Singapore Wages Grew 4.9% in 2025. Here’s Where That Growth Actually Went — and Who’s Paid What.
Nominal wages in Singapore grew 4.9% in 2025, according to the Ministry of Manpower’s own Report on Wage Practices, published 28 May 2026. That’s the headline number recruiters and HR consultants will quote you. It’s also the least useful number in the whole report, because almost nobody got exactly 4.9%. Some sectors moved nearly twice that. Others barely cleared 4%. Some individual occupations are paid five times what others are, and the gap between the top and bottom of the pay ladder tells you more about the market than any national average does.
Start with the shape of who got raises at all. Of the establishments MOM surveyed, 72.4% granted a wage increase in 2025 — down from 78.3% the year before. Another 24.5% held wages flat, up from 18.5%. A small minority, 3.1%, actually cut pay, by an average of 3.7%. Read that as a market cooling, not collapsing: fewer firms raising pay, more sitting still, a raise that did happen averaging 5.8% among the firms that gave one.
Real wages actually outpaced 2024, even as nominal growth slowed
Here’s the part that gets buried under the headline nominal figure: real wage growth — adjusted for inflation — actually accelerated to 4.0% in 2025, up from 3.2% in 2024. Nominal growth slowed from 5.6% to 4.9%, but because inflation eased even faster, workers came out ahead in purchasing-power terms compared to the year before. That’s not the story a bare “wages grew 4.9%” headline tells you, and it’s the more relevant number if you’re trying to answer “did pay actually keep up.”
Profitability moved in the same direction as the wage data, which is worth noting if you’re negotiating a raise and expect to be told the company can’t afford it: 83.1% of establishments reported being profitable in 2025, up from 80.8% the year before. Fewer firms — 16.9%, down from 19.2% — reported losses. The wage slowdown wasn’t driven by broad-based financial distress.
By level: junior management, not the top, saw the fastest growth
Break the 2025 growth down by employee tier and the pattern isn’t what most people assume. Rank-and-file wages grew 4.8%. Senior management grew 4.9% — almost identical. Junior management came out ahead of both at 5.1%.
That’s a specific, checkable claim from MOM’s own report, and it cuts against the reflexive assumption that pay growth concentrates at the top. If you’re an SME owner benchmarking a junior manager’s raise against “what senior people are getting,” the data says you should actually be benchmarking against your other junior managers — that’s the tier that moved fastest last year.
By sector: a 7.5% swing against a sub-4% one, in the same economy
The sectoral spread is where “wages grew 4.9%” falls apart as a useful planning number. Administrative & Support Services led all sectors at 7.5% wage growth in 2025. Insurance Services followed at 6.6%, Financial Services at 5.9%. On the other end, Accommodation grew just 3.9% — itself a moderation from 5.5% the year before — and Construction moderated the same way, from 5.5% down to 4.0%.
Two sectors, both real parts of the Singapore economy, roughly two full percentage points apart in wage growth, and both nowhere near the 4.9% national average. If your business sits in a sector MOM flagged as moderating, “we should be doing what everyone else is doing” is the wrong benchmark — you should be comparing against your own sector’s actual trajectory, not the aggregate.
Who’s actually earning the most — and who’s catching up fastest
The growth-rate data tells you the direction of travel. It doesn’t tell you the destination. For that, The Straits Times built a Singapore Salary Guide directly on MOM’s occupational wage data, covering more than 500 roles, letting readers compare their own age, occupation, and salary against the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles for their peers. Assistant business editor Cheong Poh Kwan’s reporting on the guide, published 22 August 2026, surfaces the numbers that the aggregate growth figures above can’t show you.
At the very top of the pay ladder, three occupations tie for the highest median monthly salary in Singapore: diagnostic radiologists, derivatives dealers, and flying instructors, each at $20,000. Just below them: chief information security and technology officers at $17,812, risk management managers at $17,077, and commercial airline pilots at $17,063.
| Rank | Occupation | Median monthly salary |
|---|---|---|
| 1 (tie) | Diagnostic radiologist | $20,000 |
| 1 (tie) | Derivatives dealer | $20,000 |
| 1 (tie) | Flying instructor | $20,000 |
| 4 | Chief information security/technology officer | $17,812 |
| 5 | Risk management manager | $17,077 |
| 6 | Commercial airline pilot | $17,063 |
Source: The Straits Times, reporting on the Singapore Salary Guide (MOM data), published 22 Aug 2026.
Age matters more than most people assume when reading a single national figure. Among workers aged 25 to 29, artificial intelligence and machine learning engineers top the ranking with a median monthly salary of $8,970 — the highest-paid role for that age band, and a reminder that the newest, fastest-growing skill sets often outearn far more established professions at the entry-to-mid stage of a career. Move into the 30s and 40s, and the top earners shift toward financial derivatives dealers, economists, and infocomm technology sales and services professionals. By the 50s, flying instructors, in-house legal counsel, and fund or portfolio managers are among the best-paid — roles that typically reward decades of accumulated expertise or a licence that takes years to earn.
There’s a gap worth naming plainly, because it’s the kind of finding an SME owner doing pay equity reviews should actually use: men earn more than women in 251 of the 365 occupations where the guide allows a direct comparison. The widest gaps show up among fund and portfolio managers, trade brokers, and sales professionals. It isn’t one-directional, though — women out-earn men in occupations including sports centre managers, business valuers, and industrial safety engineers. If you’re reviewing your own pay structure and only checking the aggregate “gender pay gap” headline number, this occupation-level breakdown is where an actual, actionable finding sits.
If you want more than one view of the market, here’s how the guides actually differ
MOM’s own data is the ground truth, but it isn’t the only lens available, and the ST article usefully names four recruitment firms that publish their own salary guides using proprietary client and candidate data rather than MOM’s survey. They don’t all measure the same thing, and treating them as interchangeable is a mistake worth avoiding.
| Guide | Coverage | Salary figures | Geographic scope |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Straits Times (MOM-based) | 500+ occupations | Monthly gross, by percentile | Singapore only |
| Adecco | 10 functions | Monthly base salary | Singapore |
| Michael Page | 13 functions | Includes bonuses and incentives | Singapore |
| Robert Walters | 6 functions | Basic salary, permanent and contract | Singapore |
| Hays | 15 industries, hundreds of roles | Annual package, broken down by seniority | Singapore, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia |
Source: The Straits Times, “Want to know if you are paid enough? Start with these salary guides,” published 22 Aug 2026, updated 26 Aug 2026.
Notice what actually varies: some guides quote monthly figures, others annual; some cover base salary only, others fold in bonuses; Hays is the only one benchmarking across five countries rather than Singapore alone. If you’re an SME owner comparing an offer or a raise against “the market rate,” the guide you check changes the number you get — which is itself worth knowing before you quote a figure to an employee as if it were the only truth available.
What this actually means if you’re setting pay this year
I’d stop treating the national wage growth number as a planning input altogether. A 4.9% figure that spans a 7.5% sector and a 3.9% sector isn’t an average you can budget against — it’s two different economies wearing the same statistic. If you’re an SME owner in a sector that’s cooling, matching the national number is overpaying relative to your competitors; if you’re in one of the sectors still running hot, undershooting it is how you lose people.
The level data is the more actionable piece, and it’s the one I see employers miss most often. Everyone assumes senior hires need the biggest increments to stay retained, and the 2025 numbers say junior management actually moved fastest. If your retention risk is concentrated at the junior-manager layer — which, in my experience with SME clients, it usually is, because that’s the tier most likely to get poached by a company one size up — that’s where your budget should actually go, not automatically to the top of the org chart.
The occupation-level numbers add a second layer most employers skip entirely: a role can be objectively well-paid nationally and still be badly benchmarked inside your own company, because you’re comparing it to the wrong peer group. A 28-year-old AI engineer earning $8,970 isn’t underpaid relative to a 45-year-old in an unrelated function earning more — they’re simply in different markets that happen to share a payroll. Benchmark by occupation and age band, not by tenure or org-chart position, or you’ll keep making retention mistakes that look reasonable on a spreadsheet and aren’t.
One more thing worth saying plainly: 72.4% of firms giving a raise, against 24.5% holding flat, means a quarter of the market did nothing in 2025. If you’re one of those employers, don’t assume that’s neutral. Against a market where three in four firms moved, standing still is a real-terms pay cut relative to your competitors for talent — even if nobody on your team says anything about it this year. And if you’re reviewing pay equity, the 251-of-365 occupation gap is a more useful starting point than a single company-wide average — it tells you where to actually look first.
Sources
- MOM press release — Report on Wage Practices 2025, published 28 May 2026
- MOM Income Summary Table, accessed 20 Sep 2026
- MOM — Table: Occupational Wages 2025, accessed 20 Sep 2026
- The Straits Times — “Want to know if you are paid enough? Start with these salary guides,” by Cheong Poh Kwan, published 22 Aug 2026, updated 26 Aug 2026
One Comment