Local Qualifying Salary and the local workforce count

An employer can pay every local employee correctly, on time and in full, and still discover that only some of them count. The Local Qualifying Salary is the reason. It is not a minimum wage, it carries no direct penalty, and most of the employers bound by it have never read the page it lives on. What it does is decide how much each Singapore citizen or permanent resident on your payroll is worth on the one headcount the Ministry of Manpower actually measures. If you are working through the wider picture of building a workforce around local hiring, start with our guide to hiring Singaporeans and PRs. This article covers the pay floor sitting underneath it.

What the figure is, and when it changed

MOM’s own description is short: the Local Qualifying Salary sets the minimum salary that local employees must be paid in firms that hire foreign workers.

There are two figures, not one. For a full-time local employee, meaning 35 to 44 hours a week, the Local Qualifying Salary is S$1,800 gross a month. For a part-time local employee, meaning under 35 hours a week, it is S$10.50 gross an hour. Both took effect on 1 July 2026, and MOM’s page carries that date as its last update.

It is a moving figure rather than a fixed one. It rose from S$1,400 to S$1,600 with effect from 1 July 2024, and from S$1,600 to S$1,800 with effect from 1 July 2026, the latter announced at the Committee of Supply debate in March 2026. Nothing about that pattern suggests S$1,800 is the end of it. Anyone budgeting a lower-paid local headcount two or three years out should assume another review rather than a flat line.

What it is actually for

Here is the part that is routinely missed. The Local Qualifying Salary is not a wage rule wearing a strange name. It is a counting rule.

Every local employee is weighted against the figure to produce the firm’s local workforce count, and the weighting has three bands:

• At S$1,800 gross a month or more, the employee counts as one local worker.
• From S$900 up to below S$1,800, the employee counts as half a local worker.
• Below S$900, the employee does not count at all.

That local workforce count is the number MOM works from when it calculates how many Work Permit and S Pass holders a firm may hold, which is the whole of the connection and as far as this article takes it.

The purpose behind the design was put plainly by the Minister of State for Manpower at Committee of Supply in March 2026: raising the LQS to keep pace with wage growth ensures that locals are employed meaningfully, rather than token jobs just so that firms can access foreign workers. Read that back against the half-count band and the design is obvious enough. A firm cannot buy itself a full local headcount with a nominal role priced below the line.

Which employers actually owe it

The duty is conditional, and the condition is worth stating exactly, because it is where most confusion starts. MOM’s wording is that the Local Qualifying Salary sets the minimum salary local employees must be paid in firms that hire foreign workers. A firm employing only Singapore citizens and permanent residents is not paying an LQS floor on that basis, because there is no foreign workforce for the count to govern.

The moment a firm employs a foreign worker, the position reverses, and it reverses across the whole payroll. It is not confined to a particular department, a particular grade or the roles that sit near the foreign hires. Every local employee is measured against the figure.

There is also a second, voluntary route to the same obligation. One of the three criteria for the Progressive Wage Mark, the accreditation described in our article on the Progressive Wage Model, is that a firm pays all of its local workers who are not on a Progressive Wage schedule at least the Local Qualifying Salary. A firm pursuing the Mark, and with it eligibility for government tenders and quotations, takes on the LQS floor as an accreditation condition regardless of what MOM enforces elsewhere.

What we check first on a payroll where this matters

The mechanics are not complicated. They are just easy to leave unexamined for a year at a time, which is exactly how a firm ends up out of line in the month after a rise. When we take on a payroll where the local workforce count is live, this is the first pass:

• Which employees are Singapore citizens or permanent residents, since both the floor and the count apply to them and not to pass holders.
• Which of those are part-time under 35 hours a week, and therefore measured against S$10.50 gross an hour rather than the monthly figure.
• Who sits in the S$900 to under-S$1,800 band, where the employee counts as half a local worker rather than one.
• Who sits below S$900, where the employee contributes nothing to the count at all.
• Who is also covered by a sectoral or occupational Progressive Wage schedule, which is measured against that schedule rather than against the general LQS figure.

That is the first pass, not the whole of it. The full check runs longer, and running it every month against a figure that has moved twice since 2024 is the job.

Two things catch employers out more often than the rest. The first is the rise itself: a payroll that was compliant in June 2026 at S$1,600 was not compliant in July, with nobody having changed a thing. The second is the half count. An employer who reads the rule as pass or fail assumes an employee just below the line either contributes nothing or contributes fully. Neither is right, and the difference is half a head on the number MOM works from.

One more point of precision, since MOM states both figures as gross. Where a package mixes basic pay with fixed allowances and variable components, check the composition against MOM’s own page rather than assuming the basic figure is the one being measured. And note that CPF is a separate obligation running on a separate calculation: it is payable for Singapore citizens and permanent residents at rates that vary by age band and PR year, which our CPF calculator will work through, and none of it changes because an employee sits above or below the Local Qualifying Salary.

Keeping it current

The Local Qualifying Salary reaches further than a single figure has any right to. It is one line on a government page, reviewed every couple of years, quietly deciding how much of your own workforce is counted as local. It is also precisely the sort of rule that gets set up correctly once and then never looked at again, which is why the month after a rise is when firms most often find themselves short.

We run payroll processing for Singapore employers, including the local workforce count and the Progressive Wage checks that sit alongside it, and HR Solutions for firms that need the policy layer built as well as the numbers run. Or set a diary note for the next Committee of Supply, read MOM’s page yourself, and adjust the payroll the same week. It is a short page. It only becomes expensive when nobody opens it.