Salary bands on MyCareersFuture job offers revealed

Disclaimer: Unless otherwise stated, any opinions expressed below belong solely to the author.

The problem with salary statistics, which are usually circulated in the media, is that they cover what people who are employed are paid, not necessarily what the employers are offering at the moment.

This may create unreasonable expectations among people looking for work right now, or a sense of dissatisfaction that you have nothing attractive to choose from, while others are seemingly getting paid more already.

But the reality is that it’s easier for employers to modify their offers to new hires rather than cut salaries of current ones. Many advertised figures may also be treated as a starting point, up for negotiation, if you can justify a higher pay with experience or tangible accomplishments.

To understand if the job offer you’re looking at is attractive relative to all others, you need aggregated data—and this is possible now through a free tool at Payline.sg, launched as a side project by Singapore-based developer Adrian Watkins.

It screens jobs published on the MyCareersFuture portal, extracting categories, specific job titles and, of course, salaries. It then calculates the median salary, along with the 25th and 75th percentiles, to show the range of pay being offered across different roles (excluding any benefits, just basic salary brackets).

This is why you should not compare these numbers with national statistics—such as the median published by the Ministry of Manpower—which include bonuses, overtime payments and employer’s CPF as well.

Here are the 43 occupational categories, with their respective salary bands:

Please remember, this is not how much people are being paid, but how much employers are currently offering, based on listings extracted from MyCareersFuture. This is an important distinction.

And it’s worth keeping this in mind, because the figures may not be what you expected.

In most categories, the Top 25% of the offers barely reach S$6,000 per month, which might not be what you have imagined some of the best people in a particular occupation would make.

Those figures do go up to over S$9,000 in areas that we are most used to seeing higher salaries in—that is Finance, IT, Law or Consulting. Nevertheless, the median even for these is hovering around S$6,000, with IT being the only occupation that crosses the S$7,000 mark.

Again, this is not what all workers are paid across these industries, but rather what is offered in existing openings. If you’re looking for a job, it provides valuable context.

However, if you’re hoping for something that pays more, you can always dig deeper and compare figures for a more specific job title you believe you are qualified for.

After all, even 43 categories do not capture the entire spectrum of jobs from entry level to senior management, and the pay on offer for a specific person is likely to be different than these broad averages.

For example, when jobs across all categories are grouped by years of experience required, the salary figures for the most experienced candidates rise to around or above S$10,000 a month.

More detailed figures can be browsed here.

This is useful information to judge where a particular offer you’re looking at lands relative to all the others, or whether the money you are being offered during a recruitment process, reflects upper or lower bands of what is offered in a particular occupation.

But you should not treat these figures as absolutes—your specific situation may be considerably different.

• Read other articles we’ve written on Singapore’s job landscape here.

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