The Singapore payroll compliance calendar

A payroll compliance calendar and a rulebook are not the same document, and mixing them up is how a competent HR team still misses a deadline. A rulebook explains what CPF contributions are. A calendar tells you that this month’s contribution is due on the last day of the month, that this month’s Skills Development Levy rides along on the same submission, and that if a foreign employee handed in their notice this morning, the IR21 clock started the moment you knew, not the day they leave.

That is the gap this page fills. Singapore’s recurring payroll and people-compliance obligations sit with three different regulators, CPF Board, MOM and IRAS, several of them use the word “due” to mean different things, and at least two of the deadlines most often repeated online are wrong. What follows is the calendar as a lean HR or finance team actually needs to work from it: monthly, then annual, then event-triggered, with the two facts almost everyone gets backwards stated plainly, up front, before anything else.

The monthly cycle: CPF, SDL and payslips

CPF contributions and the Skills Development Levy share one monthly clock. Itemised payslips run on a different rhythm entirely: due with every payment, not once a month, easy to blur if you think of all three as one calendar entry.

CPF contributions are due on the last day of the calendar month. Not the 14th: CPF Board’s own wording is that 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, and that 14th is an enforcement threshold, not the due date. The distinction is not academic. Late payment interest runs from the day after the actual due date, so a contribution paid on the 15th has already accrued fifteen days of interest, not one. We cover the full submission process, CPF EZPay, Corppass, the Submission Number, in how to submit CPF contributions; the current rates by age band and PR year sit on our CPF contribution rates page.

Skills Development Levy (SDL) shares CPF’s calendar exactly: same month, same CPF EZPay submission, no separate filing to remember. Where it differs is coverage, and this is the part people miss. SDL is payable on every employee working in Singapore, foreign work-pass holders included, at 0.25% of monthly total wages, with a floor of S$2 for wages under S$800 and a ceiling of S$11.25 for wages above S$4,500. CPF Board collects it as agent for the Skills and Workforce Development Agency (SWDA), a statutory board formed on 1 July 2026 by merging SkillsFuture Singapore and Workforce Singapore. If you have seen SDL described elsewhere as funding “SkillsFuture Singapore”, that description is now out of date. The rate detail, the narrow list of exemptions, and the SWDA merger are covered in Skills Development Levy for Singapore employers.

Itemised payslips are not a monthly obligation at all; they attach to each payment. Every employee covered by the Employment Act, including managers and executives who sit outside Part IV’s hours protections, gets a payslip with the payment or within three working days of it, and a final payslip with the last salary on termination. The full item list, the Key Employment Terms rule that runs alongside it, and what MOM actually does about a lapse are covered in our itemised payslips and KETs spoke, linked from the new-hire obligation below.

The annual cycle: AIS, IR8A and the 14 January cut-off

CPF and AIS get confused constantly, and the confusion is understandable, because both describe the same wages to two different regulators on two entirely different clocks.

The Auto-Inclusion Scheme (AIS) is annual, goes to IRAS, and is due 1 March. It becomes compulsory the moment you have had five or more employees at any point in the preceding calendar year, counting full-time and part-time staff, non-resident employees and paid directors, including anyone who left partway through the year. Once you are in, you stay in, even if headcount later drops below five. Registration and submission run through IRAS’s myTax Portal, in the window leading up to 1 March; an employer with fewer than five staff and no notice from IRAS is not required to file electronically, but must still hand employees a hardcopy IR8A, and any applicable Appendix 8A or 8B, by the same date, so employees can file their own return. We cover enrolment and the annual mechanics in the Auto-Inclusion Scheme for Singapore employers, and the forms themselves, IR8A, Appendix 8A and 8B, in our IR8A employer guide, linked from that spoke.

The date that actually catches people out sits a month and a half earlier. Under the AIS Data Link-up Service, IRAS pre-fills employment income from what you have already submitted to CPF Board, but only for CPF submissions made by 14 January. IRAS’s own example is a December contribution submitted after 14 January: it will not pre-fill into that year’s AIS return and has to be added by hand. It is the one place where being a few weeks late on a routine monthly CPF submission quietly creates annual-filing work months later, for someone who was not even the person who filed CPF.

Two retention duties run underneath both cycles, silently, until an audit asks for them. Employment Act records, personal particulars, salary, leave, are kept for at least two years for current staff, and a former employee’s last two years of records are kept for at least a year after their last day. The broader payroll and tax paper trail, records supporting a company’s income and expense claims, are kept for at least five years from the relevant Year of Assessment under the Income Tax Act. Neither is glamorous, and neither gets looked at until an inspector or an auditor asks for it.

The event-triggered obligations

Not every Singapore payroll obligation runs on a fixed date. Four situations, a new hire, a foreign employee leaving, a local employee leaving, and an employee crossing an age threshold, each start their own clock, and it usually starts before anyone thinks to look for it.

A new hire. Key Employment Terms, in writing, are due within 14 days of the first day of work, for any employee on a contract of 14 days or more. CPF contributions start from the first month of eligible wages, with no separate registration beyond keying the employee’s details into your next submission. The full 18-item KETs list, the itemised payslip items, and what MOM actually does about a lapse are in itemised payslips and Key Employment Terms.

A departing foreign employee. If the person leaving is not a Singapore Citizen, holds a work pass, or is a Permanent Resident, IR21 tax clearance applies, and the filing deadline is at least one month before their last day, an overseas posting, or a departure of more than three months. Two exemptions are worth knowing before assuming every departure needs it: employees who worked 60 days or less in the calendar year are exempt (directors and public entertainers excepted), and a further concession covers foreign employees who entered Singapore on or after 1 January 2007 and worked 183 days or more across two calendar years while earning under S$21,000 a year. Where IR21 does apply, IRAS’s own processing figures are worth planning around: 80% of e-filed forms are processed within 7 working days, against 21 days for paper filing, so a realistic wait for the Clearance Directive runs to one to three weeks, not months. The full resignation-day-forward sequence is in the IR21 foreign employee resignation timeline.

A departing local employee. No IR21 is needed for a Singapore Citizen; tax clearance is a non-citizen obligation only. What still applies is more ordinary, but no less real: a final itemised payslip with the last salary, CPF on wages up to the last day worked, and whatever notice-period pay the contract sets out. A shorter list than for a departing foreign employee, but not a blank one.

A change in age band or PR year. CPF rates step up when an employee crosses an age threshold (55, 60, 65, 70), and when a Permanent Resident moves from their first year of graduated rates to their second, then to full rates in their third. Both are easy to miss on a spreadsheet that was set up once and never revisited since.

The full payroll compliance checklist, at a glance

Eight rows, three regulators, no legislation restated here, just the dates and where they go.

Obligation	Goes to	Due	Triggered by
CPF contributions	CPF Board	Last day of the calendar month	Payroll for any month you employed a CPF-eligible Citizen or PR
Skills Development Levy	CPF Board, as agent for SWDA	Same submission as CPF, via CPF EZPay	Payroll for any month you employed staff in Singapore, foreign employees included
Itemised payslips	The employee	With each payment, or within 3 working days; final salary on termination	Every pay run
Key Employment Terms	The employee, in writing	Within 14 days of the first day	Any employee on a contract of 14 days or more
AIS / IR8A	IRAS	1 March	5 or more employees at any point in the preceding year, or an IRAS notice
IR21 tax clearance	IRAS	At least one month before the last day, overseas posting, or a 3-month-plus departure	A non-citizen employee resigns, is transferred, or leaves
Employment records	Kept on file	Current staff: 2 years running. Former staff: their last 2 years, kept 1 year after their last day	Every Employment-Act-covered employee
Payroll and tax records	Kept on file, produced to IRAS on request	At least 5 years from the relevant Year of Assessment	Every payroll transaction

This table leaves out two obligations deliberately, not by oversight. MOM’s Occupational Employment Dataset has no fixed periodic date; you update it whenever an employee’s occupation or employment status changes, not on a calendar cycle. And the Foreign Worker Levy, a separate monthly bill tied to Work Permit quotas, runs on its own tier and headcount rules entirely outside this calendar.

What changes on 1 January 2027

Two of the CPF age bands get more expensive for employers from 1 January 2027, and a calendar page that ignores a dated, already-published change is stale on the day it launches.

From 1 January 2027, the total CPF rate for employees above 55 to 60 rises from 34% to 35.5% (the employer share up 0.5 percentage points to 16.5%, the employee share up 1.0 point to 19%), and for employees above 60 to 65 it rises from 25% to 26% (employer and employee each up 0.5 points, to 13% apiece). The bands below 55, and above 65, are untouched. Phased-in rates for senior employees earning S$500 to S$750 a month rise proportionally too. Nothing changes for Permanent Residents on first- or second-year graduated rates.

Where the money goes is specific, not vague: CPF Board states the increase is “fully allocated to the CPF Retirement Account, up to their Full Retirement Sum.” A CPF Transition Offset softens the employer side automatically, equivalent to half of the 2027 increase in employer contributions for each Singapore Citizen or PR employee aged above 55 to 65, with no application needed. CPF Board has not published how long the offset runs, beyond tying it to “the 2027 increase,” so we are not going to guess at a duration it has not stated.

This is the third step in a deliberately gradual path. The 2019 Tripartite Workgroup on Older Workers recommended raising senior rates by no more than a single percentage point a year, aiming for the above-55-to-60 band to reach parity with the standard 37% rate by around 2030, a target MOM has always described as adjustable if conditions warrant. The full narrative, and what to do about it if your payroll genuinely spans a mix of ages, is in CPF rates for senior employees.

What being late actually costs

CPF late payment interest is the cost everybody underestimates, because it does not feel like it should compound the way it does. It runs at 1.5% a month, minimum S$5, starting the day after the due date, not the enforcement threshold. CPF Board’s own example makes the point better than any paraphrase: pay on the 15th, and 15 days of interest are levied, “as the payment is 15 days past the due date.” Not one day. Fifteen.

Beyond interest, CPF Board can impose a composition amount to settle a case without going to court, and persistent default escalates to prosecution, with directors charged personally alongside the company. A separate, considerably harsher offence applies where an employer has already deducted an employee’s CPF share from their wages and simply not paid it over: that is not lateness, that is holding money that was never the employer’s to hold, and the CPF Act treats it accordingly. The full penalty ladder, and the enforcement process CPF Board actually runs, are in the CPF late payment penalty.

AIS, payslip and KETs lateness sit under their own, separate penalty regimes, distinct from CPF’s, each covered in its own article above.

Who actually keeps this running

None of the individual obligations on this calendar is hard on its own. What makes the calendar unforgiving is that several clocks run at once, and in most companies exactly one person is watching all of them, until that person goes on leave, changes roles, or leaves the company. The month that breaks is rarely the month someone forgot a rule. It is the month the person who tracked the rules was unavailable.

Some employers keep this entirely in-house, on a shared calendar and a checklist, and for a small, stable headcount with straightforward pay, that is a genuinely reasonable choice. Others move to payroll software once there is enough repetitive computation to be worth automating, or to a bureau or full outsourcing once nobody on the team owns payroll as an actual job. We compare the four models honestly, including when staying in-house is the right call, in payroll: in-house, software or outsourced.

We also run payroll processing for Singapore employers who would rather hand the calendar to someone else. Either way, the dates above do not move for anyone’s convenience.