How to submit CPF contributions on time

By the end of this you will have submitted a month of CPF contributions for your Singapore Citizen and Permanent Resident staff, paid CPF Board, and have an email acknowledgement to file. The tool is CPF EZPay, reached from cpf.gov.sg, and CPF Board calls it suitable for employers of any size.

Four things gate the process, and the list is CPF’s own: Singpass, a CPF Submission Number (CSN), an email address, and an approved payment mode, either Direct Debit or PayNow QR.

With those in place and last month’s records carried over, the monthly run is keying and a payment. A first-time submitter should budget days, not minutes: the CSN, and the Corppass access behind it, cannot be arranged on the afternoon of the deadline.

Step 1: Apply for your CPF Submission Number

CPF Board’s guidance is to apply for the CSN as soon as you intend to hire, not once the first payday is in sight. You need Singpass and the entity’s UEN.

A CSN is not your UEN. It is the UEN (or NRIC/FIN, if you trade under your own name) plus a CPF Payment Code, which is why it looks like XXXXXXXX-PTE-01. Each payment type needs its own.

Once approved you can submit from the next calendar day, and applying online registers you for CPF EZPay automatically. CPF publishes no processing time for the application itself, so apply early, with the other registrations a new Singapore entity needs.

Step 2: Assign the right Corppass e-Services

This is the step first-timers miss, and it produces a locked door on the 13th.

Two Corppass e-Services are involved and they are not interchangeable. “CPF Services for Employers and Business Partners” must be assigned to your authorised users before anyone can reach the CSN application. “CPF EZPay” is assigned separately, to whoever will actually submit. Arrange the first and not the second and you hold a CSN you cannot use.

Assign both to at least two people. Payroll deadlines do not move because one person is on leave.

Step 3: Set up how you are going to pay

Two payment modes. CPF Board calls Direct Debit the most convenient, and it is, once it exists: a Direct Debit Authorisation, set up online through eGIRO if you bank with a participating bank, by hardcopy request if not. PayNow QR needs nothing arranged in advance, which makes it the quicker route to a first submission, though its QR code expires at 11:59pm on the day you submit.

Check your bank’s daily deduction limit now rather than on the 13th. CPF’s guide is blunt: “All bank deductions are subject to the daily deduction limit that you have set with your bank.” A large payroll then fails at the bank, not at CPF, and a failed Direct Debit is retried seven calendar days later: a straight path past the enforcement threshold.

Step 4: Log in and set the contribution month

Go to cpf.gov.sg, choose Employer/Business, click Login, then CPF EZPay. Select your entity type (UEN-registered entity, or individual trading under own name) and log in with Singpass. If the guide you are following calls this “e-Submit@web”, it is out of date: that naming no longer appears on cpf.gov.sg.

Then key the Month and Year you are contributing for.

Read that field twice. “Wrong Relevant Month” is first on CPF’s published list of employer errors, in two flavours: selecting the same month as last time, and selecting last year. Both are easy in January, and both create an adjustment you have to unwind.

Step 5: Key in each employee once

For each person: CPF Account Number, the name exactly as it appears on the NRIC, Ordinary Wages, Additional Wages, and where they apply the Agency (CDAC, ECF, MBMF or SINDA) and Agency Fund amount, which carry the self-help group contributions you deduct. Under Detail, add date of birth, citizenship and employment status.

For a Permanent Resident in their first or second year you also enter the PR Start Date and the PR Type: GG for graduated rates, FG for full employer rates. CPF EZPay then tracks the PR year and updates the contribution as it goes, so the failure here is rarely a forgotten update. It is a wrong PR Start Date, keyed once and inherited quietly every month after.

Save changes. Records auto-populate next time, so this is front-loaded work, not monthly work.

CPF is payable for Citizens and Permanent Residents earning more than S$50 a month, on any basis: full-time, part-time, temporary, contract or casual. Employment Pass, S Pass and Work Permit holders get none. Under the rates in force from 1 January 2026, between S$50 and S$500 there is no employee’s share, though the employer’s share is still payable; between S$500 and S$750 the employee’s share phases in. That is where part-timers sit. Rates by age band and PR year, and the S$8,000 Ordinary Wage ceiling from 1 January 2026, are on our CPF contribution rates page; check one employee against the CPF contribution calculator.

Step 6: Add the Skills Development Levy

At the other-payments step you key the Skills Development Levy, plus any CPF late payment interest.

SDL is a separate levy CPF Board collects on behalf of the Skills and Workforce Development Agency, and it is where the CPF instinct misleads people: it is payable for every employee working in Singapore, foreign employees included. As at August 2026 it runs at 0.25% of monthly total wages, minimum S$2 under S$800 a month, maximum S$11.25 above S$4,500. CPF EZPay auto-computes it for Citizens and Permanent Residents; for foreign employees you key it in yourself, the sort of manual step that gets skipped in a busy month.

Step 7: Check what the tool will not check

CPF EZPay’s auto-computation does most of the arithmetic, and it has one documented blind spot that costs real money. CPF’s own user guide says: “It does not impose a cap on CPF contributions that exceed the additional wage ceiling.”

The Additional Wage ceiling for 2026 is S$102,000 minus the total Ordinary Wages subject to CPF that year, per employer per calendar year. In an ordinary month it never bites. In a bonus month it does, and the tool will let you over-contribute without comment.

Which makes the Ordinary/Additional split worth getting right. Wages are Ordinary Wages only if they are due wholly or exclusively for that month’s employment and payable by the 14th of the following month. Anything else is an Additional Wage, which is how a late-paid allowance reclassifies itself without anyone deciding it should.

Fixing an over-contribution later has a hard limit: any refund or adjustment must be applied for within one year of payment. A March bonus error found in next year’s audit may simply be out of time.

Step 8: Pay, then confirm the submission completed

Select the employees you are contributing for, confirm the amounts, tick the declaration that the information is true and correct, and pay by Direct Debit or PayNow QR.

Then take this sentence from CPF Board literally: “Your CPF submission is only complete when you have successfully made payment.” Keying the figures is not filing.

Watch the status afterwards. Direct Debit shows “Submitted” until same-day processing (CPF publishes a cut-off of around 5.15pm, worth confirming on the day), then “Processed”, then “Paid” after two working days. PayNow QR shows “Paid” almost immediately. That is also your correction window: a Direct Debit submission can still be amended while it shows “Submitted”, a PayNow QR one cannot. You get an email acknowledgement, and CPF EZPay keeps up to 24 months of electronic payment records.

One more that nobody remembers: if you no longer have any employees, tell CPF Board immediately. There is no nil submission to file, just a tick box at the confirmation step. Anyone on Electronic Standing Instruction de-activates it separately.

When CPF contributions are actually due

The due date is the last day of the calendar month. The 14th of the following month is the enforcement threshold. CPF Board’s wording: “The due date for CPF contributions is on the last day of the calendar month. Enforcement action would be taken against employers who fail to pay by the 14th of the following month (or the next working day if the 14th falls on a Saturday, Sunday, or Public Holiday).”

The distinction is not academic. Late payment interest runs from the first day after the due date, not from the 15th. CPF puts it plainly: “if you pay CPF contributions on the 15th, 15 days of late payment interest is levied as the payment is 15 days past the due date.” Miss the 14th by a day and you are not one day late. You are fifteen.

Interest is 1.5% per month, minimum S$5, payable under section 9 of the Central Provident Fund Act 1953 “for every day the amount remains unpaid”. The Act leaves the rate to regulations; the 1.5% and the S$5 minimum are CPF Board’s published figures.

Past interest, CPF Board may impose a composition amount of up to S$1,000 per offence, compoundable only after all arrears and interest are paid. Conviction under section 58(1)(b) carries a fine of S$1,000 to S$5,000 and/or up to six months’ imprisonment for a first offence, doubling to S$2,000 to S$10,000 and/or up to twelve months for repeat offences. CPF is direct about who answers: “Directors of the company will also be charged, and face the same court fines and/or imprisonment.”

Deducting the employee’s share from wages and then not paying it over is a separate, heavier offence: section 7(3) carries a fine of up to S$10,000 or up to seven years’ imprisonment, or both. Ordinary lateness is not that. Holding money you have already taken out of someone’s salary is.

The mistakes that actually happen

CPF publishes its own list of employer errors that later need an adjustment:

• Wrong Relevant Month or Year. First on CPF’s list, for a reason.
• Wrong CSN: CPF’s example is XXXXXXXX-PTE-02 instead of PTE-01, which bites groups moving staff between related entities.
• A name or CPF account number that does not match the NRIC, or a contribution paid for the wrong person.
• The wrong rate, from a mis-keyed date of birth, an overlooked change of age group, or full rates applied to a first or second year Permanent Resident.
• Late notice of a change in citizenship, no-pay leave or a resignation.
• Duplicate payment, from re-submitting a file in the belief that it overrides the earlier one.

Plus two CPF documents elsewhere, neither of which looks like a mistake at the time: the bank’s daily deduction limit, and forgetting to tell CPF when you have no employees.

What CPF submission is not

It is not IR8A or the Auto-Inclusion Scheme. CPF is monthly, to CPF Board, for Citizens and Permanent Residents. AIS is annual, goes to IRAS, is due 1 March, compulsory at five or more employees, and sits under section 68(2) of the Income Tax Act. They are linked in one direction: IRAS pre-fills employment income from your CPF submissions, but only those made by 14 January. IRAS’s example: a December 2025 submission made after 14 January 2026 will not pre-fill for YA 2026. Our IR8A employer guide covers the annual side.

It is not the Skills Development Levy either, though you pay them in the same sitting: SDL covers foreign employees, and CPF Board collects it as agent.

Doing this yourself, or not

None of this is hard. It is just unforgiving of the month you are distracted, and it usually lives in one person’s head: which CSN, which bank limit, who went on no-pay leave in March. That works until they resign, which is why what to do when the only person who runs HR and payroll leaves is easier to solve in advance than in the week itself.

We run payroll processing and monthly CPF submission for Singapore employers, including the parts above that fail quietly. Or take this page, put the dates in a calendar, and do it yourself. Both are respectable. Doing it on the 15th is not.