The median full-time working resident in Singapore earned S$5,775 a month in 2025, the latest official figure from the Ministry of Manpower's Comprehensive Labour Force Survey. That number includes your employer's CPF contribution; strip it out and the median basic pay on a typical contract is about S$5,000. The figure rose 5.0% over the year, and after inflation real incomes still grew 4.3%. This guide gives you the verified MOM numbers by percentile, the fresh-graduate starting figures from the 2025 Graduate Employment Survey, and the part most salary lists skip: what actually lands in your bank account after CPF and tax. Use it to sense-check an offer, a pay rise or your own position against the rest of Singapore.
The single number most people want is the median full-time salary, and the official one is S$5,775 a month for 2025, the most recent year MOM has released. "Median" means half of full-time working residents earn more and half earn less, so it describes a typical worker far better than the average, which a handful of very high earners pull upward.
Read it carefully, because the headline figure includes your employer's 17% CPF contribution. Your employment contract usually quotes the figure without it. On the same MOM basis, the median excluding employer CPF was S$5,000 a month in 2025. So when a recruiter quotes you S$5,000 basic, you are sitting right on the national median; the S$5,775 version just adds back the CPF your employer pays into your accounts on top.
One more boundary worth knowing: "residents" in MOM's survey means Singapore citizens and permanent residents only. Foreigners on Employment Passes, S Passes and Work Permits are excluded, so these figures describe the resident workforce, not everyone working on the island.
| Measure | Including employer CPF | Excluding employer CPF |
|---|---|---|
| Median (P50) | S$5,775 | S$5,000 |
| 20th percentile (P20) | S$3,164 | about S$2,740 |
| Median (P50) growth over 2024 | +5.0% nominal / +4.3% real | +5.0% nominal / +4.3% real |
| P20 growth over 2024 | +4.6% nominal / +3.8% real | +4.6% nominal / +3.8% real |
A median tells you the middle, but it does not tell you whether your pay is normal for someone at your stage. Percentiles do that. The 20th percentile (P20) is the figure that one in five full-time residents earns less than, and in 2025 it was S$3,164 a month including employer CPF, up 4.6% from S$3,026 the year before.
MOM's annual labour force release publishes the 20th percentile (P20) and the median (P50), but it does not publish a 75th-percentile figure, so any specific "top 25%" salary you see quoted elsewhere is an estimate rather than an official MOM number. What MOM does confirm is the spread between the bottom fifth and the middle, and the gap has actually narrowed over the past five years because lower-wage incomes grew faster than the middle: real income at P20 rose 2.9% a year over 2020 to 2025, against 1.6% a year at the median. The P20-to-median income ratio improved to 0.55 in 2025, up from 0.52 in 2020.
Pay in Singapore climbs steeply through your 30s, plateaus in your 40s and 50s, then tapers as people move to part-time or lighter roles later in life. The shape matters for your money plan: your highest-earning, highest-saving decade is usually your 40s, which is exactly when housing and children compete for the same cash.
The ranges below are indicative figures that reflect the broad age-earnings pattern in the resident workforce; they are not exact MOM percentile figures, since MOM's headline release publishes the median and P20 across all ages rather than a median for every age band. Treat them as orientation rather than a target, because occupation and industry move pay around far more than age alone.
| Age band | Stage | Indicative median range |
|---|---|---|
| 20-24 | Early career / fresh entry | S$3,300 - S$3,900 |
| 25-29 | Building experience | S$4,800 - S$5,500 |
| 30-39 | Specialist / first management | S$6,500 - S$8,500 |
| 40-49 | Peak earning years | S$7,500 - S$10,000 |
| 50-59 | Senior / plateau | S$6,500 - S$9,000 |
| 60 and above | Wind-down / part-time shift | S$3,000 - S$5,500 |
If you are starting out, the relevant benchmark is the Graduate Employment Survey, not the all-ages median. The 2025 Joint Autonomous Universities Graduate Employment Survey, published in early 2026, put the median gross monthly starting salary for fresh graduates in full-time permanent jobs at S$4,500, unchanged from the year before. NUS graduates came in higher, with a median of S$4,746.
The spread by course is wide. Computing, medicine and the better business-and-tech double degrees start around S$5,000 to S$7,000, while arts, humanities and social-science graduates typically begin nearer S$3,500 to S$4,500. The employment outcomes held up despite a cautious job market: across the autonomous universities, about 88.9% of graduates found work within six months of finishing their final exams.
Fresh-graduate ranges are narrower than mid-career ones, so the swing is usually a few hundred dollars, not thousands. The lever that matters more is the trajectory: a slightly lower starting salary at a firm with structured promotions can beat a higher one that stalls. Before you accept, run the offer through a salary and take-home calculator so you compare cash-in-hand, not headline numbers, and factor in any sign-on bonus, which is one-off and should not anchor your expectations for year two.
Most "salary guide Singapore" results you will find are recruiter guides from firms like Robert Half, Morgan McKinley, Michael Page or Hays. They are genuinely useful for one thing the MOM data cannot do: pay for a specific job title, like a senior software engineer or a finance director. But they measure something different from the official figures, and reading them the wrong way leads to bad expectations.
Three things to keep in mind. First, recruiter figures are almost always quoted as gross annual base salary, not monthly and not including employer CPF, so a S$96,000 listing is S$8,000 a month basic, roughly S$9,360 once you add the 17% employer CPF that the MOM median includes. Second, they show a range across the 25th, 50th and 75th percentile for that role, where the top figure assumes deep experience and scarce skills, not the typical hire. Third, the numbers come from that firm's own placements and surveys, so they skew toward the white-collar, finance, tech and professional roles that recruiters fill, not the whole workforce. That is why a recruiter guide can show a S$80,000-plus role as "entry level" while the national P20 sits near S$3,164 a month.
Pay also varies far more by industry than by job title alone. Financial services, information and communications, and professional services sit well above the all-economy median in MOM's industry data, while food and beverage, retail and cleaning sit below it. Use a recruiter guide to find the going rate for your exact role and seniority, then translate it back to a monthly, CPF-inclusive figure before you compare it to anything here or to your current pay. Run that conversion through a salary and take-home calculator so you are comparing like for like.
Singapore has no single across-the-board minimum wage, but it does have two floors that set the lowest legal pay for most resident workers, and salary guides almost never mention them. The first is the Local Qualifying Salary (LQS). An employer that hires foreign workers must pay each local employee at least the LQS, which is S$1,600 gross a month for full-time staff working 35 to 44 hours a week, or S$10.50 an hour for part-timers. From 1 July 2026 the full-time LQS rises to S$1,800 a month.
The second floor is the Progressive Wage Model (PWM), a sector-by-sector wage ladder that sets rising minimum basic wages for lower-paid jobs in cleaning, security, landscaping, retail, food services, lift maintenance, and for in-house administrators and drivers. A general cleaner, for example, has a baseline basic wage of S$1,740 a month, rising to S$2,080 from 1 July 2026, plus a PWM bonus of at least two weeks of basic pay a year. The ladder pays more as workers take on supervisory or machine-operation roles.
If you earn at this end of the scale, these floors are your legal entitlement, not a target to negotiate toward, and they rise on fixed dates you can plan around. They also explain why the bottom of the income distribution has been growing faster than the middle: real income at the 20th percentile rose 2.9% a year from 2020 to 2025, against 1.6% at the median, and the wage floors are part of why.
Your annual pay is often more than 12 times your monthly salary, because of the Annual Wage Supplement (AWS) and performance bonuses. The AWS, also called the 13th-month payment, is a single extra payment on top of your year's wages. It is not compulsory under Singapore law: you only get it if it is written into your employment contract or collective agreement, so check the offer letter rather than assuming. Where it is paid, it is usually one month's salary.
Performance bonuses and any monthly variable component sit on top of that and are also discretionary unless your contract guarantees them. This matters when you compare two offers: a base of S$5,000 with a guaranteed AWS and a typical two-month bonus is worth far more over a year than a S$5,500 base with no variable pay. Convert everything to an annual total before you decide, and treat a one-off sign-on bonus as exactly that, not part of your recurring pay.
Raw pay differs between men and women, but most of that gap reflects different jobs, industries and hours rather than unequal pay for the same work. In 2023, full-time female employees aged 25 to 54 earned 14.3% less than their male counterparts on an unadjusted basis, down from 16.3% in 2018. Once you account for differences in occupation, industry, age and education, Singapore's adjusted gender pay gap was 6.0% in 2023, according to a Ministry of Manpower study.
The practical takeaway is about benchmarking, not blame. If you are comparing your salary to a friend's or to a published figure, compare within the same role, industry and seniority, because the headline gap is driven mainly by which jobs people hold. The adjusted gap of 6.0% is the residual once those factors are stripped out, and it has narrowed as more women move into higher-paying occupations.
Two forces are shaping offers this year. The first is skills: employers are paying premiums for scarce, measurable capabilities rather than for years served, with the sharpest demand in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, data and fintech. If your role touches one of these, you have more room to negotiate than the all-ages median suggests. The second is caution: hiring slowed from the tight market of 2022 and 2024, so employers are slower to stretch on base pay and lean more on bonuses, flexibility and contract or project roles.
For your own pay, the lever that still works is moving for a defined reason rather than staying put by default. Job-switchers tend to win larger increments than internal raises, but only when they move toward a scarcer skill or a clear step up, not sideways. Before you chase a higher base, check the full package: a smaller base with a guaranteed AWS, a real bonus and CPF on the full ceiling can beat a bigger headline number. Review your position once a year, and if your responsibilities have outgrown your pay band, that gap is your evidence for a raise.
Salaries have risen steadily over the past decade, with two faster years in 2022 and 2024 when the labour market tightened. The 5.0% nominal rise to S$5,775 in 2025 was slower than the 5.8% jump the year before, but because inflation eased, the real gain of 4.3% was healthy. Over the longer run, real median pay grew about 1.6% a year from 2020 to 2025.
The table below is the official MOM series for the full-time median including employer CPF. It is a useful reality check: if your pay has not moved in three years, you have effectively taken a pay cut against both inflation and the market.
| Year | Median (S$) |
|---|---|
| 2020 | 4,534 |
| 2021 | 4,680 |
| 2022 | 5,070 |
| 2023 | 5,197 |
| 2024 | 5,500 |
| 2025 | 5,775 |
Gross salary is the number people compare, but take-home is the number you live on. Two deductions stand between them: CPF and income tax. CPF is the bigger one for most people, and it is forced savings rather than money lost, but it still leaves your bank account each month.
If you are 55 or under, 20% of your monthly wage goes into CPF as your own contribution, capped by the Ordinary Wage ceiling. From 1 January 2026 that ceiling rose to S$8,000 a month (the final step of a multi-year increase), so CPF is now deducted on monthly wages up to S$8,000. Your employer adds 17% on top, which also goes into your CPF accounts. Work the median: a worker on S$5,000 basic pays S$1,000 into CPF, leaving S$4,000 in cash, while the employer's S$850 lands in CPF on top. Check exactly how the ceiling hits your pay with a CPF contribution calculator.
Income tax is gentler than CPF and far gentler than most countries. The first S$20,000 of chargeable income is taxed at 0%, rates rise in steps, and the top marginal rate of 24% only bites above S$1 million of chargeable income. A single worker on the S$5,000 median, after the standard reliefs, pays only a few hundred dollars of tax a year. CPF contributions and approved tax reliefs reduce your chargeable income further. To see your own number, the Singapore income tax guide and an income tax calculator will be more precise than any rule of thumb.
"Good" depends on what your pay has to cover, not just where it sits on the percentile chart. A single person renting a room on S$5,000 basic has very different room to save than a sole earner with a mortgage and two kids on the same pay. The honest test is your savings rate, the share of take-home you keep after spending, because that is what builds wealth regardless of the headline number.
A practical target is to keep at least 20% of your take-home, after CPF, and to hold three to six months of expenses as an emergency fund before you invest seriously. If you earn the median S$5,000 basic, that means living on roughly S$3,200 of your S$4,000 cash and routing the rest into savings and investments. The 50/30/20 split is a starting frame; see the 50/30/20 rule and run your real numbers through a personal budget calculator.
Comparing your pay against the market is a yearly habit worth keeping. If you are below the median for your age band and your responsibilities have grown, that is your case for a raise. If you are above it, the question shifts from earning more to keeping more, and a higher salary only helps if your savings rate moves with it rather than your spending.
The median full-time resident salary is S$5,775 a month including employer CPF, the latest MOM Comprehensive Labour Force Survey figure for 2025. Excluding the employer's CPF contribution, which is how most contracts quote it, the median is about S$5,000 a month. It rose 5.0% over the year, or 4.3% after inflation.
Anything above the median of S$5,000 basic (S$5,775 including employer CPF) puts you in the top half of full-time residents. MOM does not publish a 75th-percentile figure, so there is no official threshold for the "top 25%". In any case, "good" depends on what your salary has to cover, so a better test is your savings rate: keeping 20% or more of your take-home matters more than the headline figure.
The 2025 Graduate Employment Survey put the median starting salary for fresh graduates in full-time permanent jobs at S$4,500 a month, unchanged from the previous year. NUS graduates had a higher median of S$4,746. Computing and medicine start around S$5,000 to S$7,000, while arts and humanities graduates typically begin nearer S$3,500 to S$4,500.
The headline MOM figure of S$5,775 includes your employer's CPF contribution. Your contract usually quotes pay without it. On the same official basis, the median excluding employer CPF was S$5,000 a month in 2025. When comparing offers, always check whether a quoted number includes employer CPF or not.
If you are 55 or under, 20% of your wage goes into your own CPF, capped at the S$8,000 monthly Ordinary Wage ceiling from January 2026. On S$5,000 basic you pay S$1,000 into CPF and keep S$4,000 in cash, before a small income tax bill. Your employer adds 17% on top into your CPF accounts, so your real compensation is higher than your take-home.
The full-time resident median including employer CPF rose from S$4,534 in 2020 to S$5,775 in 2025. Real median pay grew about 1.6% a year over that period, while lower-wage incomes at the 20th percentile grew faster at 2.9% a year, narrowing the gap between the bottom fifth and the middle.
MOM's income figures cover residents only, meaning Singapore citizens and permanent residents. Foreigners on Employment Passes, S Passes and Work Permits are excluded, so the median of S$5,775 describes the resident workforce rather than everyone working in Singapore.
There is no single across-the-board minimum wage, but two floors set the lowest legal pay for most resident workers. The Local Qualifying Salary is S$1,600 gross a month for full-timers (S$10.50 an hour part-time), rising to S$1,800 a month from 1 July 2026. The Progressive Wage Model sets sector wage ladders for jobs like cleaning, security and retail; a general cleaner's baseline is S$1,740 a month, rising to S$2,080 from 1 July 2026.
No. The Annual Wage Supplement, also called the 13th-month payment, is not required by law. You receive it only if it is written into your employment contract or collective agreement, in which case it usually equals one month's salary. Performance bonuses and any monthly variable component are likewise discretionary unless your contract guarantees them, so check the offer letter before assuming.
In 2023, full-time female employees aged 25 to 54 earned 14.3% less than men on an unadjusted basis, down from 16.3% in 2018. After accounting for differences in occupation, industry, age and education, the adjusted gender pay gap was 6.0%, according to a Ministry of Manpower study. Most of the raw gap reflects different jobs and hours rather than unequal pay for the same work.
Recruiter guides from firms like Robert Half or Morgan McKinley quote gross annual base salary by role and percentile, excluding employer CPF. Divide the figure by 12 for a monthly number, then add 17% to compare it with the MOM median, which includes employer CPF. Treat the top of any range as the 75th percentile for scarce skills, not the typical hire, and remember the data skews toward finance, tech and professional roles.
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.