Singapore Payroll Terms: CPF, SDL, IR8A & AIS Guide

Key Takeaways

• CPF, SDL, IR8A and AIS are four separate obligations, not one. CPF and SDL are monthly contributions you pay alongside wages. IR8A and AIS are annual reporting requirements to IRAS.
• CPF applies only to Singapore Citizens and Permanent Residents. SDL applies to every employee you hire, local or foreign, including part-timers and interns.
• IR8A is the annual form. AIS is the delivery method. You still need to prepare IR8A data every year; AIS just tells you whether you submit it electronically to IRAS or hand it to your employees on paper.
• The IR8A deadline is 1 March every year, covering income earned in the preceding calendar year. There is no grace period, and late or missing filings carry fines of up to S$1,000 per employee.
• Get the terminology straight before your first payroll run. Confusing CPF with SDL, or IR8A with AIS, is one of the most common (and costly) mistakes first-time Singapore employers make.

If you’ve just hired your first employee in Singapore, you’ve probably run into four acronyms within your first week: CPF, SDL, IR8A, and AIS. They get thrown around interchangeably in forums and payroll software menus, but each one means something different, applies to different people, and has its own deadline. This guide untangles all four in one place, so you know exactly what you owe, to whom, and by when.

What is CPF and who does it apply to?

CPF (Central Provident Fund) is Singapore’s mandatory social security savings scheme. Both you and your employee contribute a percentage of monthly wages into the employee’s CPF account, which funds their retirement, healthcare (via Medisave), and, in many cases, their home purchase.

CPF only applies to employees who are Singapore Citizens or Permanent Residents (PRs). If your team is entirely made up of Employment Pass or S Pass holders, you won’t be making CPF contributions for them at all — though other levies, covered below, still apply.

For employees aged 55 and below, the total CPF contribution rate is currently 37% of wages (17% from the employer, 20% from the employee), applied to Ordinary Wages up to the monthly ceiling. The rate steps down in bands for older employees. Because CPF rates and wage ceilings are revised periodically, always confirm the exact percentage and ceiling that applies to your payroll month on the CPF Board’s contribution calculator rather than relying on a fixed number from memory.

In practice, what we see with most SMEs is that CPF becomes the first real budgeting surprise for new employers — the employer’s share is a genuine cost on top of gross salary, not a deduction from it, so it needs to be planned into your headcount costs from day one.

CPF contributions are due by the 14th of the following month. Late payment attracts interest, and persistent late payment can trigger CPF Board enforcement action.

What is SDL and how is it different from CPF?

SDL (Skills Development Levy) is a separate, much smaller levy that funds workforce training initiatives administered under the SkillsFuture umbrella. This is where employers most often trip up: SDL applies to every employee you hire, not just Citizens and PRs.

That means SDL is payable for:

• Singapore Citizens and PRs
• Employment Pass, S Pass, and Work Permit holders
• Part-time and casual staff
• Interns, as long as they’re paid a wage

SDL is calculated as a small percentage of each employee’s monthly wage, subject to a minimum and a wage ceiling — the rate and ceiling are set by SkillsFuture Singapore Agency (SSG) and reviewed periodically, so check the current figures on the SSG website before running payroll.

Unlike CPF, which goes into an individual’s retirement account, SDL doesn’t belong to the employee. It’s pooled into national funds like the Skills Development Fund, which subsidises training grants that employers themselves can later tap into. Helpfully, SDL is collected together with CPF each month, so if your payroll software or the CPF e-Submission system calculates CPF correctly, it will typically calculate SDL for the same headcount at the same time.

What is the IR8A form and who needs it?

IR8A is the annual statement of employment income that employers must prepare for every employee who earned Singapore-sourced income during the calendar year. It’s the Singapore equivalent of a payslip summary that IRAS uses to assess each employee’s personal income tax.

You need to prepare IR8A for:

• Full-time and part-time employees, resident and non-resident
• Company directors, including non-executive directors receiving fees
• Board or committee members receiving payment
• Former employees who received income during the year (a late bonus, for example)

Depending on what you paid, you may also need supporting forms: Appendix 8A for non-cash benefits like housing or a company car, Appendix 8B for gains from employee stock plans, and Form IR8S where CPF contributions were adjusted or refunded. Most first-time employers only need the base IR8A form, since benefits-in-kind and share schemes tend to come later as a company scales.

The deadline to prepare IR8A and any relevant appendices is 1 March of the year following the year of income — for example, income earned in 2025 must be reported by 1 March 2026. This date does not move, and IRAS does not routinely grant extensions.

Missing the deadline is treated as an offence under the Income Tax Act, with fines of up to S$1,000 per employee not correctly filed for, and imprisonment possible for serious or repeated non-compliance. For a deeper walkthrough of exactly how to complete each section of the form, see our guide on what Singapore employers need to know about IR8A.

A quick note on searching for “IR8A form 2024,” “IR8A form 2022,” or even “IR8A form 2021”: the form itself is updated each Year of Assessment, so it’s normal to see employers search by year when they’re trying to find the current version. Running payroll in Singapore means the form you need changes slightly year to year, and the IR8A form for YA2026 (covering income earned in 2025) is the one described here — if you’re filing for an earlier year, use that year’s version of the form instead, since fields and thresholds can shift.

IR8A is also not the same thing as IR21 tax clearance. If a foreign employee is leaving Singapore for good, you may need to file Form IR21 for IRAS tax clearance a separate obligation from IR8A that applies specifically to departing non-citizen employees, with its own timeline (generally at least one month before the employee’s last day). Don’t assume that filing IR8A covers this; check IRAS’s tax clearance guidance for departing employees separately if this situation applies to you.

What is AIS and how does it relate to IR8A?

AIS (Auto-Inclusion Scheme) is not a separate form — it’s the electronic channel through which employers submit IR8A data directly to IRAS, so that it’s automatically pre-filled into each employee’s personal tax return.

Employers meeting the headcount threshold set by IRAS are required to join AIS and file electronically rather than issuing paper IR8A forms to staff. Smaller employers below the threshold may join AIS voluntarily, or continue issuing hardcopy IR8A forms for employees to declare themselves. Because the mandatory AIS headcount threshold has been adjusted in recent years, confirm the current figure on the IRAS AIS page before deciding whether registration is compulsory for you.

Once you’re submitting through AIS, you should not also hand out paper IR8A forms — the two methods are mutually exclusive for the same employee in the same year. Registration for AIS is done through myTax Portal and, once you’re in, stays in effect for future years unless you deregister.

How CPF, SDL, IR8A and AIS fit together across the payroll year

It helps to see these four terms on a single timeline, since they don’t all happen at the same point in the year.

Read left to right, the pattern is simple: CPF and SDL are what you pay monthly, alongside every payroll run. IR8A and AIS are what you report annually, once the year is closed. Getting the monthly numbers right all year is what makes the annual IR8A filing straightforward rather than a scramble in February.

For a closer look at how the employer’s share of CPF is calculated and budgeted, see our guide on employer CPF contributions in Singapore.

Should you run payroll yourself, or use a payroll system or payroll service?

Once you’ve got CPF, SDL, IR8A and AIS straight in your head, the next decision is how you’ll actually run payroll in Singapore month to month. Singapore employers generally pick one of three routes:

• Manual payroll, calculating CPF and SDL by hand each month. This works for a single employee, but the margin for error grows fast once you’re tracking multiple wage components, part-timers, or staff on different work passes.
• A payroll system, i.e. software that automates CPF and SDL calculations and, ideally, integrates directly with AIS for electronic IR8A submission. This is the most common upgrade once a company has more than one or two employees.
• Payroll outsourcing, where a payroll accounting services provider runs the monthly calculations, CPF and SDL submissions, and annual IR8A/AIS filing on your behalf.

There’s no universally “right” answer here — a lean two-person team on manual payroll may be perfectly fine, while a fast-growing team juggling different CPF rates, SDL thresholds, and appendices probably benefits from payroll services in Singapore rather than an internal spreadsheet. The point of getting the CPF/SDL/IR8A/AIS terminology right in this guide is that it makes that decision easier: you know exactly what a payroll system or payroll outsourcing provider needs to be capable of before you evaluate one.

Common mistakes first-time Singapore employers make

• Assuming SDL doesn’t apply because staff are all on Employment Passes. SDL is levied on nationality-blind headcount; CPF is the one that’s Citizen/PR-only, not SDL.
• Treating AIS as optional busywork. Once you cross the mandatory headcount threshold, AIS registration and electronic filing is a legal requirement, not a convenience feature.
• Filing IR8A but forgetting director’s fees. Fees approved for board members are reportable income, even if the director doesn’t draw a regular salary.
• Backdating CPF contributions instead of catching errors early. Late CPF payments attract interest from the day after the due date, and errors compound the longer they go unnoticed.
• Confusing “IR8A” with “AIS” in conversation. They get used interchangeably by non-specialists, but one is the data, the other is the delivery mechanism — mixing them up leads to registering for the wrong thing at the wrong time.

Conclusion

CPF, SDL, IR8A, and AIS aren’t interchangeable jargon each one has its own rules, its own audience, and its own deadline. CPF and SDL are the monthly contributions sitting alongside every payslip; IR8A and AIS are the annual reporting obligations that close out the year. Getting comfortable with the difference early saves first-time employers from the two most expensive mistakes: underpaying a levy nobody told them applied, or scrambling to register for AIS days before the 1 March deadline.

Grof’s payroll and corporate secretarial team manages CPF and SDL contributions, IR8A preparation, and AIS submissions for Singapore-incorporated companies of every size so first-time employers don’t have to become payroll specialists just to stay compliant. If you’d like a second pair of eyes on your current payroll setup, get in touch with Grof’s team.

FAQs: Singapore Payroll Terms