Visa requirements for working in Singapore in 2026 (September 2026)

I spent the last few days going through Ministry of Manpower guidance, the Committee of Supply announcements from March and the COMPASS criteria that were refreshed on 1 January, because the visa requirements for working in Singapore now involve two separate tests rather than one and most guides still describe only the first. Meeting the salary threshold gets you nowhere on its own. You also have to score 40 points on a framework where two of the six criteria have nothing to do with you at all, and everything to do with who else your employer has already hired.

The quick answer

Every foreign national needs a work pass, and there is no self-sponsored route for ordinary applicants. Your employer applies on your behalf through the myMOM portal. You cannot apply for yourself unless you are earning enough to qualify for one of the two elite passes, in which case you can.

Three passes cover almost everyone. The Employment Pass is for professionals, managers, executives and specialists, needs S$5,600 a month in most sectors or S$6,200 in financial services, and then needs 40 COMPASS points. The S Pass is for mid-skilled roles at S$3,300 or S$3,800 in financial services, and comes with a company quota and a monthly levy. The Work Permit covers semi-skilled work in specific sectors and has the tightest restrictions of the three.

The number that surprises people most is not the entry threshold. It is the age escalation. The Employment Pass floor is benchmarked against the top third of local professional salaries by age band, so it climbs from S$5,600 at 23 or under to S$10,700 at 45 and above, and from S$6,200 to S$11,800 in financial services. A 45 year old and a 25 year old applying for the identical job face thresholds nearly twice apart. There is no way around this and no discretion in it.

Two changes are already scheduled. From 1 January 2027 the Employment Pass floors rise to S$6,000 and S$6,600, with the age 45 figures going to S$11,500 and S$12,700, and renewals follow a year later from January 2028. S Pass minimums go to S$3,600 and S$4,000 on the same dates. Existing holders are not grandfathered, they are simply assessed against the new numbers when their renewal comes round.

What the pass types actually mean

Singapore's system is unusually legible once you know four things about it.

Visa requirements for working in Singapore, route by route

Figures below are current as at September 2026. Every salary figure is a fixed monthly amount, and the Employment Pass and S Pass floors shown are for the youngest applicants only.

The row worth noticing is the Personalised Employment Pass. It is the only mainstream route that is not tied to a specific employer, which means you can change jobs without a new application and stay in Singapore between jobs. At S$22,500 a month it is out of reach for most people, but if you are near that figure it is worth structuring your offer to clear it, because the flexibility it buys is worth more than the money.

How COMPASS actually scores you

COMPASS has applied to all Employment Pass applications since September 2023, and from 1 July 2026 it applies to renewals too. Four foundational criteria and two bonus criteria, each scoring 0, 10 or 20 points, and you need 40 to pass.

The two that are about you

C1 is your salary compared to local professionals in the same sector and age band. Below the 65th percentile scores nothing, between the 65th and 90th scores 10, and at or above the 90th scores 20. Those percentile figures are published by MOM and refreshed every August, which matters more than it sounds and I come back to it below.

C2 is your qualifications. A degree from an institution on MOM's top-tier list scores 20, a recognised degree equivalent or professional qualification scores 10, and anything else scores nothing. The lists were refreshed on 1 January 2026 and the refresh was genuinely useful, broadening recognition across technology, engineering and applied science and adding professional qualifications in cybersecurity, nursing, physiotherapy, architecture, hospitality and culinary fields. Recognised at the 10 point level now includes ACCA, CPA Australia, chartered engineer status in the UK, Singapore and Australia, CREST cybersecurity certifications and nursing and culinary diplomas. If you were told two years ago that your qualification scored zero, check again.

The two that are about your employer

C3 is diversity, measured as how concentrated your nationality already is among your employer's professional staff. Under 5 per cent scores 20, between 5 and 25 per cent scores 10, above 25 per cent scores nothing. C4 is support for local employment, comparing your employer's share of local professionals against its sub-sector average.

These two are the reason identical candidates get different answers. Firms with 25 or fewer professional staff automatically score 10 on both, which is a genuine advantage for startups and small companies. A large firm that has hired heavily from one country can score zero on C3 no matter how strong you are.

The two bonuses

C5 is the skills bonus, worth 20 points if your role sits on the Shortage Occupation List and your nationality is under a third of your employer's professional staff, or 10 points if the role is listed but that nationality condition is not met. The list covers areas like artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, healthcare, agritech and the green economy, and it was refreshed on 1 January 2026. C6 is worth 10 points where your employer has been recognised by a government agency for supporting strategic economic priorities such as investment or innovation.

Bonus points are how a mid-salary hire at an ordinary company gets to 40. A candidate with 10 on salary, 10 on a recognised qualification and the small-firm defaults of 10 and 10 is already there. That arithmetic is worth doing before you negotiate rather than after.

The passes above and below the Employment Pass

Above sits the ONE Pass, at S$30,000 a month, which is not tied to an employer, lasts five years and can be renewed. It also covers people with outstanding achievement in arts, sport, science and academia without the salary test. The Tech.Pass targets established technology founders and leaders and runs as a capped scheme rather than an open application.

Below the Employment Pass, the S Pass has changed in one important way this year. All new applications must now meet the qualifying salary or pass a COMPASS style assessment, and MOM applies a skills-based assessment looking at qualifications and certifications rather than salary alone. The quota is 10 per cent of your employer's workforce in services and 15 per cent in manufacturing, construction, marine shipyard and process. Levies run roughly S$330 to S$650 a month depending on where the hire sits in the quota. Crucially the S Pass has no nationality restrictions, unlike the Work Permit.

The Work Permit got substantially more generous over the last two years and almost nobody outside HR noticed. The old cap limiting how long a Work Permit holder could stay in Singapore, which ran from 14 to 26 years depending on sector, was removed on 1 July 2025, so renewals are now indefinite subject to age and eligibility. Age limits moved twice: from 1 July 2026 the maximum age to apply for a new permit is under 62, and the maximum employment age for existing holders is 64, both tracking Singapore's statutory retirement age which also rose to 64 that day. Bhutan, Cambodia and Laos joined the non-traditional source list in June 2025 and eligible occupations expanded that September. Anything you read describing a maximum period of employment or a cap of 60 is out of date.

What your employer has to do

Worth knowing because the delays and the refusals mostly happen here rather than on your side of the file.

Under the Fair Consideration Framework, most Employment Pass and S Pass roles must be advertised on MyCareersFuture for at least 14 days before the application is filed, and the advertisement has to be genuinely open to Singaporeans and permanent residents. MOM treats a posting that was a formality ahead of a pre-selected hire as a breach, and the consequences are pass rejection plus placement on a watchlist that means closer scrutiny of everything the employer files afterwards. Exemptions exist for roles paying at least S$22,500, for intra-corporate transferees and for very short engagements.

Government fees are modest: S$105 to apply, S$225 on approval, and S$30 for a multiple journey visa if your nationality requires one, so roughly S$360 in total and the same again at renewal. The real cost sits in levies for S Pass and Work Permit hires, and in the compliance work.

Employers with a high proportion of foreign staff face more scrutiny on new Employment Pass applications, and that scrutiny has tightened through 2026. If you are joining a company where most of the professional staff are foreign nationals, expect a harder time regardless of your own profile.

Why people fail at renewal having done nothing wrong

Here is the part that is genuinely absent from almost everything written about Singapore work passes, and it is the thing I would most want to understand before signing.

From 1 July 2026, COMPASS applies to Employment Pass renewals for passes expiring on or after that date. Before then, renewal was largely a salary and compliance check. Now your renewal is scored on the same six criteria as a fresh application, against benchmarks that have moved since you arrived.

Three things drift underneath you. The C1 salary percentiles are refreshed every August, so local professional pay rising in your sector pushes the bar up while your salary stands still. The age bands mean crossing into a higher band raises your qualifying floor. And C3 and C4 depend on your employer's staff mix, which changes every time a colleague joins or resigns, none of which you control or even see.

Stack those and the failure mode becomes obvious. Someone hired at 34 on S$7,000 who was comfortably over the line can be 37 on S$7,400 with a lower COMPASS score, because sector benchmarks moved faster than their pay and their employer hired three more people of their nationality in the meantime.

What actually helps. Ask your employer to run a COMPASS self-assessment for you a full year before your pass expires rather than at renewal time, because the fixes all take months. Negotiate salary reviews against the sector benchmark rather than against inflation, and say so explicitly in the conversation. If your role could plausibly sit on the Shortage Occupation List, get that confirmed and documented now, since 20 bonus points absorb a lot of drift. And if your qualification scored zero under the old C2 lists, have it re-checked against the January 2026 refresh, because that alone can move you 10 or 20 points.

How to actually apply

• Run the self-assessment before you negotiate, not after. MOM publishes a self-assessment tool covering both the salary floor and COMPASS. Knowing you are eight points short changes what you ask for in the offer conversation, and knowing it afterwards changes nothing.
• Check your salary floor against your age, not the headline. S$5,600 is the figure for applicants 23 and under. If you are 40, the number that applies to you is considerably higher, and applications that miss it are rejected rather than queried.
• Structure the offer as fixed monthly salary. Bonuses, commission and variable pay count for nothing toward the threshold or toward C1. A package worth S$9,000 with S$5,000 fixed will be assessed as S$5,000.
• Get your qualifications verified early. Foreign degrees need authentication by a MOM-approved screening agency, and C2 points depend on the institution appearing on the current list. This is the step that most often delays an otherwise clean file.
• Ask the employer two questions about themselves. How many professional staff do they have, and what share are local. Under 25 staff means automatic 10 point defaults on C3 and C4. A foreign-dominated professional workforce means you are facing a headwind that has nothing to do with you.
• Confirm the MyCareersFuture posting ran its full 14 days. A short or amended posting invalidates it, and the employer restarts. It costs you nothing to ask for the posting date and the closing date.
• If you are near S$22,500, push past it. That figure exempts you from COMPASS entirely and qualifies you for the Personalised Employment Pass, which is not tied to your employer. Few salary negotiations have a cliff edge this valuable sitting in the middle of them.

Questions people ask about working in Singapore

Final verdict

Having read all of it, the visa requirements for working in Singapore reward one thing above all others, and it is not your CV. It is the fit between your salary, your age and your prospective employer's existing staff mix. Singapore has built a system that deliberately makes the same candidate more or less approvable depending on where they apply, and it publishes the arithmetic openly so you can check it in advance. Very few countries do that. The framework is demanding, but it is not opaque.

So the recommendation is specific. Before you accept an offer, run the COMPASS self-assessment with the employer's actual staff numbers rather than a guess, because C3 and C4 swing 40 points between the best and worst case and you cannot influence either after you sign. Push for fixed monthly salary rather than a larger total package, since only the fixed portion counts anywhere in this system. And if your offer is anywhere near S$22,500, negotiate past it, because that number buys you exemption from COMPASS and a pass that is not tied to your employer.

One thing before you commit. Ask what your qualifying salary will be at your next renewal, not just today. The floors rise in January 2027 for new applications and January 2028 for renewals, existing holders are not grandfathered, the C1 benchmarks refresh every August, and your age band will have moved by then. A job you can get today at S$6,200 is a job you may not be able to keep at S$6,200 in 2029, and that is a question far better asked during the offer conversation than during the renewal one.

Sources: Ministry of Manpower on Employment Pass eligibility · KPMG on the COMPASS and work pass updates from 1 January 2026 · Newland Chase on the revised qualification and Shortage Occupation Lists · Envoy Global on what the 2026 C2 refresh added · Raffles Corporate Services on COMPASS scoring and the renewal timeline · Aniday on the Local Qualifying Salary change and quota arithmetic · Mavenside on the Work Permit duration cap removal · Procloz on the Fair Consideration Framework and levies. Singapore revises pass thresholds and COMPASS benchmarks at least annually, with salary benchmarks refreshed each August and further increases already legislated for 2027 and 2028, so confirm every figure against the Ministry of Manpower before you sign a contract or file an application.