Insurance for work pass holders

Three different things are meant by insurance here, and they come from different rules. Medical insurance answers the hospital bill. The Primary Care Plan answers the general practitioner visit and the follow-up to it. Work injury compensation answers the accident at work, and is the only one of the three that is not specific to foreign workers at all.

The pass decides whether an employer must buy the first two. Medical insurance has to be bought and maintained for each Work Permit holder and for each S Pass holder, while for an Employment Pass holder the requirement does not apply. The Primary Care Plan depends on where an eligible worker lives and on the sector the employer works in.

The pages here complement Work pass conditions and your protection, which sets out the wider duties — salary, housing, medical treatment as part of upkeep, and the fees an employer may not recover from a worker. This page does not repeat that material: it takes the insurance duties and follows them to their detail.

The duty is to buy and maintain medical insurance for each Work Permit holder and for each S Pass holder, and the cost of the policy cannot be passed on to the worker. For a Work Permit holder the source also puts it in the negative: the employer must not recover the premium from the worker in any way.

The policy has to cover in-patient care and day surgery, and it must include hospital bills for conditions that may not be work-related. The minimum is S$60,000 per year for each worker, and it applies as an annual limit rather than as a limit for each admission or each stay in hospital.

A policy can divide its cover into sub-limits — for in-patient care, for day surgery, or for each disability or medical condition. That is allowed, but each sub-limit must meet the same minimum on its own.

There is one situation in which the duty does not apply. Medical insurance is not required for a Work Permit holder who also holds a Dependant’s Pass and already has insurance meeting the minimum, covering the whole period for which the Work Permit is valid. The exemption follows the Dependant’s Pass holder rather than the pass type, so it is a narrow one.

The cover itself has been strengthened in two stages. From 1 July 2023 the annual claim limit had to reach at least S$60,000 per year for each worker, and claims were split between the insurer and the employer as 75% insurers and 25% employers, for claim amounts above S$15,000. From 1 July 2025 the standard moved again, to standardised allowable exclusion clauses, age-differentiated premiums in two age bands, and direct payment by insurers to hospitals once a claim is admissible.

The policy details then have to be declared to MOM. The employer submits them online before the pass can be issued or renewed, and submits them again whenever they change — and changing insurer counts as a change. The details MOM tracks are the insurer’s name, the policy number, and the policy’s commencement and expiry dates. The submission is made through WP Online, and an employment agency can be authorised to make it on the employer’s behalf.

An employer may arrange for a worker to bear part of the cost of medical treatment, and MOM sets out what has to be true for that arrangement to be a proper one rather than a shifting of the employer’s duty onto the worker. Three conditions apply together, and all three have to hold.

The amount the worker bears must be reasonable and must not exceed 10% of the worker’s fixed monthly salary. The arrangement must not run for longer than 6 months for every 2 years of employment. And it must be set out explicitly in the employment contract or the collective agreement, with the worker’s full consent.

Two further conditions come from MOM’s own answer on the subject. The cost of the insurance premium can never be passed on to the worker — only the cost of treatment may be shared. And where the treatment cost arises from a work injury, the employer’s obligations under the Work Injury Compensation Act have to be met first, before any sharing of treatment cost is considered.

If the arrangement involves deducting from the worker’s salary, the employer must write to MOM for permission before making the deduction. That is a separate step from the contract term, and both are needed.

The Primary Care Plan covers out-patient primary care, which is the part of medical treatment that medical insurance does not reach. It does not replace medical insurance, and a worker who needs both has both.

It is compulsory for Work Permit holders other than migrant domestic workers, and for S Pass holders, where either of two things is true: the worker stays in a dormitory that can accommodate 7 or more workers, or the employer’s business activity is in the construction, marine shipyard or process sectors. Whether the sector test is met follows the business activity the employer declared. For every other Work Permit holder and S Pass holder the plan is optional, and it has been compulsory in this form for the eligible groups since 1 April 2022.

It applies to all eligible new applications, to renewals, and to workers who change employer. The employer buys it from one of MOM’s approved Anchor Operators and declares the purchase on WP Online before the pass can be issued or renewed, which is the same declaration step that medical insurance goes through.

The plan runs for 12 months, renewed for another 12 automatically, unless the employer ends it.

Work injury compensation works differently from the two above, in two ways worth separating. The first is who is covered by the Act, and the second is who the employer must buy insurance for.

The Act covers any employee under a contract of service or apprenticeship, whatever the salary, the age or the citizenship. That is wider than the insurance duty. Whatever the salary, insurance is compulsory for every employee doing manual work, regardless of salary, and for employees doing non-manual work the duty covers those earning S$2,600 a month or less. The salary figure is calculated without overtime, bonus, annual wage supplement, productivity incentive payments and allowances. Both local and foreign employees fall within it.

The Act does not cover independent contractors or the self-employed, domestic workers, or uniformed personnel serving in the Singapore Armed Forces, the Singapore Police Force, the Singapore Civil Defence Force, the Central Narcotics Bureau or the Singapore Prison Service. Where an employer is not required to buy insurance for an employee, it may still choose to; and if a valid claim is made, MOM states that the employer must pay the compensation whether or not a policy was in place.

Where a policy is required, it must be issued by a designated insurer and comply with MOM’s compulsory terms. That has applied to policies from 1 January 2021; a policy that began before that date does not have to come from a designated insurer. MOM advises finalising the insurance contract and giving the insurer the information it needs at least 21 days before the policy starts, and it advises against under-declaring the number of workers covered.

One duty sits outside the policy itself. Under the Work Injury Compensation (Insurance) Regulations 2020, a copy of the certificate of insurance must be displayed throughout the policy period, where every employee it could cover can easily see and read it.

The amounts the insurer pays were raised with effect from 1 November 2025. For death, the compensation has a minimum of S$91,000 and a maximum of S$269,000. Permanent incapacity is compensated on the same shape: a minimum of S$116,000 and a maximum of S$346,000, each multiplied by the percentage of incapacity the doctor assesses, and where the doctor assesses 100% incapacity an extra 25% is added. Medical expenses are covered up to S$53,000, or up to 1 year from the accident, whichever comes first. An insurer has to pay the employee within 21 days of service of the notice of assessment or the notice of computation.

A company often engages another company to do work or to supply labour, and the question then is who answers for the worker who is injured. The worker’s employer remains the employer; what the Act adds is a route to the principal as well.

Under section 13 of the Work Injury Compensation Act 2019, where a contractor’s employee is injured, the Commissioner may direct a principal to pay the compensation. The route applies where the principal contracted for the execution of the work or for the supply of labour. The principal is then liable to pay the compensation as though it had employed the worker directly, calculated on the worker’s earnings under the contractor, and is entitled to be indemnified by the actual employer. It applies only if the accident happened at a place where the principal had undertaken to execute work, or that was under the principal’s control or management.

The insurance consequence is separate and easy to miss: the principal has to insure its own liability under its own policy. A principal cannot rely on the contractor’s policy to answer for it.

That does not carry across to medical expenses which are not the result of a work injury. For those, MOM states that the responsibility sits with the direct employer of the Work Permit holder — the employer named on the pass.

For an Employment Pass holder, medical insurance is not required for Employment Pass holders, and that is the opposite of the position for a Work Permit or an S Pass holder. The difference is deliberate rather than an omission: MOM’s stated reasoning is that an Employment Pass holder is subject to a higher salary threshold and can obtain cover independently.

An employer may still choose to provide medical insurance as part of the employment contract. Where it does, the cover is a contractual benefit rather than a requirement of the pass.

The Primary Care Plan and the compulsory work injury compensation insurance are separate matters. The Primary Care Plan is tied to the Work Permit and S Pass groups described above, and the work injury compensation duty follows the work an employee does and what they earn, so it can apply to a foreign employee on any pass, including this one.

Two changes have been announced and neither is in force today, so nothing below should be read as the present rule.

MOM announced on 14 December 2025 that employers of S Pass holders in the construction, marine shipyard and process sectors who do not live in dormitories will be able to opt them out of the Primary Care Plan where a corporate healthcare plan of comparable coverage already applies to them, taking effect from early 2026. The announcement names S Pass holders only, and it does not extend to Work Permit holders. MOM has published no exact effective date, no definition of comparable coverage and no procedure for the option, so the scope of the announcement is as narrow as its words.

MOM also announced on 6 August 2026 an enhanced Primary Care Plan from 1 April 2027, with four Anchor Operators and a Primary Care Plan Enrolment Portal. That announcement is the source of the date; on that date the operators are to change and the portal is to be introduced, and the plan as it stands today is the one described above.