | $223 |
| Other income (incl. CPF payouts) | $35 | $142 | $167 |
The median is one point on a curve. To see where you land, it helps to think in deciles, the ten equal slices of households ranked from lowest to highest income. The median sits between the 5th and 6th deciles. SingStat reports income by decile on a per-household-member basis, which is the fairer way to compare because it adjusts for household size.
Income grew across every decile in 2025, and grew fastest at the bottom. After adjusting for inflation, the lowest decile saw average per-member income rise 12.8%, the 2nd decile 9.7%, sliding down to 3.0% for the highest decile. Over the longer 2020 to 2025 stretch, the same pattern held: real per-member income rose between 1.4% and 10.5% per year across deciles, with the lower deciles pulling ahead. That is why income inequality, measured by the Gini coefficient, kept falling.
A practical way to use this: take your total household income, divide by the number of people living in your household, and compare the per-member figure against the median of $4,160. A two-person household on $9,000 a month has $4,500 per member, comfortably above the median. A five-person household on $12,000 has $2,400 per member, below it, even though the headline household figure looks high. Household size is the variable most people forget when they ask whether they are doing well.
To put real numbers on each slice, the table below shows the average monthly market income per household member in 2025, decile by decile. These are SingStat's own figures, summed across employment, investment, rental and other income. Read them as the centre of gravity within each tenth of households, not a hard cut-off. The median of $4,160 lands between the 5th decile ($3,744) and the 6th decile ($4,629), which is exactly where the middle should sit. The jump from the 9th to the 10th decile, from about $9,500 to roughly $18,000 per member, is the long tail of high earners that pulls the average above the median.
| Decile | Per-member income | Where it sits |
|---|---|---|
| 1st (lowest) | $507 | Mostly non-employment income (CPF, payouts) |
| 2nd | $1,450 | Below median |
| 3rd | $2,259 | Below median |
| 4th | $2,977 | Below median |
| 5th | $3,744 | Just below the median |
| 6th | $4,629 | Just above the median |
| 7th | $5,673 | Above median |
| 8th | $7,105 | Above median |
| 9th | $9,487 | Top fifth |
| 10th (highest) | $17,959 | Top tenth |
Many Singaporeans look at $12,446 and feel behind. Two things explain the gap. First, this is household income, not individual income, so a dual-income couple combines two salaries into one figure. Second, it counts employer CPF contributions and one-twelfth of bonuses, which do not show up in your monthly bank deposit. Your individual take-home pay being well under $12,446 is completely normal and tells you nothing about whether your household is above or below the median.
The right yardstick for one person is the individual income figure, which a different agency tracks. The Ministry of Manpower puts the median gross monthly income of full-time employed residents at $5,775 in 2025, up from $5,500 in 2024, and that already includes employer CPF. So a household at the $12,446 median is, roughly, two people each earning a little above the individual median. If you live alone or are the only earner, $5,775 is the benchmark that actually maps to your situation. We break the individual numbers down by job in our guide to the median gross income by occupation.
Market income is before government help. In 2025, resident households received an average of $7,300 per household member in government transfers across the year. That breaks down into $1,891 in regular contributions (recurring schemes like Workfare), $964 in ad-hoc contributions (one-off disbursements such as CDC Vouchers), and $4,445 in transfers in-kind (the value of subsidised services such as education and healthcare).
The 2025 average was lower than the $7,725 received in 2024, mostly because several one-off 2024 schemes ended, including the Majulah Package bonuses and the Budget 2024 Cost-of-Living Special Payment. So the dip is not the government pulling back support, it is the unwinding of temporary top-ups.
Transfers are heavily skewed toward lower-income households, which is the point. Households in HDB 1- and 2-room flats received an average of $16,519 per household member in 2025, more than double the all-household average, while households in condominiums and landed property received around $4,200 to $4,350. The slope tracks dwelling type closely because flat size is a decent proxy for income and need. Households in the first seven income deciles received more in transfers than they paid in taxes, so the net flow was toward them. You can see how some of these schemes work in our guides to the GST Voucher and CHAS card.
| Component | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Regular contributions (e.g. Workfare) | $1,653 | $1,891 |
| Ad-hoc contributions (e.g. CDC Vouchers) | $1,861 | $964 |
| Transfers in-kind (subsidised services) | $4,211 | $4,445 |
| Total per household member | $7,725 | $7,300 |
The same $7,300 average hides a wide range once you split households by dwelling. Government transfers are targeted, so a household in a 1- or 2-room flat receives roughly four times what a landed-property household gets per member. This is the redistributive system working as designed, and it is why the after-transfers Gini sits so far below the market-income Gini.
The Gini coefficient is the standard measure of income inequality. It runs from 0 (everyone earns the same) to 1 (one household has everything). For 2025, Singapore's Gini based on household market income per member fell to 0.452, down from 0.460 in 2024 and the lowest since records on market income began in 2015.
After accounting for government transfers and taxes, the Gini for 2025 drops further to 0.379, also the lowest since 2015. The gap between 0.452 and 0.379 is the redistributive effect: transfers and a progressive tax system narrow the spread between top and bottom earners. For comparison, the after-transfers Gini was 0.437 back in 2015, so inequality after government action has been trending down for a decade.
Why this matters for reading the median: when lower deciles grow faster than upper ones, as they did in 2025, the distribution tightens and the median becomes more representative of the typical household. The income story in Singapore right now is not just higher numbers, it is a slightly flatter spread around the middle. We go deeper on the trend and what drives it in our piece on income inequality in Singapore.
| Year | Before transfers and taxes | After transfers and taxes |
|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 0.494 | 0.437 |
| 2020 | 0.479 | 0.397 |
| 2024 | 0.460 | 0.381 |
| 2025 | 0.452 | 0.379 |
One year of growth is noise; the trend is signal. On the new market-income basis, the median monthly household income rose 2.9% in nominal terms (2.2% real) cumulatively from 2015 to 2020, then accelerated to 36.8% nominal (17.0% real) from 2020 to 2025, on the back of the economic recovery after the 2020 COVID downturn. That works out to 3.2% real growth per year over the past five years.
Per household member, the run is stronger because households have been shrinking. Real per-member income grew 11.9% from 2015 to 2020 and 20.5% from 2020 to 2025, or about 3.8% per year over the last five years. Average resident household size has drifted down to around 3.06 persons in 2025, which mechanically lifts per-member income even when household income holds steady.
The takeaway for your own planning: a 3% to 4% real annual rise is the recent baseline for the typical household. If your household income is growing slower than that, you are losing ground relative to the median. If inflation is eating your raises, that is worth checking against our piece on the current inflation rate in Singapore, since real growth is what actually buys you a better life. Where you live shifts the picture too, which we map out in our look at household income by district.
| Period | Per household (cumulative) | Per member (cumulative) |
|---|---|---|
| 2015 to 2020 | +2.2% | +11.9% |
| 2020 to 2025 | +17.0% | +20.5% |
| Per annum, 2020 to 2025 | +3.2% | +3.8% |
The median is a benchmark, not a target. Knowing where your household sits is useful for one thing above all: judging whether your saving and spending are calibrated to your actual position rather than to a vague sense of how everyone else lives. A household at the median, $12,446 a month, that follows the 50/30/20 rule would put roughly $2,500 a month toward savings and investments. Most households at the median are not doing that, which is the real gap worth closing.
If your per-member income is above the median, the question is whether your savings rate reflects it, or whether lifestyle inflation has absorbed the surplus. Higher income only builds wealth if a rising share of it is saved and invested rather than spent. Run your own figures through our budget planner and net worth calculator to see where you actually stand, separate from the headline.
If your per-member income is below the median, the levers are the same ones everyone has, just with tighter margins: build an emergency fund first, make sure you are claiming every transfer you qualify for, and automate even a small monthly investment so compounding does the heavy lifting over time. The fastest way to move up the deciles is usually income growth through skills and career moves, but the savings rate is the part you control from today.
The latest official figure, for 2025, is a median monthly household market income of $12,446, or $4,160 per household member. The older income-from-work measure for resident employed households is $12,027 a month. Both come from SingStat's Key Household Income Trends 2025, released in February 2026.
SingStat changed its headline measure in the 2025 report. It now leads with household market income ($12,446), which includes non-employment income and covers all resident households. The previous measure, household income from work ($12,027), counts only employment income among households with at least one working person. Both are still published.
It is before any government transfers and taxes, but it includes employer CPF contributions and one-twelfth of annual bonuses. That is why the official figure is higher than the take-home pay shown in your bank account, which excludes employer CPF and spreads bonuses unevenly.
The average sits above the median because very high earners pull it up. SingStat reports the median as the better gauge of a typical household. For 2025, the median household market income is $12,446 a month; the average is higher but less representative of the household in the middle.
Because it is household income, not individual income, so a working couple's two salaries are combined. It also counts employer CPF contributions and a share of annual bonuses, which do not appear in your monthly bank deposit. Your individual take-home pay being below $12,446 is normal.
Median household market income rose 7.7% in nominal terms and 6.8% after inflation, from $11,558 in 2024 to $12,446 in 2025. Per household member, it rose 8.4% nominal or 7.5% real. Lower-income deciles grew fastest, up to 12.8% in real terms for the lowest decile.
The Gini coefficient on household market income per member fell to 0.452 in 2025, the lowest since 2015. After government transfers and taxes, it falls to 0.379, also a decade low. The drop reflects faster income growth at the bottom and the redistributive effect of transfers and progressive taxes.
Take your total monthly household income, including employer CPF, and divide by the number of people living in your household. Compare that per-member figure against the median of $4,160. A high household income spread across many people can still sit below the median on a per-member basis.
The median gross monthly income of full-time employed residents was $5,775 in 2025, up from $5,500 in 2024, according to the Ministry of Manpower. That figure includes employer CPF contributions. It is the right benchmark for one person, while the $12,446 household figure combines all earners under one roof.
On a per-household-member basis in 2025, average monthly market income ran from about $507 in the lowest decile to roughly $17,959 in the highest. The 5th decile averaged $3,744 and the 6th $4,629, which brackets the $4,160 median. These are SingStat figures summed across employment, investment, rental and other income.
The median is the household in the exact middle of the distribution, so half earn more and half earn less. The average adds everyone's income and divides by the count, which lets a small number of very high earners pull it well above the median. SingStat leads with the median ($12,446 in 2025) because it better describes a typical household.
This is general financial information for Singapore, not personal financial advice. Figures change — verify current rates against the official sources above before acting. See our full disclaimer.