Public Holiday Pay in Singapore: Off-in-Lieu, Rest Days & Part-Time Rules

Singapore has 11 gazetted public holidays a year, and the Employment Act guarantees every covered employee paid time off for each one — or a defined remedy if the holiday lands on a day they weren't going to work anyway. Which remedy applies turns on one question your payroll has to get right for every employee, every holiday: does the public holiday fall on their rest day or their non-working day?

Last reviewed 10 July 2026 · Source: Ministry of Manpower (Employment Act).

Rest day vs non-working day: not the same thing

Confusing these two is the single most common public-holiday payroll error in Singapore, and MOM treats them differently. A rest day is the one day a week an employee is contractually not required to work — for Part IV-covered staff (workmen earning up to $4,500 basic monthly, non-workmen up to $2,600) it must be Sunday by default, though the employer can appoint another day. A non-working day is anyone else's day off — a PME's (professional, manager or executive's) Saturday, a shift worker's rostered off-day — that carries no statutory rest-day protection at all. Same absence from the roster, two different legal remedies, both defined by the Employment Act.

When the holiday falls on your rest day

If a public holiday lands on a Part IV employee's rest day, MOM's rule is fixed: the next working day automatically becomes their paid public holiday instead. There's no employer discretion here and no floating credit to track — it's a same-occurrence substitution, done the moment the calendar moves the holiday one day forward.

When the holiday falls on your non-working day

This is where MOM gives the employer a real choice. When a public holiday falls on any Employment Act employee's non-working day — a category that includes PMEs, who have no statutory rest day at all — you decide between two remedies: a paid day off in lieu, taken later, or one extra day's salary at the gross rate of pay, paid out instead. Whichever you pick, MOM expects it applied as a company-wide policy decision, not something negotiated holiday by holiday.

The "observed Monday" isn't automatic for your payroll

Government offices and banks close the Monday after a Sunday public holiday — that's a civic gazette rule everyone sees on the calendar. It is not the same rule that decides an individual employee's pay. What actually governs your payroll is the rest-day/non-working-day remedy above: for a standard Monday-to-Friday staffer whose rest day is Sunday, the two rules happen to land on the same Monday. For a retail or F&B team working a Sunday-to-Thursday roster with Saturday as the rest day, they don't — that employee's public-holiday remedy is calculated off their own rest day, not the gazette. Run payroll off the civic Monday assumption and you'll misfire for every non-Sunday-rest employee on the team.

If you ask staff to work on the public holiday itself

An employee who actually works on the public holiday — rest day, non-working day, or a normal working day that happens to be gazetted — keeps their pay for that day and is owed, per MOM, one extra day's pay at the basic rate on top: effectively double pay for the day worked. Some employers agree a swapped day off instead by mutual consent, but that's a negotiated exception, not the statutory default.

Public holiday falls on…	Who	What happens	Employer's choice?
Your rest day	Part IV employees only	The next working day becomes your paid public holiday	No — mandatory
Your non-working day	Any Employment Act employee, PMEs included	A paid day off in lieu, or one extra day's salary at your gross rate	Yes — employer decides the policy
A working day you're asked to work	Any Employment Act employee	Your normal pay for the day, plus one extra day's pay at your basic rate	Pay is fixed by law; a swapped day off is by agreement only

Off-in-lieu: it doesn't expire on its own

When you choose the "day off in lieu" remedy, that credit sits on the employee's balance until they take it — and unlike annual leave's carry-forward rules, neither the Employment Act nor MOM sets a statutory expiry for it. Some employers let credits run indefinitely; most set a policy expiry of three to six months to keep balances from piling up, but that's a business decision you have to state up front, never a silent forfeiture. Whatever you choose, put it in writing and let employees see the expiry date on their balance — an off-in-lieu credit an employee didn't know was expiring is a dispute waiting to happen.

Who's covered: Part IV and PMEs

Category	Salary threshold	Rest-day protection	Public holiday entitlement
Workman	Up to $4,500 basic monthly	Yes — statutory rest day	Yes
Non-workman	Up to $2,600 basic monthly	Yes — statutory rest day	Yes
PME (professional / manager / executive)	No limit	No statutory rest day	Yes

Public holiday entitlement itself is broad — it covers every Employment Act employee, PMEs included. Rest-day protection is narrower — Part IV only. That asymmetry is exactly why a PME never gets the mandatory rest-day substitution: with no statutory rest day, every public holiday they're rostered off on is legally a non-working day, governed by your company's off-in-lieu-or-pay policy instead.

Part-time employees: pro-rated, and sometimes cashed out

A part-time employee — contracted for under 35 hours a week — still gets public holiday pay, just pro-rated against a comparable full-timer's hours rather than granted as a whole day, using the same pro-rata logic SME payroll leans on for incomplete months. MOM's formula: divide the part-timer's annual working hours by a full-timer's annual working hours, multiply by 11 public holidays, then by the full-timer's daily hours.

Some employers go a step further and fold that pro-rated value into the employee's ongoing hourly rate instead of granting time off or per-holiday pay — but only if the contract of service says so. That's encashment, and it replaces the day-off/per-PH-pay event entirely rather than sitting alongside it. Encashed public holiday pay counts as Ordinary Wage for CPF purposes, the same as any other hourly earnings.

Item	Worked example (22h/week part-timer, 44h/week full-time baseline)
Pro-rated pay per public holiday	4 hours' pay
Annual public holiday value (11 holidays)	44 hours' pay
Encashed into hourly rate (on a $5/hr base)	+$0.19/hr → $5.19/hr

The arithmetic: 44 pro-rated hours ÷ (22 hours × 52 weeks) × $5 = $0.19 added to every hour worked, for the whole year — not a lump sum, an ongoing rate adjustment.

Setting your company's public holiday policy

Every one of these choices — which remedy you offer on a non-working day, how long an off-in-lieu credit lasts before it lapses, or whether you'd rather pin a fixed make-up working day instead of running a floating credit at all — is a policy you set once for the whole company, not a per-employee negotiation. Get it documented before your next public holiday lands wrong, not after an employee asks why their balance disappeared.

What to check before your next public holiday

• Know which of your employees are Part IV — it decides whether the mandatory rest-day substitution applies to them at all.
• Record each employee's actual rest day — Sunday is the default, but rosters that run Tuesday–Saturday or similar change the answer.
• Write down your non-working-day policy (day off in lieu vs extra pay) and, if you grant days off, your expiry rule — and make sure employees can see their own balance.
• Flag your part-time contracts that include a public-holiday encashment clause, so the hourly rate stays correct all year, not just the day the holiday falls.

Fix the rest-day/non-working-day split before your next public holiday, and every downstream calculation — leave balances, off-in-lieu expiry, part-time pay — falls into place on its own.