Local Qualifying Salary to be further refined, details to be announced in Budget
The LQS is put in place to ensure firms do not hire locals on ‘a token salary’, says Minister for Manpower Tan See Leng
[SINGAPORE] The Local Qualifying Salary (LQS) will be further refined, with details to be announced in the upcoming Budget statement on Feb 12, Minister for Manpower Tan See Leng said on Tuesday (Jan 13).
Dr Tan revealed this during his response to a supplementary question in Parliament from Abdul Muhaimin Abdul Malik, Workers’ Party MP for Sengkang GRC, on the LQS – the minimum wage firms must pay local workers to be eligible to hire foreign employees.
Abdul Muhaimin asked whether the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) had assessed the impact of raising the LQS in 2024 from S$1,400 to S$1,600 on working seniors, particularly those whose wages may have been lifted just enough to meet the threshold but who may have been pushed into lower Silver Support tiers as a result.
He also asked how many recipients have been affected.
The Silver Support Scheme provides quarterly payouts of between S$250 and S$1,080 to low-income Singaporeans aged 65 and above.
The higher-tier payout applies to individuals living in households with a monthly income per person of up to S$1,500, while the lower tier is for those with a household income per person of more than S$1,500 but not exceeding S$2,300.
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Other eligibility criteria include not owning a five-room or larger Housing & Development Board flat, private property or multiple properties, and having total Central Provident Fund contributions of no more than S$140,000 by age 55. For the self-employed or platform workers, average annual net trade income must not exceed S$27,600 when they were aged between 45 and 54.
Earlier in the sitting, Abdul Muhaimin also asked why the Silver Support Scheme’s higher-tier monthly income threshold remains at S$1,500 even though the LQS has been raised to S$1,600, and whether the government would review the threshold to ensure consistency and adequate support for lower-income seniors.
In response, Dr Tan said the LQS and the Silver Support Scheme “are not in any way interlinked”.
The LQS, he added, is not meant to measure retirement adequacy or financial need, but to ensure firms do not hire locals on “a token salary” simply to qualify for foreign worker quotas.
On how many seniors may have seen their Silver Support payouts affected by the LQS increase, Dr Tan said MOM does not track such figures “because it is not how we work that scheme out to be”.
He also noted that the monthly per-capita household income ceiling for the Silver Support Scheme, which is reviewed periodically, was raised to S$2,300 from S$1,800 in 2025, allowing more seniors to qualify for payouts.
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