Payroll year-end in Singapore has a deceptive shape. The headline deadline — reporting every employee’s 2026 income to IRAS — falls on 1 March 2027, which sounds comfortably far away. But the numbers you will report in March are being generated right now, by whatever your payroll system does in its November and December runs. A misconfigured CPF table, a bonus booked to the wrong year, or an employee count nobody checked against the Auto-Inclusion Scheme threshold does not become visible in March. It becomes a March problem — sitting between you and a deadline that does not move.

And this year-end carries an extra twist: on 1 January 2027, while you are preparing the 2026 filing, the rules change under your feet — CPF rates rise for older employees, and the Employment Pass and S Pass salary floors step up for new applications.

This article covers the whole cluster: who must file what by 1 March, two points on which widely circulated guidance is wrong or outdated, the bonus-timing trap, the January changes, and the short list of things to fix before your December payroll run.

The 1 March Obligation: IR8A and the Auto-Inclusion Scheme

Every Singapore employer must report each employee’s employment income for the calendar year to IRAS by 1 March of the following year. For income earned in 2026, that means 1 March 2027 — Year of Assessment 2027. “Employees” here is broad: full-time, part-time, resident and non-resident staff, and company directors receiving remuneration all require reporting.

How you report depends on whether you are in the Auto-Inclusion Scheme (AIS).

AIS is compulsory if any of the following applies:

• Your business had 5 or more employees at any time from 1 January to 31 December 2026 — and the count includes everyone who was employed during the year, including staff who have since left;
• IRAS has issued you a Notice to File Employment Income of Employees Electronically; or
• You are already registered for AIS — once in, participation continues even if headcount later falls below five.

Under AIS, you submit employment income electronically to IRAS (via myTax Portal or directly from AIS-enabled payroll software), and the figures are pre-filled into your employees’ personal tax returns. You do not issue hardcopy IR8A forms to staff. This is also why a late AIS submission is not a private problem: every employee’s own tax filing sits waiting on your data.

Employers below the threshold who are not in AIS prepare Form IR8A — plus Appendix 8A for benefits-in-kind and Appendix 8B for share-option and share-ownership gains, where applicable — and provide them to employees by 1 March for their own filing. Smaller employers can also join AIS voluntarily, and for anyone running payroll software, it is usually less work than the paper route.

Correction #1 — the registration deadline. A number of guides circulating this quarter state that AIS registration for the 2026 income year closes on 31 December 2026. IRAS’s own page says otherwise: AIS registration is now available year-round, and registration for YA 2027 is open until 1 March 2027. So a company that discovers its obligation in January has not missed the boat. That said, registering now is still plainly the better move — registration takes minutes, and the real work (clean data, a submission-capable system, a configured payroll file) is what the remaining months are for. Register once you have at least one employee; do not leave registration and first submission to the same fortnight.

Correction #2 — Form IR8S is gone. Up to YA 2025, excess or voluntary employer CPF contributions were reported on a separate Form IR8S. From YA 2026, the IR8S is discontinued: excess or voluntary employer CPF contributions (net of refunds) are reported on the IR8A itself, and interest on refunds of excess employee CPF goes under allowances. The practical check: if your payroll software still generates an IR8S for the 2026 year, it is running an outdated template — update it before, not during, filing season.

The Bonus-Timing Trap

The single most common year-end reporting error is attributing bonuses to the wrong year — and the rule is subtler than “when it was paid.”

A contractual bonus — one the employee is entitled to under the employment contract, such as a guaranteed 13th-month AWS for service in 2026 — is 2026 income even if it is paid in January 2027, because the entitlement arose in 2026. It belongs in the YA 2027 filing.

A discretionary bonus — one the company decides at its own option — is income of the year in which the employer commits to paying it. A performance bonus approved by the board in January 2027 and paid in February 2027 is 2027 income, reported a full year later in YA 2028, even though everyone thinks of it as “the 2026 bonus.”

Two consequences follow. First, your December board minutes matter: as we covered in our year-end tax planning article, a bonus committed before 31 December is deductible to the company in FY2026 — and that same commitment date fixes which year the employee is taxed in. Second, your payroll file needs to reflect the legal position, not the cash date. Decide the bonus structure deliberately, paper it, and tell whoever prepares the IR8A data which rule applies.

While on CPF and bonuses: CPF on Additional Wages (bonuses) is subject to the annual AW ceiling, which is computed per employee from the S$8,000 monthly Ordinary Wage ceiling. December bonus runs are where AW ceiling errors — contributions over- or under-paid — most often occur, and where they are cheapest to catch.

What Changes on 1 January 2027 — While You Are Filing for 2026

CPF rates rise for older workers. From 1 January 2027, as the next step in the long-running schedule to strengthen retirement adequacy:

• Employees above 55 to 60: total contribution rises from 34% to 35.5% (employer 16.5%, employee 19%)
• Employees above 60 to 65: total rises from 25% to 26% (employer 13%, employee 13%)
• Employees 55 and below: unchanged at 37% (17% employer, 20% employee)
• The Ordinary Wage ceiling holds at S$8,000 — the phased increases completed in January 2026, and no further step applies in 2027

The changes apply to wages earned from 1 January 2027. If your payroll is on a maintained cloud platform, the new tables arrive automatically — verify rather than assume, with a sample payslip for each affected age band on the January run. If payroll is spreadsheet-based or on unmaintained software, this is a manual table update that must land before January’s processing, and the age-banded rates are exactly where manual payrolls go wrong.

Work pass salary floors rise for new applications. Also from 1 January 2027, as we covered in our work-pass framework guide: the Employment Pass minimum qualifying salary rises to S$6,000 (S$6,600 for financial services) and the S Pass floor to S$3,600 (S$4,000 financial services) for new applications, with renewals following from 1 January 2028. If you are hiring foreign staff, an application submitted in December 2026 is assessed against the current floors; the same application in January is assessed against the new ones. Offers in the pipeline near the thresholds should be timed and priced with that line in view — and renewals due in 2028 should already be budgeted against the higher floors, not the current ones.

The December-Run Checklist

Everything above converges on one practical point: the December payroll run is the last one whose output you can still shape before it becomes the year’s filed record. Before it processes:

• Confirm your AIS status — count everyone employed at any point in 2026, leavers included; if the count reaches five and you are not registered, register on myTax Portal now
• Verify the CPF configuration for 2026 — OW ceiling at S$8,000, current-year rate tables — so the CPF figures feeding the IR8A are right before they are generated, not corrected after
• Reconcile payroll CPF against CPF Board records for the year to date — the IR8A must match what the Board actually received, not what the software estimated
• Settle the bonus position — contractual or discretionary, committed this year or next — and document it in the board minutes accordingly
• Sweep the year’s benefits-in-kind — housing, car benefits, insurance premiums borne for staff, gifts above exemption thresholds — into the Appendix 8A data now, rather than reconstructing them in February
• Collect leavers’ data — employees who left during 2026 still need income reported; confirm their records are complete while the details are still retrievable
• Load the 1 January 2027 CPF tables (or confirm your platform will) and diarise a January payslip check for staff above 55
• Check pending work-pass applications and offers against the January floor increases
• Confirm your submission channel works — an AIS-enabled payroll platform or the myTax Portal route — with a dry run in January, not a first attempt in late February

Calibrated, As Always

Must do: report 2026 employment income by 1 March 2027 — electronically under AIS if you had 5 or more employees at any point in 2026 or hold an IRAS notice; and run January 2027 payroll on the new CPF rates for staff above 55.

Worth doing now, cheap: the December checklist above — each item is minutes now versus days in February; and register for AIS early even though the window runs to 1 March.

Merely possible, no action needed for most: AIS for employers below five staff (voluntary, often convenient, never compulsory until the threshold or a notice arrives); and the 2028 renewal floors for work passes — a budgeting note, not a current task.

How A1 Accounting Helps

Payroll year-end is painless in exact proportion to how well the year’s payroll was run — which is why our clients experience it as a review, not a project. For businesses on our payroll service, the CPF tables are current, contributions reconcile to CPF Board records monthly, benefits-in-kind are tagged as they occur, and the AIS submission flows from the same records — filed well before 1 March, with employees’ pre-filled returns correct the first time.

If your payroll has been run in-house this year and any item on the December checklist gives you pause — the employee count, the CPF configuration, the bonus treatment, or simply who is going to prepare and submit the AIS file — October is the right month to hand it over. February is when everyone else tries to.

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The numbers you file in March are being written in your next two payroll runs. Reach out this week and we will make sure they are written correctly.

Disclaimer: This article is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute tax, employment or legal advice. AIS obligations, CPF rates and work-pass criteria depend on individual circumstances and are subject to change; verify current requirements with IRAS at iras.gov.sg, the CPF Board at cpf.gov.sg and MOM at mom.gov.sg before acting.