S$5.6K to S$22.5K: Minimum pay for expats competing for jobs with S’poreans, by age & industry

Singapore seems a promised land for many, but how easy is it to get in?

Disclaimer: Unless otherwise stated, any opinions expressed below belong solely to the author. All figures sourced from the Ministry of Manpower.

One of the hottest topics in Singapore is immigration and the resulting competition for jobs between foreigners and locals. Many Singaporeans express discontent about thousands of expatriates arriving to the tiny city-state, allegedly undercutting locals on salaries and becoming more attractive hires than the locals.

However, the government has already placed safeguards protecting the local marketplace from people earning too little for the jobs they are employed in (with the exception of the lowest paid Work Permit holders, doing dirty jobs that most Singaporeans wouldn’t want anyway).

One of those obstacles is that the minimum salary a foreigner has to be offered before he can even access the market.

There are three tiers of foreign employment in Singapore: the Work Permit, the S-Pass and the Employment Pass. The focus of this article is the highest and most lucrative of them—the EP.

This is because, as mentioned, Work Permits are taken up by cheap immigrant labour in construction or other physical jobs. On the other hand, the S-Pass, despite lower qualifying salaries than EP, comes with mandatory levies of S$650 per month and is subject to strict quota requirements. It is designed for low to mid-income workers, without university degrees.

EP, on the other hand, comes with the most flexibility, relatively fewest restrictions and highest salaries, provided the candidates meet the qualifying criteria—including monthly pay.

How much do foreigners have to make?

Media reports usually cover the basic figures published by the government, but it seems to me that few people realise that they don’t show the full picture.

The minimum qualifying salary for an Employment Pass was raised this year to S$6,200 for jobs in financial services and S$5,600 for all other professions. In both cases, this is already above the national median of S$5,500.

What you rarely (if ever) see reported, is that this minimum applies only to candidates aged 23 and younger. This minimum is then progressively raised up to the age of 45, when it reaches S$11,800 per month in finance and S$10,700 elsewhere.

This means that the bar keeps moving higher and higher—for new foreign applicants as well as the current ones, seeking to renew their EP. Both are chasing a moving target.

For instance, a 35-year old expat will have to be offered at least over S$8,000 in non-financial services and over S$9,000 in finance before they can even hope to get an EP. At age 40, it climbs to S$10,000 for those in financial services.

This is before they are even considered for evaluation under the Complementarity Assessment Framework (COMPASS) system, which assesses EP candidates based on criteria such as qualifications and skills, among others.

Money isn’t everything…

Since 2023, all EP applicants have to fulfill additional conditions under the COMPASS framework. To pass, they have to collect 40 points in four foundational categories, which can be complemented by extra points in two bonus ones.

Even for the highest earners, the salary can provide only 20 out of the required 40 points. They have to do well on qualifications (like good degrees from respectable universities or lengthy experience), contributions to diversity, support for local employment in the company (measured by how many locals it employs already) or strategic importance of their skills or their employers (these days it mostly applies to IT).

Otherwise their employers will have to pay up. These individuals can’t get away with just the measly, lowest qualifying salary but need to rank well among peers in their specific industry (as I have already reported in this article). To score 10 points, they need to be among the Top 35% of local earners, and for the full 20, they need to be in the Top 10%—which is no small feat, as you can see in the tables below:

Minimum salaries required for 10 points on COMPASS assessment, by industry and age*

(65th percentile for local PMETs: Professionals, Managers, Executives, and Technicians)

*for salaries below the minimum qualifying salary for EP, the EP application is only valid when the MQS for a particular age is reached

Minimum salaries required for 20 points (maximum) on COMPASS assessment, by industry and age

(90th percentile for local PMETs: Professionals, Managers, Executives, and Technicians)

…but S$22,500 will buy you freedom

Money can help a foreigner get more liberty in Singapore’s labour market, but only after reaching a really high threshold of S$22,500 per month. It’s only at this level that EP applicants are exempt from the COMPASS criteria and their employers have a much easier path to bringing them on board, as they do not even have to advertise these senior positions locally.

But there is the keyword: senior. At S$270,000 per year, virtually the only jobs that qualify are in senior management and, perhaps, a few odd highly specialised technical or engineering roles.

Everybody else has to prove their value not only through the earnings their Singaporean employers are willing to offer them, but also their demonstrable qualifications or contributions to local economy.

At around 200,000 people, the EP-holder population may seem very substantial, but it’s equivalent to only 8% of the resident labour force of over 2.4 million Singapore Citizens and Permanent Residents, and actually decreased by around 4,000 between Dec 2023 and Jun 2025.

As it turns out, the well-paid expatriate club remains pretty exclusive in Singapore.

• Read other articles we’ve written on Singapore’s job market here.

Also Read: Top 10% salaries in S’pore by age and industry: From S$6,225 at 25 to S$40,530 per month at 45

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