Moving to Singapore: A Practical First-Month Guide

Which pass do you actually need

Most newcomers arrive on one of four passes, and which one you get mostly follows from your job offer and salary rather than being a choice. Employment Pass (EP) is for professionals, managers and executives. As of 2026 the minimum qualifying salary is S$5,600/month for most sectors and S$6,200 for financial services, rising again to S$6,000/S$6,600 from 1 January 2027. That floor only applies to the youngest applicants — the real bar scales up with age and experience, to as much as S$10,700 (S$11,800 in financial services) for senior candidates. Since a 2026 framework change, meeting the salary is only stage one. Stage two is COMPASS, a points-based test across six criteria — including salary relative to peers, qualifications and skills-in-demand — where most applicants need 40 points minimum, unless they earn S$22,500+/month and are exempt from COMPASS entirely.

S Pass covers mid-skilled roles — technicians, associate professionals. The 2026 floor is S$3,300/month (S$3,800 in financial services), rising to S$3,600/S$4,000 for new applications from 1 January 2027. It's benchmarked to the top third of what local workers in the same age bracket earn, so the real qualifying number climbs well above the floor as you get older.

Bringing family: a Dependant's Pass covers a legally married spouse and unmarried children under 21, and needs the sponsoring EP or S Pass holder to earn at least S$6,000/month. A Long-Term Visit Pass (LTVP) covers everyone else who doesn't qualify for a DP — unmarried partners, disabled or unmarried adult children — same S$6,000 sponsor floor, rising to S$12,000 if you want to bring a parent.

Finding somewhere to live: HDB vs condo

Around four in five people in Singapore live in HDB flats — government-built public housing that, despite the label, is mostly bought and rented on the open market rather than allocated. Foreigners can rent a whole HDB flat if they hold an EP, S Pass, Work Permit, Student Pass, DP or LTVP, on leases of at least six months, capped at two years per approval before you need to reapply. The catch is the non-citizen quota: each HDB neighbourhood caps non-Malaysian foreign tenants at 8%, and each block at 11% (Malaysians are excluded from the quota). Once a block hits its cap, only Singaporeans and Malaysians can rent there next — check a specific block's status on HDB's e-Services portal before signing anything, because it changes.

Condos carry no such quota and are simpler for a foreigner to rent, just pricier. As of 2026, a one-bedroom condo runs roughly S$2,200–3,500/month in the outer suburbs, S$2,800–4,500 in the mid-tier ring, and S$3,500–6,000+ in the prime core (districts 9/10/11).

Standard leases run one or two years with a one- to two-month security deposit. Agent commission is usually paid by the landlord when rent is S$3,500+/month on a year-plus lease; on cheaper or shorter lets, the tenant often covers roughly half to a full month's rent instead. Most leases for EP/S Pass holders now include a "diplomatic clause" — originally written for actual diplomats, now standard practice — letting you break the lease early, typically after the first 12 months, on two months' notice.

Where people actually live

Most "moving to Singapore" content points you at Orchard, Tanjong Pagar and the East Coast — real places, but not where most of the city actually lives, and not what Open Locally's Singapore directory is weighted toward. Here's the heartland version:

Yishun and Jurong West are two of the biggest new towns, both on the North-South Line, both dominated by HDB blocks, wet markets and large neighbourhood malls, with rents noticeably below the central areas — a 3-room HDB flat in either can still run S$2,200–3,700/month against much more centrally.

Queenstown, on the East-West Line, is Singapore's first satellite town, developed from 1952 — its older blocks now sit alongside the one-north tech and biomedical hub around Buona Vista, giving it a genuinely mixed, walkable character. Clementi, next door and on the same line, does something similar with NUS on its doorstep.

Hougang, on the North-East Line, and Choa Chu Kang and Bukit Batok, both on the North-South Line's western reaches, are straightforward residential new towns — bigger flats, family-oriented, further from the CBD, and correspondingly cheaper.

Geylang, on the East-West Line just east of the CBD, is the outlier: split by its odd- and even-numbered lorongs (lanes), with genuinely excellent, cheap late-night food on the odd-numbered side and Singapore's best-known red-light district on the even-numbered side. It has a well-documented reputation problem, but it's also central, well-connected, and a lot of ordinary residents — including a large migrant worker population — live there without incident.

None of these are "expat districts," and that's the point — this is where you'll find the everyday hawker stalls, wet markets, kopitiams and neighbourhood shops that Open Locally's directory is actually built to surface.

Your first week: SingPass, bank, SIM

SingPass is the first thing to sort out — Singapore's national digital ID, and not optional in practice: you'll need it, or the more limited Foreign User Account for those without a local ID yet, to file tax, register for services, and complete parts of your pass paperwork. Once your EP or S Pass is issued, you get full SingPass access, unlocking upwards of 2,000 government and private-sector services under one login.

A local bank account is next. DBS, OCBC and UOB all accept EP and S Pass holders; DBS will open an account against an In-Principle Approval letter even before your pass is physically issued. Expect a branch visit for DBS and UOB (OCBC allows partial online setup), bring your passport, pass or IPA, and proof of a Singapore address, and budget roughly S$1,000 as the initial deposit on accounts with fee waivers attached.

A prepaid SIM from Singtel, StarHub or M1 runs around S$12–15/month. If you register it only on your foreign passport, it's automatically suspended after 30 days with no refund unless you re-register in person once you hold a local pass.

Healthcare: what changes for a newcomer

Healthcare genuinely changes the moment you're not a citizen or PR. MediShield Life, the mandatory national basic insurance, doesn't cover work pass holders — you're not eligible to enrol. Employers are required to give Work Permit and S Pass holders at least S$15,000/year in medical insurance coverage; EP holders' insurance depends entirely on what the employer chooses to offer, so it's worth asking before you sign.

In practice, most newcomers rely on employer group insurance plus their own top-up private cover for anything beyond it. Polyclinics — government-subsidised primary care clinics — are open to foreigners, but you pay the full, unsubsidised rate rather than the citizen/PR price. Private GP clinics are everywhere and quick to get into; private specialist and hospital care is excellent but expensive without insurance. If you're arriving short-term or between jobs, arrange your own private cover rather than assuming the system catches you the way it does citizens.

Getting around: cheap trains, brutal cars

Public transport is the easy part. SimplyGo lets you tap a foreign-issued contactless Visa or Mastercard, or Apple/Google Pay, directly at MRT gates and on buses — no card to buy, though foreign-issued cards carry a S$0.60/day admin fee. An EZ-Link card (S$12, including a S$5 non-refundable card fee) is the alternative. Either way, the MRT and bus network covers the island well and a single trip rarely costs more than a few dollars.

Cars are a different story, and the reason is the COE — a Certificate of Entitlement you must win at a fortnightly bidding round before you're even allowed to register a car, on top of the car's own price. Through mid-2026, Category A (smaller cars, up to 1,600cc) has been trading around S$120,000–126,000, and Category B (larger cars) around S$125,000–130,000 — for the certificate alone, valid for 10 years, before you've paid for the vehicle. It's a genuinely startling number to newcomers, and it's the entire reason car ownership here is a luxury-goods decision rather than a default one.

Schools if you've got kids

The fork in the road is international vs. local (MOE) school, and the cost gap is real. International schools typically run S$3,300–3,950/month in tuition — roughly S$40,000–47,000 a year — before the building fees, capital levies and enrolment deposits many charge on top, which can add another 15–25%.

Local government schools are much cheaper but not automatically open to you: foreign children need to go through the Admissions Exercise for International Students (AEIS), a competitive process with standardised English and maths tests, especially at secondary level. If you secure a place, non-citizen fees in MOE schools run roughly S$550/month at primary level up to S$950–1,250/month at secondary — so a non-ASEAN foreign student in a government secondary school costs around S$26,000/year, well under half of most international schools. The trade-off: cheaper and inside the real Singapore system, but AEIS placement isn't guaranteed, and the bilingual curriculum with a compulsory Mother Tongue subject is a bigger adjustment than an international school's.

Money: tax and CPF

Income tax is one of the genuine reasons people move here. For the 2026 year of assessment, resident rates are progressive from 0% on the first S$20,000 up to 24% on chargeable income over S$1,000,000 — you become a tax resident once you've worked here 183 days or more in the relevant year. Non-residents are taxed at a flat 15% on employment income or resident rates, whichever is higher, and 24% flat on other income such as director's fees. For most people arriving from higher-tax countries, this is a meaningfully lighter bill.

CPF — the compulsory retirement and healthcare savings scheme deducted from every citizen and PR's paycheck — does not apply on an Employment Pass, S Pass or Work Permit. Neither you nor your employer contributes, and there's no opt-in. That also means the CPF-linked benefits, like Medisave and the CPF housing scheme, don't apply either, which is part of why employer-provided health insurance and your own savings discipline matter more here than the local retirement narrative suggests. CPF only becomes relevant if and when you're granted Permanent Residency.

Cost of living: the reality check

Hawker food is the genuine bargain — a proper meal for S$3–6 almost anywhere, doing a lot of heavy lifting in keeping day-to-day costs down. Public transport is cheap by developed-city standards. Groceries and sit-down restaurant meals sit closer to a major Western city's prices.

Where it bites: rent is almost always the biggest line item and the one that varies most by choice — heartland HDB versus a prime-district condo is easily a 2–3x difference for a comparable size. Alcohol is heavily taxed and noticeably expensive in bars and restaurants. Cars, as above, are a luxury few newcomers should budget for. Private healthcare and international schooling, if you need either, are the two costs that most reliably blow out a budget built around the "cheap hawker food" headline. Day-to-day essentials in Singapore are genuinely affordable — it's the handful of big-ticket items that are priced like a global financial hub, and that's where a short-visit impression of the city stops matching what a resident actually pays.