- CPF contributions are due on the last day of the month you pay wages
- Late CPF attracts 1.5% interest a month, subject to a S$5 minimum
- Employment income records are due to IRAS by 1 March each year
- Itemised payslips are compulsory for every Employment Act employee
Knowing how to manage payroll in Singapore comes down to a short list of dates and a much longer list of details. The dates are set by CPF, IRAS and MOM, and missing one costs money. The details are where most finance leads lose their evenings, which is why many hand the cycle over to Sleek’s payroll services.
These 12 tips are ordered the way payroll actually runs: understand the scope, build the calendar, then work through the monthly and annual obligations attached to it.
Would you rather someone else tracked these dates for you?
What does running payroll in Singapore actually involve?
Tip 1: Write down every moving part before you try to automate any of it.
Payroll here is four things in sequence: computing salaries, paying statutory contributions, issuing payslips, and reporting employment income once a year. Each part has an internal owner and an external deadline. Put the list on paper and the payroll calendar largely writes itself.
Salary computation covers basic pay, allowances, overtime and deductions. Contributions cover CPF for Singapore Citizens and Permanent Residents, the Skills Development Levy, and levies attached to foreign workers. Reporting covers a payslip every cycle and an employment income record every year.
Ownership matters as much as the list. In most SMEs the salary numbers come from whoever manages people, the contributions and submissions come from finance, and the approval to release cash sits with a director. Payroll goes wrong at the handovers far more often than inside any one step.
If you are new to the contribution side, start with how CPF contributions work and come back to this list.
Which payroll deadlines does every employer have to hit?
Tip 2: Build the payroll calendar before your first payday, not after your first penalty.
Most payroll trouble is a diary problem rather than a knowledge problem. The table below is the set of Singapore payroll deadlines an employer is working against. Print it, or put every row into whatever calendar your team actually opens.
| Obligation | Frequency | Deadline | Who it applies to | If you are late |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CPF contributions | Monthly | Last day of the calendar month the wages relate to; enforcement action follows if unpaid by the 14th of the following month | Employees who are Singapore Citizens or Permanent Residents | 1.5% interest a month from the day after the due date, minimum S$5 |
| Itemised payslips | Every pay cycle | Given with payment, or within three working days of it | Every employee covered by the Employment Act | [TBC – MOM does not state a penalty on the itemised payslips page; source before publish] |
| Skills Development Levy | Monthly | Collected alongside your CPF contributions | Employers with employees rendering services in Singapore | See the SDL guide linked in tip 7 |
| Foreign worker levy | Monthly | Confirm with MOM | Employers of Work Permit and S Pass holders | [TBC – source before publish] |
| Employment income records (Form IR8A / AIS) | Annual | 1 March | AIS employers [mandatory-participation headcount threshold TBC] | Fine up to S$5,000 and, in default of payment, imprisonment up to 6 months (s94, Income Tax Act) |
| Progressive Wage Credit Scheme payouts | Annual | – | Employers raising the wages of lower-wage workers | Not a filing, so no penalty; an unclaimed payout is simply lost |
| Absentee Payroll funding claims | Per training course | – | Employers sending staff on funded training | The claim lapses |
Read the payroll calendar as two rhythms rather than seven rows. There is a monthly rhythm that repeats twelve times a year and barely changes, and an annual rhythm that lands in the first quarter and takes real preparation. Teams that get payroll wrong almost always have the monthly rhythm under control and the annual one in someone’s memory.
Four cells in that table are still marked TBC. The Singapore payroll deadlines that are confirmed are sourced and dated; the rest are marked rather than guessed, because a wrong statutory date is worse than a blank one.
How much CPF do you pay, and when is the CPF submission deadline?
Tip 3: Treat the last day of the month as the real CPF submission deadline, not the 14th.
For employees aged 55 and below, the employer contributes 17% of wages and the employee contributes 20%, a total of 37%, with effect from 1 January 2026 [CPF, employer obligations, fetched 21 August 2026]. Rates for the older age bands step down and are [TBC – source the full age-band table before publish].
The due date for CPF contributions is the last day of the calendar month. Enforcement action follows if you have not paid by the 14th of the following month, or the next working day where the 14th falls on a Saturday, Sunday or public holiday [CPF, enforcement and penalties for non-compliance, fetched 21 August 2026].
Two ceilings cap what attracts CPF. The Ordinary Wage ceiling is S$8,000 a month from 1 January 2026, and the Additional Wage ceiling is S$102,000 minus the total Ordinary Wages subject to CPF for that year [CPF, fetched 21 August 2026]. Bonuses are tested against the second of those, not the first.
Self-help group contributions, such as CDAC, MBMF, SINDA and ECF, sit alongside CPF in the same monthly cycle for most employers. Their rates and the exact collection mechanism are. Put them on the calendar as a row now and fill the detail in once sourced.
What do you need in place before your first payday?
Tip 4: Finish the setup admin a full pay cycle before anyone is due to be paid.
A first payroll run needs four things ready: employer registration with the CPF Board, a payment method set up for contributions, complete employee records, and a pay date written into the employment contract. The first two have lead times you do not control.
None of your employer statutory obligations wait for the admin to catch up. The obligation to contribute starts with the first wages paid, so registration that is still in progress on payday is already a late payment in the making.
Employee records mean identity and residency status, pay rate, pay period, and bank details, because residency status drives whether CPF applies at all. Lead times for CPF employer registration and for the CPF Submission Number are [TBC – source from the CPF employer registration page before publish].
Write the pay cycle down somewhere other than the employment contract as well. A single line stating the period covered, the pay date and the internal cut-off for timesheets and claims removes most of the month-end arguments before they start.
This is the cheapest part of the payroll checklist to get right and the most expensive to leave until the week wages are due.
What has to be on a Singapore payslip?
Tip 5: Issue itemised payslips from the first cycle, not once someone asks for one.
Every employer must issue itemised payslips to employees covered by the Employment Act, a requirement in force since 1 April 2016. The payslip goes out with the payment, or within three working days of it. On termination or dismissal, it goes out together with the outstanding salary [MOM, itemised payslips, fetched 21 August 2026].
MOM requires these items on the payslip:
- Full name of the employer
- Full name of the employee
- Date or dates of payment
- Basic salary, with the rate and the hours, days or pieces for hourly, daily and piece-rated workers
- Start and end date of the salary period
- Allowances paid
- Other additional payments, such as bonuses, rest day pay and public holiday pay
- Deductions made
- Overtime hours worked
- Overtime pay
- Start and end date of the overtime payment period, where it differs from the salary period
- Net salary paid in total
Soft copy, hard copy and handwritten are all acceptable formats [MOM, fetched 21 August 2026]. Penalties for failing to issue payslips are [TBC – not stated on the MOM itemised payslips page; source before publish].
Note how much of that list is overtime detail. Hours, pay, and the period covered where it differs from the salary period all have to be visible. If overtime is tracked in a chat thread rather than a system, the payslip is where that becomes a compliance problem instead of an inconvenience.
How do you handle year-end employment income reporting?
Tip 6: Start year-end in November, because the IR8A deadline does not move.
Employment income records for the year must be furnished to IRAS no later than 1 March [IRAS, explanatory notes on Form IR8A and Appendix 8A for YA2026, fetched 21 August 2026]. Registration for the Auto-Inclusion Scheme for YA2027 is open until 1 March 2027 [IRAS, AIS registration page, fetched 21 August 2026]. Whether AIS participation is compulsory for your company depends on a headcount threshold that is [TBC – source from IRAS before publish].
The penalties are specific. An employer who misses the deadline is liable on conviction to a fine not exceeding S$5,000 and, in default of payment, imprisonment for up to 6 months under section 94. Giving incorrect information can attract a penalty of up to twice the tax undercharged, plus a fine not exceeding S$5,000 or imprisonment up to 3 years, under section 95 [IRAS, YA2026 explanatory notes].
Working backwards from 1 March, November and December are when the preparation actually happens. That means reconciling twelve months of gross pay against the ledger, confirming every employee record is complete, and identifying anyone who joined or left mid-year. February is for submitting, not for discovering that a resignation in May was never recorded properly.
The form itself, and what belongs in each field, is covered in Form IR8A and employment income reporting.
Which levies and schemes attach to your payroll?
Tip 7: Put every levy and scheme on the same calendar as CPF, even the ones that pay you.
Four things sit alongside CPF and get forgotten because none of them is a monthly salary payment. Each has its own page, and the rates and windows belong there rather than here.
- the Skills Development Levy, collected with your CPF contributions
- the foreign worker levy, for Work Permit and S Pass holders
- the Progressive Wage Credit Scheme, which co-funds wage increases for lower-wage workers
- Absentee Payroll funding, which offsets salary costs while staff are away on funded training
The last two are money coming back to you and are the two most often missed. A claim you never file is indistinguishable from a claim you were not eligible for.
How do you keep payroll records audit-ready?
Tip 8: File payroll by month, not by document type.
One folder per month, holding the payroll register, the payslips issued, the CPF submission acknowledgement, the bank payment file and the approval that released it. Reconstructing a single month from five separate systems is what turns a routine query into a week of work.
How long payroll records must be retained is [TBC – source the IRAS record-keeping requirement before publish]. Whatever the statutory floor, keep the acknowledgements as long as you keep the accounts.
Decide who is allowed to approve a payroll run, and record it. A named approver who is not the person preparing the run is the single control that catches both errors and fraud, and it costs nothing to implement. In a company small enough that one person does both, the reconciliation in tip 10 carries that weight instead.
Wider record-keeping and filing questions are grouped in the annual compliance and company management FAQs.
What do payroll mistakes actually cost?
Tip 9: Price the mistakes once, then decide how much process you want around them.
Late CPF attracts interest at 1.5% a month from the day after the due date, subject to a minimum of S$5. Failure to pay can bring a court fine of between S$1,000 and S$5,000 per offence and up to 6 months’ imprisonment on a first conviction, rising to between S$2,000 and S$10,000 and up to 12 months on subsequent convictions, under section 58(1)(b) of the CPF Act. The Board may instead impose a composition amount of up to S$1,000 per offence [CPF, enforcement and penalties, fetched 21 August 2026].
Missing the employment income submission is a separate offence with its own fine of up to S$5,000. Stack the two and a quiet administrative slip becomes the most expensive line in the finance function.
The compounding is what catches people out. An employee misclassified in month one is wrong in every subsequent contribution, wrong on the year-end record, and wrong again in the correction. One bad assumption in January is eleven months of remediation in December.
How do you keep payroll and your accounts in step?
Tip 10: Reconcile payroll to the ledger in the same week you run it.
Payroll produces three numbers the accounts need: gross wages, employer contributions, and net cash paid out. Posting them a month later means finding the discrepancy without remembering the cycle that caused it.
Accruals are the other half of this. Unpaid bonuses, untaken leave and contributions due but not yet paid all belong in the period they were earned rather than the period they leave the bank account. Payroll is usually the largest accrual an SME carries and the one most often posted late.
Where the same provider runs both, the reconciliation stops being a handover. That is the argument for keeping accounting and payroll together rather than splitting them across two vendors.
When should you review how you run payroll?
Tip 11: Re-examine the process every time headcount or pass mix changes, not annually.
Being straight about this: a company with a handful of employees, one pay cycle and clean records can run its own payroll perfectly well. Software plus a disciplined calendar is genuinely enough at that size.
It stops being enough at a fairly predictable point. More than one pay cycle, foreign workers with levies attached, variable overtime, or the same person running payroll and closing the books are each a reason to look again at in-house payroll versus outsourcing.
Time the change if you do make one. Moving payroll mid-year means splitting the year-end submission across two sets of records, so a switch that lands at the start of a calendar year costs materially less effort than the same switch in August.
How Sleek helps you manage payroll in Singapore
Tip 12: Hand over the calendar, not just the calculation.
Sleek runs monthly payslips, CPF and SHG contributions, SDL, IR8A and AIS submissions, leave management and GIRO file generation for Singapore companies. The point is not that the arithmetic gets done. It is that nobody on your team is holding the dates in their head.
The monthly CPF submission deadline and the annual IR8A deadline both stop being your problem, along with the Singapore payroll deadlines in between them.
Because payroll sits inside the same engagement as bookkeeping and tax, the reconciliation in tip 10 and the year-end preparation in tip 6 stop being separate pieces of work. The employer statutory obligations on the calendar are met by the same team that closes your accounts.
That is the whole of this payroll checklist, absorbed by someone whose job it is.
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FAQs on how to manage payroll in singapore
Do I need to pay CPF on a bonus?
A bonus is an Additional Wage, so it is tested against the Additional Wage ceiling rather than the monthly Ordinary Wage ceiling. That ceiling is S$102,000 minus the total Ordinary Wages subject to CPF for the year [CPF, fetched 21 August 2026]. An employee whose regular salary has already used up most of that figure will have less bonus attracting CPF.
Do I pay CPF for employees on work passes?
CPF contributions apply to Singapore Citizens and Permanent Residents [CPF, employer obligations, fetched 21 August 2026]. Employers of Work Permit and S Pass holders are instead liable for the foreign worker levy. Confirm the treatment for your specific pass types before your first run, because the two obligations are billed and paid differently.
What happens to payroll when an employee resigns mid-month?
The final payslip must be issued together with the outstanding salary rather than on the usual cycle [MOM, itemised payslips, fetched 21 August 2026]. CPF is still due for the part-month worked, on the normal monthly deadline. Where the leaver is a foreign employee, tax clearance obligations may also apply and are [TBC – source from IRAS before publish].
What is the difference between the CPF due date and the 14th of the month?
The due date is the last day of the calendar month the wages relate to. The 14th of the following month is the point at which enforcement action follows for contributions still unpaid, moving to the next working day where the 14th falls on a Saturday, Sunday or public holiday [CPF, fetched 21 August 2026]. Interest at 1.5% a month runs from the day after the due date, not from the 14th, so paying on the 12th is already a late payment.
Do I still submit an IR8A for someone who left during the year?
Yes. The employment income record covers income paid during the calendar year, so a leaver’s earnings for the months they worked still form part of the submission due by 1 March. This is the most common reason a year-end submission has to be amended, because the leaver’s record was closed in the payroll system and never carried forward.
Can I run Singapore payroll from overseas?
Nothing about the obligations changes with where the person running payroll sits, because the deadlines attach to the employing company. What changes is practical: statutory holidays, banking cut-offs and the 14th-of-month enforcement point are all Singapore-time events. Teams running it from another timezone usually move their internal cut-off several days earlier.
