Parental leave in Singapore: every leave type, and who pays for it

A working parent in Singapore can draw on seven separate child-related leave schemes. Four of them are weeks off around a birth or an adoption: up to 16 weeks of maternity leave, 4 weeks of paternity leave, up to 10 weeks of shared parental leave that the two of you split between you, and up to 12 weeks of adoption leave. Three are days you take later, as your child grows: up to 6 days of childcare leave a year, 2 days of extended childcare leave a year once your youngest is 7 to 12, and up to 12 days of unpaid infant care leave a year while your child is under 2.

For a Singapore Citizen child born from 1 April 2026, eligible parents can take up to 30 weeks of paid leave in the child’s first year, counting maternity, paternity and shared parental leave together. For a child born between 1 April 2025 and 31 March 2026 the shared parental block is 6 weeks, so the stack is four weeks shorter.

Those are the headline numbers, and they are the easy part. The two questions that decide how your year actually goes are who carries the cost of each block of leave, and where each scheme stops. Both are below.

In brief: Seven child-related leave schemes, as of August 2026: maternity up to 16 weeks, paternity 4 weeks, shared parental 6 or 10 weeks by arrival date, adoption up to 12 weeks, childcare up to 6 days a year, extended childcare 2 days a year, unpaid infant care up to 12 days a year, most needing a Singapore Citizen child. You are paid either way on the six paid schemes, but your employer carries maternity weeks 1 to 8 for a first or second child order, and childcare days 1 to 3 for any child. The 2026 National Day Rally announced bigger childcare leave and Government funding of five of the paid schemes for all child orders, up to the reimbursement limit, neither with a start date in the Government’s rally summary.

The full leave matrix

One table, all seven schemes, as of August 2026. These are the Government-Paid entitlements, meaning the schemes the Government funds in whole or in part, and almost all of them need a Singapore Citizen child. What a non-citizen child’s parent gets instead is further down.

All seven also need three continuous months with your employer, and on the four birth-related schemes those months have to fall immediately before your child’s date of birth or, on the adoptive route, the formal intent to adopt date. Those same four add that you may still qualify with less service if your employer agrees to grant the leave. Childcare leave adds a second layer: past those three months, it is also prorated by your completed months of service.

Two words in the table do a lot of work. Child order is the term the maternity and adoption schemes use to decide who pays: twins are one child order, so on those two schemes a parent of twins gets the same weeks and the same reimbursement cap as a parent of one baby. Childcare leave is the exception to keep in mind, because there twins do earn an extra year, and the closing section says how.

The leave year is the second. It is the calendar year by default, though you and your employer can agree to run it over some other twelve months.

Three limits in that table catch people out. Childcare leave is capped at 6 days a year no matter how many children you have, and it runs off your youngest child’s age, so a second baby restarts the clock rather than adding days.

The second is proration. Childcare leave is reduced by your completed months of service that year, so a parent who starts with a new employer at the beginning of June has 7 completed months by December and 4 days rather than 6. Under three months with a new employer there are none at all.

Changing jobs does not wipe that out. The scheme page says you take a prorated entitlement with the new employer regardless of what you took with the old one. Two limits sit over the top of it: the yearly limit of up to 6 days covers all your childcare leave in a calendar year however many employers you have had, and the Government reimburses the 4th to 6th day only once in that year.

The third is the leave year. None of the yearly schemes carry over, and a day you do not take by the end of it is gone.

Who actually pays for your leave

Start with the reassuring half. You are paid the same either way. The split below is about which party is out of pocket, not about what lands in your account.

It still matters, because it explains a friction parents run into without being told why. Some leave costs your employer real money and some costs it nothing, and the blocks are not where you would guess.

For a first or second child order, your employer pays the first 8 weeks of your maternity leave at your gross rate of pay, out of its own pocket. The Ministry of Manpower (MOM) defines that as your pay including the allowances you are entitled to under your contract of service, but not overtime, bonus, the annual wage supplement, reimbursed special expenses, productivity incentives or travel, food and housing allowances. The Government reimburses weeks 9 to 16, capped at S$10,000 per 4 weeks, or up to S$20,000 for that birth.

From a third child order onward the Government reimburses all 16 weeks, up to S$40,000.

Childcare leave works the same way in miniature. Your employer pays days 1 to 3 at your gross rate, and the Government reimburses days 4 to 6, capped at S$500 a day or up to S$1,500 a year. Extended childcare leave is reimbursed for both days at the same S$500 a day, up to S$1,000 a year, which is a different annual figure and worth reading twice.

Adoption leave splits at week 4: employer for weeks 1 to 4, Government for weeks 5 to 12, for a first or second child order.

Paternity leave and shared parental leave sit differently. Neither scheme page assigns any week to the employer: the Government reimburses every week of both, capped at S$2,500 a week. Above that cap, neither of those two pages says who carries the difference.

If you are self-employed the same lines apply, with the employer’s share simply not reimbursed. For a first or second child order you claim only the Government-paid portion of the three split schemes: maternity weeks 9 to 16 and adoption weeks 5 to 12, with the first 8 weeks and the first 4 weeks not reimbursable. From a third child order onward the Government reimburses all 16 weeks of maternity leave and all 12 weeks of adoption leave, subject to the same caps. Childcare leave carries no child order test: you claim days 4 to 6 and absorb the first 3 either way.

Paternity leave, shared parental leave and extended childcare leave have no employer-paid block at all, so you claim those in full, subject to the same caps.

What the 2026 National Day Rally announced (not yet in force)

On 23 August 2026, Prime Minister Lawrence Wong announced two changes to child-related leave at the National Day Rally. Both are announcements. Made For Families, the Government’s family support site, published a summary of the rally that gives no start date for either and says the details are still to come, so nothing in this section is leave you can book yet.

The first change would replace childcare leave and extended childcare leave with a single scheme covering children aged 12 and below. It would size the entitlement by how many children aged 12 and below you have, rather than by how old your youngest is. The Government published the new figures as a picture on its Made For Families summary of the rally, so here they are as text.

Compare that with today. A parent whose youngest Singapore Citizen child is 6 or below has up to 6 days a year; a parent whose youngest Singapore Citizen child is 7 to 12 has 2. Under the announced scheme a parent of one young child would get 8, and a parent of three would get 12 for all of them together.

The announced change would be largest for families with school-age children, who currently fall to 2 days once their youngest ages out of the childcare leave band.

The last column is the one worth pausing on. Childcare leave is counted per parent, so under the announced scheme a household with two working parents and two children aged 12 or below would have 20 days a year between them. Today, with a youngest Singapore Citizen child under 7, that same household has up to 12.

Once a start date is published, the combined figure is the one to plan a school holiday around.

The second change is about money. The Government said it will cover the cost of child-related leave for all child orders, up to the reimbursement limit, and it named five schemes: maternity, adoption, paternity, shared parental and childcare leave. If that lands as announced, the employer-funded blocks in the section above would stop costing the employer anything up to that limit.

It would apply to eligible self-employed people too, who today can claim only for the Government-paid portion.

Two of today’s seven schemes are missing from that list. Extended childcare leave is not named, and the first change would merge it into the new childcare leave scheme in any case. Unpaid infant care leave is not named either, and the summary does not say what would happen to it.

What is not settled: the start date of the new childcare leave scheme. The Made For Families page says that more details, including that date, will be announced later, and it does not say how the full reimbursement would work in practice. Until then the entitlements in the matrix above are the ones in force.

Stacking the leave in your baby’s first year

The three big schemes are designed to run one after another, and the order is fixed. Maternity leave and paternity leave come first, and adoption leave sits in the same place on the adoptive route. Shared parental leave can only start once the parent taking it has fully used their own maternity, paternity or adoption leave.

For a child born from 1 April 2026, that stack is 16 weeks of maternity leave, 4 weeks of paternity leave, and 10 weeks of shared parental leave divided between you. That is up to thirty weeks of paid leave in the first year, and it is the figure the Ministry of Social and Family Development (MSF) uses in the media release announcing the change.

Shared parental leave is split half and half by default. LifeSG, the Government’s services app, allocates each parent half the entitlement automatically, so 5 weeks each on the 10-week entitlement and 3 each on the 6. You change it in LifeSG if a different split suits you better, either while registering the birth or through its Manage SPL Sharing Arrangement service.

You have 4 weeks from the birth to change the allocation freely. After that, changing it needs written agreement from your employer.

The whole 12 months matters here. Every one of the four birth-related schemes has to be used within 12 months of your child’s date of birth, and the window does not extend: what you have not taken by then, you cannot take.

One practical note on how the leave is taken. If you and your employer agree, much of it can be broken into blocks and spread across the year, though the first 8 weeks of maternity leave and of adoption leave still have to run continuously.

If you cannot agree, a default applies instead, and each scheme has its own. Shared parental leave becomes one continuous block within 26 weeks of the birth, paternity leave one block within 16 weeks, maternity leave one block starting up to 4 weeks before the birth, and adoption leave one block from the formal intent to adopt date. Each needs 4 weeks’ notice, which your employer can waive or shorten.

Registering the birth is the step that starts all of this, since the shared parental leave arrangement is submitted through the same LifeSG service. Our guide to registering a birth in Singapore walks through that.

If your child is not a Singapore Citizen

Most of the figures above depend on your child being a Singapore Citizen. Without that, a birth parent falls back to the Employment Act, Singapore’s general employment law, and the difference is large. Adoptive parents are treated differently again, and can do better, though it turns on the parents’ own citizenship rather than the child’s.

Three rows below turn on the child’s dependent’s pass, which is the pass that lets the child of an Employment Pass or S Pass holder live in Singapore. The scheme pages spell it “dependent’s pass”; MOM spells the pass itself “Dependant’s Pass”.

On the adoption route there is a condition attached to all three of those entitlements. If the child is not a Singapore Citizen and does not become one within 6 months of the Adoption Order, or the Adoption Order is not granted within 12 months of the formal intent to adopt date, the Government or your employer may recover all or part of what was paid.

On the Employment Act maternity path, your employer pays your usual monthly salary for the first 8 weeks only if you have served that employer for at least 3 continuous months before the birth and you have fewer than 2 living children of your own at the time of delivery. The second condition has a carve-out: if your first pregnancy was a multiple birth, such as twins or triplets, your employer still has to pay 8 weeks for the next pregnancy. A third condition sits beside these two: you have to give your employer at least a week’s notice before going on maternity leave, and tell them as soon as you can once you have delivered. Miss that, without a good enough reason for not giving the notice, and you are entitled to only half the payment.

The Ministry of Manpower (MOM) sets both fallback entitlements out in full, on its maternity leave eligibility page and its childcare leave eligibility page.

Citizenship can also arrive late and still count. A child who becomes a Singapore Citizen within 12 months of birth brings maternity, paternity and shared parental leave with them, though the leave can only be taken after citizenship is granted and still inside that 12-month window. The other three use different tests: unpaid infant care leave asks that the child becomes a citizen before turning 2 and inside the relevant period, childcare leave keys on the leave year, and adoption leave keys on the parents’ citizenship rather than the child’s for eligibility, though the clawback above still turns on the child’s.

The schemes that require you to be married

The rules here are not symmetrical, so here they are. Mothers are eligible regardless of marital status: the shared parental leave and childcare leave pages say so in terms, and the maternity leave page sets no marital condition at all. Biological fathers are treated differently.

For paternity leave, shared parental leave and childcare leave, a biological father has to be or have been married to the child’s mother. Unpaid infant care leave is stated more tightly again: its page asks that the biological parents are married to each other, in the present tense, with no concession for a marriage that has since ended. Adoptive fathers are outside all of this: their scheme pages set no marital condition at all.

The window differs by scheme, and the difference matters. For paternity and shared parental leave the marriage can happen at any point between conception and the birth, or within 12 months after the birth. Marry before the birth and the leave runs from the birth as usual. Marry after it, and the leave can only be taken once you are married, still inside that 12-month window.

Childcare leave is the wider one. Its page sets no 12-month cut-off, so a father who marries after the birth is eligible and can take the leave from the date of the marriage onwards. The same page says in terms that divorced fathers stay eligible.

There is a further condition worth knowing. A biological father stops being eligible for childcare leave and unpaid infant care leave if he or the child’s mother was married to someone else when the child was conceived, unless the two of them later marry each other.

If your situation sits outside these lines, the Government-Paid Leave (GPL) Portal has a page for entitlements in other situations, covering how your entitlement changes in cases such as single parents, stillbirth, and a child who is not a citizen.

The two dates that change what you get

Two dates do most of the work in this cluster, and both are fixed by your child’s arrival.

1 April 2025. The 4 weeks of Government-Paid Paternity Leave applies from this date. Shared parental leave starts here too: the scheme reaches a child whose date of birth or estimated delivery date is on or after it, or whose formal intent to adopt date is. Where the date of birth or the formal intent to adopt date falls up to 31 March 2026, the entitlement is 6 weeks.

1 April 2026. Shared parental leave rose from 6 weeks to 10. A child whose date of birth, or whose formal intent to adopt date, falls on or after this date carries the 10-week entitlement; where it falls between 1 April 2025 and 31 March 2026, the entitlement is 6.

There is an exception to the second date, and it is worth four weeks of paid leave to the families it covers. If your estimated delivery date was on or after 1 April 2026 but your baby arrived before it, you may still qualify for the full 10 weeks.

It is not automatic. You apply through the form linked in the acknowledgement email you receive after registering the birth on LifeSG.

How to claim

Most of this is not your paperwork. If you are an employee, your employer submits the reimbursement claim; you apply for the leave through your workplace’s normal process.

What is yours to do:

1. Register your child’s birth on LifeSG. This is also where you submit or change your shared parental leave arrangement, and the 4-week free-change window starts from the birth.
2. Tell your employer early. The default arrangements above are what applies when you and your employer cannot agree, and they are less flexible than a negotiated one.
3. Check your own balance on the GPL Portal, which shows childcare leave already consumed and your shared parental leave sharing arrangement.

If you are self-employed you claim for yourself, through the same portal, once the Government-paid part of the leave has started. You do not have to finish the leave first, and you can submit more than once.

The deadline is 3 months after the last day of the leave, and for childcare leave, 3 months after the end of the calendar year. Payment is worked out from your Notice of Assessment, the tax statement the Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore (IRAS) sends you each year.

Eligibility here is conditional and the edge cases are genuinely fiddly, so check your own case against the scheme pages on the portal rather than against any article, this one included. For the wider set of family support measures, MOM and MSF both point to the same two places: the GPL Portal for the leave itself, and Made For Families for everything around it.

What to work out before your leave starts

Three things, in this order.

Work out your stack first: your maternity or paternity weeks, then how you want to split the shared parental leave, then whether you will take it in one block or spread it. Do this before the birth if you can, because the 4-week free-change window runs fast and afterwards your employer’s written agreement is needed.

Then check your dates against the two thresholds above. Your child’s arrival date, not your application date, decides whether you have 6 weeks of shared parental leave or 10, and if the estimated delivery date and the birth fall on opposite sides of 1 April 2026, use the exception above.

Then plan the yearly days separately, because they behave differently. Childcare leave and unpaid infant care leave reset at the start of each leave year and do not carry over.

If your youngest is around 7, check your own position rather than assuming it. You keep up to 6 days for a year in which your youngest is under 7 at some point, and whether that includes the year they turn 7 depends on the year you first took childcare leave for them. Extended childcare leave has the same two-branch start: the first entitlement falls either in the year your child turns 7 or in the year after.

Twins are the other case worth checking, because the childcare leave entitlement for twins runs a year longer than it does for a single child. The GPL Portal shows what you have used.

Going back to work at the end of it has its own set of problems, and we have written about the practical side of that in our guide for working mothers in Singapore. If childcare is the piece you are still solving, our guide to childcare in Singapore covers the options and what they cost.

Figures on this page are as of August 2026 and come from the GPL Portal, MOM, MSF and Made For Families. Entitlements change, so check the official pages for your own case.

Wei Chun

Founder & Editor

A Singapore parent writing the guide he wished he'd had — practical, calm, and grounded in what actually works.

chunguy.comMy Miracle Baby