Singapore to Raise Annual Leave for Outsourced Progressive Wage Model Workers to 10 Days by 2029

Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower announced on July 19 that outsourced workers covered under the Progressive Wage Model will see their minimum annual leave entitlement rise from seven days to ten days, implemented progressively from 2029. The change covers five PWM sectors: cleaning, security, landscape, lift and escalator, and waste management. Approximately 60 per cent of outsourced workers in these sectors currently receive annual leave below the new ten-day threshold and stand to benefit directly.

The structural problem this policy addresses is precise and worth understanding clearly.

Under the Employment Act, employees accrue one additional day of annual leave per year of service, starting from seven days and capping at fourteen. That mechanism works straightforwardly for workers with stable, continuous employment under a single employer. Outsourced workers, however, operate in a fundamentally different arrangement — employed by service providers but deployed at client worksites under outsourcing contracts. When those contracts change hands, workers are frequently rehired by the incoming service provider. The legal employment relationship resets. So does the leave entitlement, reverting to the statutory minimum of seven days regardless of how many years the worker has spent in the same role at the same site.

The leave clock resets. The work does not.

This gap between continuous service and contractual employment was raised explicitly during February’s Budget debate by NTUC assistant secretary-general and Radin Mas MP Melvin Yong, who called for a higher baseline leave entitlement specifically for PWM outsourced workers. Yong argued that fixing a higher floor within the PWM framework would strengthen workforce retention, acknowledge accumulated service, and allow service providers and client companies to price the cost transparently into contracts — a framing that positioned the reform as fiscally manageable rather than disruptive.

MOM’s announcement follows that framing closely. The ministry stated that tripartite partners agreed to raise the minimum entitlement to “better reflect continuous years of service” and ensure employment conditions “remain protected” even when employers change. The ten-day floor does not replace the Employment Act’s incremental accrual mechanism — workers already receiving above ten days retain those entitlements — but it establishes a materially higher baseline that insulates outsourced workers from the contractual reset problem.

That last point carries real weight. The cost of enhanced leave does not fall uniformly on service providers alone. It flows through to the contract prices that government agencies, private firms, and building management companies pay for cleaning, security, and landscape services. Transparent repricing is not a side effect of the policy — it is part of the design.

MOM’s estimate that 60 per cent of affected outsourced workers currently sit below the ten-day threshold is drawn from available data on the cleaning, security, and landscape sectors specifically. The ministry acknowledged the figure is an estimate rather than a precise census. That caveat matters. It suggests the actual distribution of leave entitlements across the full five-sector scope — including lift and escalator maintenance and waste management — remains partially opaque, and that the policy’s reach may be refined as implementation approaches.

The broader significance is institutional. Singapore’s PWM has functioned since its introduction as a mechanism to raise wages and working conditions in low-wage outsourced sectors without imposing a universal statutory minimum wage. Embedding enhanced leave entitlements directly into the PWM framework extends that logic: rather than amending the Employment Act for all workers, the reform targets the specific structural vulnerability that outsourced employment creates for a defined group. It is calibrated, sector-specific, and tripartite in origin — consistent with how Singapore’s labour policy apparatus prefers to operate.

Further details on the phased timeline will be released closer to 2029.