Singapore Immigration: What It Really Takes to Get an Employment Pass in 2026

Why Moving to Singapore Is Challenging by Design

Singapore’s foreign talent policy is known to be strict for a reason. The nation is purposefully hard to get into. Singapore wants the best and brightest. The government selects people with talent, skills, experience, and the capacity to improve their economic condition.

Employers in Singapore are held to the same standards as expats. When working with MOM for employment-based relocation, employers should consider themselves evaluated and tested equally.

So, for those professionals interested in relocating to Singapore, the Employment Pass is the most common visa path. However, the Singapore immigration process is not as simple as it used to be. These days, your salary and qualification, your employer’s profile and capabilities, as well as a host of other factors may influence the outcome in accordance with the COMPASS assessment framework.

In this guide, we are going to walk you through how Singapore immigration works in practice and what professionals need to know before applying.

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How Singapore Immigration Thinks About Foreign Talent

The Core Principle Behind Singapore’s Immigration Policies

Singapore’s immigration system runs on a single, primary principle: foreign workers and professionals are expected to supplement the domestic workforce rather than compete with it.

The MOM manages employment-based immigration in Singapore. For MOM, an EP application is a two-way process – it’s not just about the individual applicant, it’s about whether the economy as a whole would benefit from this person joining the workforce in their role.

Why Employment Pass Applications Are Assessed Holistically

This is also why applications for Employment Passes are processed comprehensively. Your background is significant, but so is the company that is hiring you, your salary, and how the Singaporean job market in your line of work is likely to view you.

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What the Singapore Employment Pass Is — and What It Isn’t

Who the Employment Pass Is Intended For

In the case of the Singapore Employment Pass (EP), it was designed for professionals, managers, executives, and highly specialised personnel in senior positions and is not a general work permit.

EP applications from candidates applying for roles that are perceived to be filled by local workers will be rejected.

Industries and Roles Commonly Approved for Employment Passes

Singapore Employment Pass holders come from a wide variety of sectors. The most commonly approved industries for Employment Passes are typically related to technology, banking and financial services, engineering and architecture, healthcare and life sciences, education, management consulting, and other fields supporting digital transformation, innovation, or specialised sectors like AI and other emerging technologies. The Singapore EP is reserved for roles requiring specialised skill sets, mature decision-making, or leadership abilities.

Initial Validity and Renewal Considerations

Employment Passes are usually granted initially for up to two years. Renewals are determined by whether or not the job, company, and other aspects of the application still meet the requirements.

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Salary Requirements and Seniority Assessment

Why Salary Is the Fastest Way Singapore Judges Role Seniority

Salary has become the primary filter that determines the success or failure of a substantial number of Employment Pass applications.

Typical Employment Pass Salary Ranges in Practice

Singaporeans use salary as a metric to evaluate job seniority. When assessing an Employment Pass application, a good salary is a strong signal to the authorities that the role itself is truly senior or specialised, as well as an indication that the company values this role enough to offer a competitive and fair wage.

Exact salary requirements may vary from year to year depending on the target sector and even age group. However, most successful Employment Pass cases should fall into these broad monthly salary bands:

Early-career professionals are typically required to be in the range of SGD 5,000 to 5,500.

Mid-level professionals with established experience tend to fall into the SGD 6,000 to 8,000 bracket.

Senior professionals and managers will likely be at SGD 8,500 and above.

Highly specialized and in-demand roles — particularly those in IT, programming, finance, accounting, AI, and data — often need to be above SGD 10,000.

Singapore also expects these salaries to scale with age and experience. For many candidates, a higher salary is a deciding factor.

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Understanding the COMPASS Framework

What the COMPASS Framework Is and Why It Was Introduced

In the last few years, Singapore has formalized its assessment process by introducing the COMPASS framework, which stands for the Complementarity Assessment Framework. Instead of relying on subjective human decision-making, employment pass applications are now assessed using an ostensibly transparent points-based model.

In most cases, an application needs to at least 40 points, unless it is an exempted position.

COMPASS is different from other such systems in that it does not just score the individual applicant. It also takes a hard look at the employer and the employer’s contribution to Singapore’s workforce.

Salary plays a major role in COMPASS. The points awarded to a candidate go up if their salary is on par with or higher than what is common in Singapore for their role and industry. Qualifications matter too — recognised degrees, professional certifications, specialised skills — all will boost the points total.

But COMPASS goes deeper than that. It also considers whether the employer has a diverse workforce and whether they make an active effort to employ Singaporeans. In other words, even a good applicant can fail if the company they are joining is seen to have shoddy hiring practices or an unbalanced workforce.

Bonus points are also up for grabs. Jobs that are clearly in Singapore’s national interest in areas like innovation, digitalisation, sustainability, for example, can score higher. Smaller or growing companies that are expanding their workforce responsibly will also get points.

The main thing to understand is that today Employment Pass applications are being measured as much for fit and balance as on the papers.

Minimum COMPASS Score and General Eligibility Thresholds

While COMPASS is presented to applicants as a points-based framework, in practice, its true power lies in how various factors relate and interact with each other.

Salary, qualifications, and skills are all benchmarked against local salaries and the job market rather than being looked at in a vacuum. This means that an applicant is not evaluated on whether they are qualified in a broad sense but rather on whether they are suitably qualified for the Singaporean market. A salary that seems competitive in another country may be considered to be average or low in Singapore if it doesn’t line up with local norms for that position.

Similarly, qualifications are graded based on both recognition and relevance. Degrees from reputable universities, professional certifications, and specialised training that can be directly applied to the role at hand all work to strengthen the application. Generic or unrelated qualifications do not carry much weight even if the candidate has many years of experience.

Why the Employer Profile Matters Under COMPASS

Arguably, one of the most impactful additions to the COMPASS framework is the emphasis placed on the employer.

Immigration authorities in Singapore are also examining whether or not the hiring company can be seen to practice responsible employment. This takes the form of looking at the ratio of local employees to total headcount, the balance between local and foreign staff, and the extent to which the company invests in training and developing local talent.

A strong candidate can still potentially be rejected if the employer has a workforce that looks too dependent on foreign hires or lacks a diverse mix of Singaporeans and foreigners across all seniority levels. In a sense, COMPASS is deliberately designed to nudge companies to consider foreign professionals as a complement to the existing workforce rather than as a direct replacement.

Strategic Role Alignment and Business Contribution

COMPASS also scrutinises how the role itself contributes to Singapore’s wider economic strategy.

Roles that support the government’s priorities of innovation, technology adoption, digitalisation, and sustainability will be seen in a better light. To be clear, this does not mean that only jobs in technology are favoured but applications are stronger if the business case for hiring a foreigner to do the job is compelling and clear.

Positions that are clearly tied to regional expansion or corporate growth, specialised expertise, and leadership functions are much easier to justify and less likely to be challenged by a lack of clarity than roles with vague or generic responsibilities.

H3: Exemptions and High-Value Applications

Not all Employment Pass applications are equal.

Certain high-earning jobs, senior managers, and candidates working in established multinational corporations may be exempted from the COMPASS assessment entirely or face significantly lower barriers.

That said, applications are still manually reviewed and audited to ensure salary alignment and a certain threshold of role seniority.

Why COMPASS Has Changed Application Strategy

Prior to COMPASS, outcomes of Employment Pass applications could feel almost arbitrary or left to chance. With COMPASS, the system is more structured but in many ways far more demanding.

The framework has meant that applicants and employers must be much more strategic about what they submit. This includes reviewing salary positioning, tweaking job descriptions, assessing employer workforce composition, and anticipating how each factor will be scored by immigration.

H3: The Bigger Picture: COMPASS as a Policy Signal

Beyond just the assessment process for individual applications, the COMPASS framework is a reflection of the long-term strategy Singapore has been taking when it comes to its workforce.

The government is saying that Singapore continues to remain open to talent from abroad but on its own very clear terms. Skilled professionals who add skills, value, and economic worth are welcome if their hiring makes sense in the context of a balanced and diverse labour market.

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