MPs suggest tweaking benchmarks, adjusting variable component of ministers’ salaries

SINGAPORE – The debate on changes to political salaries saw broad agreement on the importance of competitive remuneration, although some MPs suggested tweaks to the salary framework.

These included adjustments to how the benchmark for ministers’ salaries is calculated or changes to the proportion of fixed and variable components in a minister’s pay.

Currently, ministerial salaries are benchmarked to the median income of the top 1,000 earners who are Singapore citizens, with a 40 per cent discount to reflect the ethos of public service.

Nominated MP Kenneth Goh suggested that salaries should instead be benchmarked to jobs that reflect the “skills, judgment, complexity and weight of responsibility” expected of political office-holders.

Referring to the 2026 salary review committee’s report, Goh noted that just over half the top 1,000 earners are in senior management positions, a third are in financial services, and the remainder are professionals, such as lawyers, accountants, doctors and engineers.

“How comparable are these roles to that of a minister?” Goh asked.

While a corporate executive may run a large and complex organisation, their mandate is bound by organisational performance, with economic outcomes as a central priority, he said.

“For a minister, economic performance is also critically important, but it is only one part of the mandate,” he added. “A minister must reconcile economic performance with distributional consequences, social cohesion, land constraints, national security, resilience and intergenerational trade-offs.”

Goh also questioned the time horizon used to calculate the National Bonus – a component of ministerial salaries that is paid out based on four indicators: unemployment rate, real income growth for the 20th-percentile Singaporean earner and for the median Singapore citizen, as well as real gross domestic product growth.

He noted that the indicators reflect how Singapore is performing now, but some of the “most difficult challenges” – such as demographic sustainability, social mobility, climate adaptation, social cohesion – unfold over much longer horizons.

Goh suggested that the Government consider assessing progress on indicators that reflect Singapore’s capacity to thrive over the medium and long term.

Fellow NMP Azhar Othman, who said there was a widening distance between the lived reality of ordinary Singaporeans and the remuneration of those who govern them, suggested changing the proportions of the salary structure.

This has a fixed component of about 65 per cent, while the remainder includes an annual variable component, performance bonus and the National Bonus.

“If we accept the premise of a clean wage, we must also accept the premise of a shared risk,” said Azhar.

“I propose that we adjust the structure to a fixed salary of 45 per cent and a variable component of 55 per cent,” he said, adding that the fixed component “represents a substantial, dignified, and generous sum that no officeholder will struggle to live on”.

The remainder, he said, could be weighted towards metrics that directly affect the median citizen, such as real median income growth, unemployment rates and housing affordability.

Responding to Goh, Coordinating Minister for Public Services Chan Chun Sing said the top 1,000 earners benchmark was never intended to identify jobs comparable with those of the ministers, but serves as a broad proxy.

He agreed that salaries should be benchmarked against jobs that are more comparable, rather than just from a financial perspective, but cautioned that identifying such roles could result in too narrow a pool for comparison.

On measuring performance over a multi-year basis, rather than year by year, Chan said this has been considered, but there are practical difficulties in doing so.

“We are fully cognisant of the challenges of using a single-year measure, but we are also cognisant of the challenges of using multi-year assessment metrics. And we will have to find that balance,” Chan said.

As for Azhar’s call to increase the variable component, Chan said there have been calls for both a larger and a smaller variable component.

“The committee has considered all this, and on balance, they felt that the current two-thirds, one-third split is about right,” said Chan.

“But we will continue to look at this as we gain more experience running this framework.”

He said that regardless of the benchmark and formula chosen, these have to allow any prime minister to have the flexibility to recruit or retain three types of politicians – new entrants with potential, experienced ministers and established individuals who are prepared to give up their careers to join politics.

Quality of Life indicator

Some of the 12 MPs who spoke also supported the inclusion of a Quality of Life measure in the National Bonus – a suggestion made by the review committee.

NMP Kenneth Poon said the Government can take the opportunity to develop a broader framework for understanding social progress as the measure is developed.

He suggested four dimensions through which social progress can be assessed – material adequacy, access to essential services such as healthcare and public housing, social connectedness and subjective wellbeing, and whether Singaporeans feel their lives are going well.

Poon said objective indicators can tell us about the circumstances in which a person lives, while a subjective measure allows Singaporeans themselves to tell us how they experience their lives.

If measured well, he said, the National Bonus can continue to recognise the importance of a strong economy, jobs, and raising incomes, while also recognising the reason why these matter – “to enable Singaporeans, their families, and our communities to flourish”.

In response, Chan said the Quality of Life indicators should be ones where data can be collected, with a stable series of data to inform targets.

“It is not so easy to set such indicators because some of the things are qualitative rather than quantitative,” he said, adding that some of the factors are multi-year rather than single-year results.

Yet, he acknowledged that “some important things in life cannot be measured, and we must be careful not to make important only what we can measure”.

“So the Public Service Division will look into all this seriously before we come back with a proposal on what is feasible and what is possible, balancing all the considerations that the various members have set out,” said Chan.

MPs on how salary changes could be received

Several of the six PAP MPs who spoke noted that increasing ministerial salaries could be difficult for everyday Singaporeans to accept.

Labour MP Yeo Wan Ling (Punggol GRC) questioned the timing of the adjustments and said the reaction from workers “has not been a comfortable one”.

She said a wage framework does not make a number right “simply because a formula exists”.

What matters is that there is a credible basis behind salary adjustments, she said, adding that the “basis must be clear, the framework transparent and movements in actual pay must be explainable”.

Mariam Jaafar (Sembawang GRC) understands why someone’s reaction to seven-figure salaries might be: “Why so much?”

Acknowledging that the figure can feel abstract for many Singaporeans, she said she would not tell Singaporeans who are squeezed by challenges such as the cost of living that a seven-figure sum should not make them feel uncomfortable.

But the discomfort over such salaries should also be considered against other questions, such as whether a gap between political salaries and other career options might affect the willingness of capable people to enter politics, she said.

Five-term MP Liang Eng Hwa (Bukit Panjang), who joined politics in 2006, said in Mandarin that in 2007, he did not take part in a debate on a motion to adjust the salaries of political appointment holders as he was not entirely convinced ministerial salaries should be pegged to the market.

Two decades on, he said, he believes it is the right system, especially after witnessing first-hand the sacrifices made by political appointment holders.

“If we want Singapore to continue to have an outstanding political leadership team in the decades ahead, we must establish a reasonable and sustainable system that encourages capable people of integrity and a strong sense of mission to step forward and serve the country,” he said.

On the timing of the adjustments, Prime Minister Lawrence Wong said there is never a politically convenient time to adjust political salaries.

While he acknowledged ground sentiments, he said the Government had already deferred its consideration of the review committee’s recommendations after the conflict in Iran erupted, as its immediate priority was managing the conflict’s immediate consequences for Singapore.

While the Middle East conflict has not ended, he said the domestic economic situation has stabilised.

“We could always hope that next year will bring a better moment. But the world may just as easily become more difficult next year,” he said.

“And if every difficult circumstance becomes a reason not to act, then we will keep putting the issue off. And there will come a point when restraint ceases to be prudence and becomes neglect,” said PM Wong, who added that the need for leadership renewal is pressing and urgent.