Itemised Payslip Requirements in Singapore

Every employee covered by the Employment Act must receive an itemised payslip — given with payment, or within 3 working days of it — listing 12 prescribed items, from basic salary to every deduction. The duty sits in Section 96 of the Employment Act, enforced by MOM, and it runs on the same clock as paying salary itself.

Last reviewed 10 June 2026 · Source: Ministry of Manpower (Employment Act S96; Regulations S148/2016).

The 12 items every payslip must show

The required contents are prescribed by the Employment (Employment Records, Key Employment Terms and Pay Slips) Regulations 2016 (S148/2016):

#	Item	#	Item
1	Employer's name	7	Additional payments (bonus, rest-day pay, public-holiday pay)
2	Employee's name	8	Deductions made (fixed and ad-hoc)
3	Date of payment	9	Overtime hours worked
4	Basic salary	10	Overtime pay
5	Salary period (start and end)	11	Overtime period (if different from salary period)
6	Allowances (fixed and ad-hoc)	12	Net salary

Items 9–11 mean your overtime records and your payslip are the same numbers — a payroll system that stores OT hours and OT pay prints both obligations from one place.

If a month has none of an item — no OT, no bonus — the slip simply omits or zeroes it. What you cannot do is collapse items into each other.

When the payslip must be given

Situation	Deadline
Normal salary payment	Together with payment, or within 3 working days
Termination or dismissal	With the outstanding salary

Format is flexible: soft copy, hard copy, even handwritten — MOM prescribes the contents, not the medium. An ESS portal download, a PDF email, or a paper slip all qualify, provided all 12 items are there.

Deductions are where payslips fail

"Deductions made" covers two kinds: fixed deductions like the employee's CPF contribution, and ad-hoc deductions — which MOM says explicitly include deductions for no-pay leave and absence from work.

That wording carries a trap. If an employee took two days of no-pay leave and you simply pay a smaller gross, the slip shows no deduction line — and that slip is incomplete. The compliant presentation shows the full gross, then no-pay leave as its own deduction line (days and amount), so net salary still foots as gross minus total deductions.

Silently netting no-pay leave into a reduced gross is non-compliant.

What an incomplete payslip costs

Section 96(4) makes an incomplete or inaccurate payslip a breach regardless of whether you knew — strict liability. Since 1 April 2016 it is a civil contravention (Section 126A), not a criminal offence: MOM issues an administrative penalty of up to $1,000 for a first occasion and up to $2,000 for a repeat, assessed per affected employee (Section 126B).

Per-employee assessment matters for a small team: five staff with the same defective slip is five separate penalties, not one — up to $5,000 from a single template error on a first occasion, and double that on a repeat. Exactly the kind of risk a 10-minute template check removes.

How long to keep payslip records

Keep a copy of every payslip for 2 years for current employees, and for 1 year after a former employee leaves. The same retention applies to the underlying employment and OT records, so one retention policy covers the lot.

Soft copies count — there is no requirement to archive paper.

Sending payslips safely — the PDPA layer

How you deliver the slip has its own rules. Under the PDPC's 2025 advisory, employers should not email payslips as attachments protected by NRIC- or birthdate-based passwords — NRIC numbers must not be used as default passwords for password-protected files. A payslip is dense personal data: identity, salary, CPF, deductions.

The clean pattern is an employee self-service (ESS) portal the employee logs into, with the payslip downloaded over an authenticated session. If you must email, use a dedicated payslip PIN issued through a separate channel — never the NRIC.

A compliant payslip delivered insecurely just trades a MOM problem for a PDPA one.

Who is covered

Section 96 applies to every employee under the Employment Act — full-time, part-time, foreign staff on work passes, regardless of salary. It is broader than the Part IV overtime rules: your $5,000 manager has no statutory OT, but she must still get a complete itemised payslip every month.

A 5-minute template audit

Run the current template against this sequence once:

1. Count the 12 items against the table above — most home-grown templates miss the salary period dates or the OT period.
2. Check the deduction lines — every deduction named and amounted, including no-pay leave and absence, with net salary footing as gross minus the total.
3. Check the OT trio — hours, pay, and period all present whenever OT was worked, matching your OT records to the dollar.
4. Check delivery — given with payment or within 3 working days, through a channel that does not lean on NRIC passwords.
5. Check retention — copies kept 2 years for current staff, 1 year for leavers.

The fix is cheap now and expensive after an employee complaint lands at MOM — at $5,000 per defective slip, a five-person payroll with a shared template error is a five-figure exposure from one oversight.