Minimum Wage in Singapore 2026: Progressive Wage Model, Local Qualifying Salary and Overtime Pay

Last reviewed: 12 September 2026

Why Singapore Has No Minimum Wage

Singapore has deliberately never adopted a universal, across-the-board minimum wage. The policy rationale, repeated consistently by MOM and the tripartite partners, is that a flat minimum wage doesn’t account for productivity differences between sectors and roles, and can price lower-skilled workers out of jobs entirely. Instead, Singapore’s approach is the Progressive Wage Model: sector-by-sector wage floors that rise in tandem with defined skills upgrading and productivity milestones, so a worker’s pay increases as their job scope and training progress — not just because a blanket law says so.

This is one of the most heavily searched employment topics in Singapore precisely because the answer surprises people: there is no single number you can point to as “the minimum wage.” What exists instead is a patchwork of sector-specific and occupation-specific wage schedules, which is exactly why this guide treats PWM, the Local Qualifying Salary and overtime pay together — they’re the three levers that actually set wage floors in Singapore (MOM, Progressive Wage Model). For SME employers, the practical upshot is that “the minimum wage” question really has three separate answers depending on what’s being asked: whether a specific role has a mandated wage floor (check PWM), whether a local hire counts toward foreign worker quotas (check the LQS), and whether unpaid hours are owed as overtime (check Part 4 eligibility and the 1.5x formula). Conflating these three is the single most common payroll mistake we see among Singapore SMEs moving into a PWM-covered sector for the first time.

The Progressive Wage Model: Covered Sectors and Wage Floors

PWM is currently mandated by law in seven sectors: cleaning, security, landscape maintenance, lift and escalator, retail, food services, and waste management. On top of these sector-wide schedules, MOM also runs an “occupational PWM” that sets wage floors by job function — administrators and drivers — regardless of which industry employs them. Each sector’s wage ladder is negotiated with the relevant tripartite cluster (unions, employer associations and government) and is reviewed periodically, with wages rising as workers move up defined job bands tied to specific skills and responsibilities. Each PWM sector schedule is structured as a job-band ladder rather than a single number — typically three to four bands per sector, moving from entry-level to senior or supervisory roles, with a minimum basic wage attached to each band and annual step-ups built in. A cleaner who completes a WSQ (Workforce Skills Qualifications) training module and moves from a general cleaner band to a site supervisor band, for example, moves onto a materially higher wage floor as a direct result — the mechanism is designed to link pay progression to a verifiable skills or productivity milestone, not tenure alone.

For employers in a PWM-mandated sector, paying below the applicable wage floor isn’t a matter of internal HR policy — it’s a licensing condition. Cleaning, security and landscape businesses in particular must hold a valid PWM accreditation to operate, and government agencies increasingly require PWM compliance as a condition of tender for cleaning and security contracts. An employer that lets accreditation lapse, or pays below the mandated floor, risks losing the ability to bid for public-sector contracts altogether, not just an MOM penalty.

Local Qualifying Salary: The $1,800 Threshold

The Local Qualifying Salary is a separate mechanism from PWM, though it’s often confused with a minimum wage for the same reason: it sets a floor below which a Singaporean or PR employee doesn’t count toward an employer’s local headcount for calculating Work Permit and S Pass quotas. From 1 July 2026, the LQS rose to $1,800 a month for a full-time local employee, or $10.80 an hour for a part-time local employee working at least 35 hours a month — up from the previous $1,600 threshold.

The practical effect for employers who rely on foreign labour quotas: if you’re paying local staff below the LQS, they don’t count in the local headcount that determines how many Work Permit or S Pass holders you’re allowed to hire. An employer can technically pay a local employee less than $1,800 — there’s no legal bar to doing so — but that employee simply won’t help the employer meet its dependency ratio ceiling, which in practice pushes market wages for local hires toward the LQS anyway. See our Work Pass Guide for how the LQS interacts with quota calculations.

Progressive Wage Credit Scheme: Government Co-Funding

To soften the cost of PWM wage increases, the government runs the Progressive Wage Credit Scheme (PWCS), which co-funds a portion of the wage increases employers give to lower-wage workers, administered by IRAS. It’s described officially as “transitional wage support for employers adjusting to mandatory wage increases or voluntarily raising wages of lower-wage workers” (IRAS, Progressive Wage Credit Scheme). Employers don’t need to apply separately — qualifying co-funding is computed automatically from CPF contribution records and paid out to the employer, which is one more reason accurate CPF and payroll records (see our CPF Contributions Guide) matter beyond just CPF compliance itself.

Who Is Entitled to Overtime Pay

Overtime pay is a Part 4 Employment Act entitlement, which means it doesn’t apply to every employee in Singapore — only to “workmen” (manual labour: cleaners, machine operators, construction and production workers) earning up to $4,500 a month in basic salary, and to other employees earning up to $2,600 a month in basic salary. Managers and executives are excluded from Part 4 entirely, regardless of how much overtime they work or how low their salary is, unless their actual job scope doesn’t genuinely match the “manager or executive” label — a distinction MOM and TADM look at closely in disputes over misclassified job titles.

Employees above these salary thresholds can still be contractually entitled to overtime or time off in lieu if their employment contract says so — the Employment Act sets a statutory floor, not a ceiling, and employers are always free to offer better terms than the Act requires.

The Overtime Formula and Monthly Cap

For a monthly-rated employee, the hourly basic rate of pay is calculated as: 12 × monthly basic salary ÷ (52 × 44). Overtime work — time worked beyond the contractual normal hours in a day, or beyond 44 hours a week — must be paid at a minimum of 1.5 times this hourly basic rate. For a non-workman, the Act also caps the hourly rate used in this calculation at $13.60, even if their actual basic salary would produce a higher hourly figure.

MOM caps total overtime at 72 hours a month for Part 4 employees, though MOM can grant exemptions above this limit for specific operational needs, subject to conditions. Overtime pay must be included in the same payslip cycle as the ordinary wages it relates to — it isn’t something an employer can defer, bundle into a bonus, or pay “later.”

Why You Can’t Offset Overtime With a Fixed Allowance

MOM has specifically warned employers against a common workaround: paying a flat monthly allowance and treating it as covering any overtime worked, particularly for migrant workers on Work Permits. This is explicitly prohibited under the Employment of Foreign Manpower (Work Passes) Regulations, and a High Court ruling has reinforced that “fixed monthly allowances payable to an employee shall not include any form of overtime payment” (HRD Asia, Singapore Warns Employers Over Unlawful Overtime Pay Offsets). In other words, a $200 “attendance allowance” cannot substitute for calculating and paying actual overtime at 1.5× the hourly rate — MOM has said it will move from warnings to financial penalties for employers who keep doing this.

Real Case: $432,000 in Unpaid Wages, 103 Workers

In July 2025, MOM announced the conviction of a director and general manager behind three related catering businesses — Royal Cuisine Group, Yanxi Pte Ltd and Healthy Meals Catering — for failing to pay salaries to 103 employees over a five-month period, totalling roughly $432,000 in unpaid wages. After the businesses’ premises closed over rental arrears, the two individuals failed to properly inform staff of the situation and made only minimal restitution, eventually repaying just $73,000 of what was owed. Each was fined $72,000, with a default sentence of 66 weeks’ imprisonment if the fine went unpaid (MOM press release, Two Individuals Convicted for Failing to Pay Salaries to Employees).

The case was prosecuted under Part 3 of the Employment Act, which governs salary payment timing and requirements — a first offence carries a fine of $3,000 to $15,000 or up to 6 months’ imprisonment, with penalties scaling up for repeat offences and larger numbers of affected employees, as this case shows. The lesson for employers isn’t just “pay wages on time” — it’s that financial distress in the business doesn’t suspend the Employment Act’s salary payment timeline, and directors are held personally, not just corporately, liable.

A worked overtime example. A non-workman earning $2,400 basic monthly salary works 6 hours of overtime in a week. Their hourly basic rate is 12 × $2,400 ÷ (52 × 44) = $6.30 an hour. Overtime pay for those 6 hours is 6 × $6.30 × 1.5 = $56.70, on top of ordinary wages for the month. If the same employee earned $2,800 a month — above the $2,600 non-workman threshold — they would fall outside Part 4 entirely, and any overtime payment would depend entirely on what their employment contract promises, not on a statutory entitlement.

What Happens If You Underpay Below a PWM Wage Floor

Underpaying an employee below the mandated PWM wage floor in cleaning, security, landscape, lift and escalator, retail, food services or waste management isn’t treated as a wage dispute alone — it’s a breach of the licensing and accreditation conditions those sectors operate under. For cleaning and security businesses specifically, MOM’s Tripartite Cluster can suspend or revoke PWM accreditation, which effectively shuts the business out of the sector, since holding accreditation is typically a legal requirement to operate and a mandatory condition in almost all public-sector tenders. A business that loses accreditation doesn’t just face a wage claim — it can lose its licence to trade in that sector altogether, which is a materially higher stake than the underpayment itself.

Underpaid employees, meanwhile, have the same recourse as any other salary dispute: filing a claim with the Tripartite Alliance for Dispute Management (TADM), which mediates in the first instance and refers unresolved disputes to the Employment Claims Tribunals. See our guide to TADM and the ECT for how that process works in practice.

For the CPF contributions that apply on top of PWM and overtime wages, see our CPF Contributions Guide. For how the Local Qualifying Salary affects your Work Permit and S Pass quota, see our Work Pass Guide.