Speech by Minister Chan Chun Sing for Motion on Government’s response to 2026 review of political salaries

Wrap-Up Speech by Coordinating Minister for Public Services Mr Chan Chun Sing for Motion on Government's Response to the '2026 Review of Salaries for Political Appointment Holders and Members of Parliament' on 10 September 2026

OPENING

Mr Speaker, Sir,

First, let me thank all Members from all sides of the House, including the Workers' Party for your support and suggestions. We also thank fellow Singaporeans who have given us their feedback before, and after, Tuesday's Ministerial Statements on how we should manage and communicate this issue sensitively, as we are talking about sums that are unfamiliar to many. More importantly, we are talking about public trust, fairness, transparency and accountability with Singaporeans.

Let me now build on what the Prime Minister (PM) has laid out and respond to Members' specific comments, bearing in mind what this framework is ultimately about: why it matters to fellow Singaporeans; and our duty to leave behind a better system for the next generation.

WHAT THIS FRAMEWORK IS ABOUT

Mr Speaker, Sir, let us start with what this debate is fundamentally about. Beyond all the numbers, beyond all the formulas, it is about building a system to give future generations a better chance to assemble a strong team to take Singapore forward, come what may.

Our world is going to be more uncertain, more volatile, and messier. Our people will have many more options, many more challenges to overcome. The fundamental question is what will be the system that gives us the best chance to assemble a team of people willing, and able to take Singapore forward.

Widening Options for a Strong Team

Sir, many have pointed out and we agree — financial compensation cannot be the number one consideration for political service. We agree with that. For someone who wants to step forward, he or she must first ask if he or she, and his or her family, will want to undergo the public scrutiny, the loss of privacy, the uncertainties of being elected, the demands of public expectations, the potential of failure, and the stigma that may come with it, especially for someone with a clearer and more certain career path. But for anyone considering this, the most important factor is this — and that is the burden of responsibility to get it right for Singapore and Singaporeans. This is not a business venture; it is about the lives and livelihoods of Singaporeans. If a business fails, we can start a new one, but if Singapore fails, we are finished.

Then perhaps, after all these considerations, that person may ask about his or her practical concerns; about his or her financial remuneration, such that it will not be too prohibitive for his or her family.

Mr Speaker, Sir, I share this because these are the realities and difficult decisions that people who come for our tea session must answer themselves frankly, before they even step forward.

So, it is a tall order to get someone to step forward. Money should not be the primary consideration. But even if it is one of the many practical considerations, we should still discuss this openly – honestly, and frankly – to ask ourselves, not just how to get an individual to step forward, but how to build a system that maximises our chances of getting enough people with the right commitment, and calibre to step forward.

Sir, so the fundamental question is what we are doing to build a strong team for the future. We cannot build a strong team simply by hoping that people we need can afford to step forward.

We must have people with different strengths and experiences to be able to tackle different challenges. We need a diverse team, comprising: younger Members who bring fresh energy, ideas, and perspectives, and whom we can develop over time to build trust and bond with fellow Singaporeans; and experienced colleagues who bring judgement, can take on significant responsibilities, and have room to grow. But we also must not exclude established individuals with deep experience, who can contribute substantially from day one.

Finding that combination is hard enough. We should not make it harder, not just for this Government, but for any Government, by narrowing the field even before the selection begins. The wider the pool, the more choices we have, the greater our chances of finding and composing the team that Singapore deserves.

So, the point is not simply about finding enough people willing to take on that responsibility. It is about finding enough good people to choose from, so that we can build a strong team for the challenges ahead.

And this is what market-benchmark remuneration is meant to support. It cannot guarantee a strong team or certainty in results. But it can widen the field from which we can choose from to maximise our chances of success. Likewise, the goal of the political salary framework is to give us the range and flexibility to choose and secure a strong and diverse team.

As many Members have said, pay will never be the be-all and end-all. But we also cannot pretend that it is not relevant. As Members Liang Eng Hwa and Terence Ho have rightly noted, capable Singaporeans will have options.

Keeping the Field Broad

Sir, today, capable Singaporeans can and have built successful careers not just in Singapore but also overseas. They can serve in the private sector, the public sector, the people sector, academia, social sector, or run thriving businesses. Many are doing meaningful and exciting work, earning good incomes and contributing without having to enter politics.

But we all agree that political service asks something more from all of us. And this is a sentiment that was echoed by many Members today, including Minister Tan See Ling, Members Liang Eng Hwa, Mariam Jaafar, and Christopher De Souza.

And as I shared on Tuesday, higher pay will never adequately compensate for what they have to give up. Nor should it. And we have to be frank. Actually, the more Political Appointment Holders are paid, the greater the scrutiny, and the higher the expectations and demands.

Our objective, as the Prime Minister has stated, is not to enrich anyone. It is to give ourselves the means to keep the field broad enough to form a strong team, rather than be constrained to choose from those who can afford to step forward.

So, in this regard, the fundamental point is Singapore does not just need enough people to fill the positions. We need enough good people to fill the positions and to choose from.

HOW DOES THE FRAMEWORK WORK?

Salary Ranges and Diversity

Let me now explain and elaborate on how this framework works. Sir, having set out what the framework is, let me go into the details. Over the past few days, there have been considerable discussions on the headline figure and many other numbers. Let me try to clarify some misperceptions.

$1.8 million is not what every Minister will be paid. As Members Mariam Jaafar and Yeo Wan Ling have noted, the new MR4 benchmark is a reference point and not an entitlement. It is not the actual salary of every Minister. Let me elaborate on two points.

First, for serving MR4 Ministers, there is no immediate move from $1.1 million to $1.8 million. The one-off adjustment now is capped at 9 per cent, differentiated by individual circumstances, including performance and when the person's salary was last adjusted. A Minister currently at $1.1 million will receive no more than about $1.2 million, with subsequent adjustments depending on performance and responsibilities. To put into context, this is equivalent to an average of 0.6 per cent per annum over the last 15 years.

Second, beyond the immediate adjustment this October, there is no intention to move all Ministers to $1.8 million in the near term. As the Prime Minister has stated, we expect most MR4 Ministers to be at the lower end of the new salary range by the end of the term – this means $1.35 million, and not $1.8 million.

So, for an MR4 Minister receiving the reference salary of $1.1 million today, these are the three figures to remember — $1.1 million today, up to $1.2 million after the one-off adjustment in October, and maybe around $1.35 million for most MR4 Ministers by the end of term, subject to performance.

The widened salary ranges cater to three archetypes — the new entrant, the experienced contributor and the established individual with unique qualities to add to our team. A new Appointment Holder would typically enter nearer the lower end of the range and not the midpoint. Only those with substantially more experience may be appointed at a higher point within this range.

This need for flexibility has been echoed by Member Terence Ho, who gave suggestions to further mitigate the pay cuts, and to facilitate porosity with the private sector after a political stint. Member Mariam Jaafar also rightly pointed out that a wider range allows us to recognise the responsibility when someone takes office, and then to subsequently let performance speak for itself.

Strengthening Link with Socioeconomic Outcomes

Mr Speaker, Sir, let me also clarify that the $1.1 million, $1.2 million and $1.35 million annual salaries that we have been discussing are not guaranteed sums. Only about 65 per cent of the annual salary is fixed, with about 35 per cent being variable. So, take for example, a Minister at the $1.2 million reference salary, what this means is that he or she receives $780,000 as the fixed sum. The remainder will be variable. Depending on performance – both individual and national – he may receive a variable bonus of $420,000 if he performs well and if the targets for National Bonus indicators are met.

Mr Pritam asked for transparency about the bonus paid to Political Appointment Holders as it may vary from the norm. Indeed, in strong years, when Singapore performs well and National Bonus targets are far exceeded, actual bonus may then exceed this norm. In weaker years, the Minister could get zero bonus as well. That variability is by design. It is what makes the framework accountable, and not misleading.

So, if we look at the last few years, the range of the National Bonus has ranged from less than one to more than five months. On average, it is about three. And the basis on which the bonus varies is clear. The four indicators, their target thresholds, and the payout matrix are all publicly available, as I have shown on the slides on Tuesday. The basis for this assessment is also open and verifiable.

The National Bonus not only looks at whether the economy grows. It looks at whether Singaporeans have jobs. It looks at whether real incomes are improving, after factoring in inflation. And since 2011, the National Bonus payout has ranged from 0.75 months in low years to 5.6 months in better years.

From next year, the targets for all three socioeconomic indicators on jobs and incomes will be tightened. I asked my staff to do a back testing. If we had applied these tighter targets over the past 10 years, the National Bonus would be about one month lower each year, on average. This is an important shift. It means that the National Bonus will weigh even more heavily on the socioeconomic progress of Singaporeans rather than the more abstract Gross Domestic Product (GDP) numbers.

As stated on Tuesday, the Government will also accept the Committee's recommendation to study a Quality of Life indicator. Both Members Haresh Singaraju and Kenneth Goh have expressed support for such a measure, and Member Kenneth Poon has also given suggestions on the broader aspects of social progress. I thank all Members for your suggestions. And we agree with the many things that you have said. We want to see how we can broaden the indicator, but yet at the same time, the indicators must be something that we can collect data, and be stable enough to set the targets.

But as many of you have also pointed out, it is not so easy to set such indicators because some of the things are qualitative rather than quantitative. Some of the factors are multi-year results rather than single-year results, and we certainly do not want to set the wrong Key Performance Indicator (KPI) to encourage or drive the wrong behaviour.

And I have always learnt since young that some important things in life cannot be measured, and we must be careful not to make important only what we can measure. I think we can agree on that.

The Public Service Division will look into this seriously and study what is feasible and possible, balancing all the considerations that the various Members have set out.

And I want to touch on what Member Kenneth Goh talked about in terms of the bonus structure over two horizons. Indeed, as the Prime Minister has said, and I will reiterate, the job of the Cabinet, the job of the leadership team, is not just about meeting the KPIs on a yearly basis, and the here and now.

In fact, in my years in public service, I have learnt one very important thing. Sometimes, when we have pre-empted the problem and the public does not even need to deal with it or get to know of it, that to us is the mark of success. The mark of success is not how well we do the firefighting.

The mark of success, more often than not, is how we have prevented the fire in the first place. All these take a longer-term horizon. All these take a beyond-the-here-and-now perspective, and all these are not easy to manage or to quantify.

But I think all of us can agree that perhaps all these are even more important than all the factors that we can quantify here and now. This requires a sense of balance and care.

We also thank Member Azhar Othman for his suggestion to vary the variable component in the salary package. And we have heard two different perspectives – there is one perspective that calls for a higher variable component, perhaps a bit more like the private sector. There is also another perspective that calls for a smaller variable component, or higher fixed component, given the nature of the job. The committee has considered all this, and on balance they felt that the current two-thirds, one-third split is about right. But we will continue to look at this as we gain more experience running this framework.

Member Haresh Singaraju suggested to have clearer targets published, to ascertain the effectiveness of political leadership. We understand his sentiment. But as I have mentioned, governance is not just about a series of KPIs, and certainly not a series of KPIs for this year alone, so we will have to be careful how and what we publish.

But I think he has raised a very important point. There are many things that we may not be able to publish. How do we account for the tough negotiations that the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI) has to undertake behind the scenes to secure our trade agreements? How do we share with the public the sensitive things that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Defence (MINDEF) or the Ministry of Home Affairs has to work behind the scenes to keep the threats at bay, and hopefully we will never have to tell Singaporeans one day that the threat has emerged without us knowing.

We will try, and we will continue to keep our minds open on what are the KPIs that we can share and how to share them with fellow Singaporeans in such a way that it does not distort our perspective of thinking long-term and managing issues, pre-empting issues, before they catch fire.

Sir, some Members may understandably also be concerned about the financial impact arising from the updates to the framework. As PM has shared, the impact is expected to remain stable. Assuming the maximum 9 per cent adjustment, overall spending on Political Appointment Holder salaries is expected to remain below 0.05 per cent of Government Expenditure, and below 0.01 per cent of GDP.

I have asked my staff to check – even with the new benchmarks fully implemented, we will still spend less as a percentage of Government Expenditure and GDP than what we did in 2011. The 0.05 per cent of Government Expenditure and the 0.01 per cent of GDP can be taken from the perspective that this is our investment in the leadership team for Singapore, for the future.

Mr Speaker, Sir, let me now address some other specific points raised by various Members.

Member Kenneth Goh raised several suggestions on the benchmark, including whether the discount was necessary, and using role-based comparators rather than top 1,000 earners. As PM says, the top 1,000 was never intended to identify jobs comparable to the Minister's. It serves as a broad proxy, and if we go back a bit to history before this framework started, actually, we chose a certain number from selected vocations, but that was deemed to be too narrow, and that is why we have expanded the benchmark pool in the current framework.

But we agree with you, that we would like to find job roles that are more comparable, rather than just from a financial perspective. Then the question is how do we identify those roles, and will we get back to the same situation where we first started, where we were looking at leadership positions in companies, senior doctors, lawyers, and so forth, and then we had fewer vocations, fewer people, but at the end of the day, regardless of which formula and which benchmark that we are choosing, we still need to ask one basic question, "Will this benchmark and framework, allow the PM – any PM – to have the range and the flexibility to bring in that three archetypes that I have talked about — the new entrant with potential, the experienced colleague to continue to stay, the established individual who are prepared to come in and join us, having had a successful career somewhere else. So, we will continue to study this.

On the idea of doing it on a multi-year basis, we have also considered that it is a fair idea, because as many have said, the performance of the government cannot be measured year by year. Then the question is how many years, and what to do if there is a change of Government, so those are practical difficulties as we consider this particular suggestion.

I have been to different ministries, from the Ministry of Social and Family Development (MSF), to MTI, the Ministry of Education (MOE) and now MINDEF. I would say that in all the Ministries, the time cycle for results is all very different. When I was in MSF, someone asked me, "How do you define success? Is it how much ComCare you have given out? How many people you have helped?" I said, "No." The mark of success is how little we need to give out ComCare, but that is a short-term goal. The real mark of success for MSF is: when we help somebody, will that child one day grow up feeling confident, independent, and say, "I can take care of myself and my family". That is a generational thing.

When I was in MOE, what defines the success of MOE? Surely not the Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) score or the 'A' level scores. It is whether one generation later, our young people grow up and have the confidence to look at the world and say, "Whatever challenges there may be out there, I will be able to overcome it, either individually or with my team Singapore." Success will be that even when the chips are down, our younger generation will say, "I will be here in spite of…" These are long term challenges that are hard to measure.

In MINDEF, when I returned last year, some of the projects that I initiated and worked on twenty years ago are now coming on stream, so we are fully cognisant of the challenges of using a single year measure, but we are also cognisant of using a multi-year assessment matrix, and we will have to find that balance.

But ultimately, as Member Yeo Wan Ling has said, deep inside each of us, every Singaporean will have to answer the question: Has this team delivered? Has this team provided a better future for me and the next generation? And that is our ultimate test.

On the standalone framework for Members of Parliament (MPs) and Mayors, we agree with the Committee's recommendation that we should examine the benchmark. We agree that it is not so intuitive to say that the MP allowance is a fraction of the MR4 benchmark.

So, we will study this and we will talk to various stakeholders to try and see what can be a better benchmark. But I want to emphasise one thing. We did not say that it is an MP salary. We say it is an MP allowance, because the MP allowance is to help the MP to conduct his or her work in the constituency. Generally, in Singapore, in our system, we believe that it is important and useful for MPs to have a full-time job somewhere so that they can represent the diverse perspective from their different backgrounds, rather than be a full-time MP. The allowance is not so much to make up for the sacrifices they have to put in from their job; the allowance is more to help them in their constituency work. But we accept that any MP who puts in the hard work to take care of their constituencies will very likely have to pay a certain price in terms of their own career progression, and I thank MPs from all sides of the house who have stepped forward to do this.

Members Pritam Singh and Christopher De Souza spoke on allowances for Legislative Assistants and Secretariat Assistants. We did not make any change in this exercise because it was not under the terms of reference for the political salaries. But we will certainly look at how we can update this, and I will certainly task the relevant agencies to take a look at this to update this as necessary.

Mr Speaker, Sir, maybe I should round up the discussion and after we have settled all the technicalities, I think let us come back to why we are here in this Chamber, and why we are discussing this.

We are all here spending time discussing this very serious issue, not because any one of us is trying to benefit from this framework personally. But as many Members have said, we have a responsibility to make sure that we have a framework that gives Singapore the best chance to succeed in the years to come. The best chance for any Prime Minister to assemble a team that is worthy of Singapore.

And as the world becomes more complex, as our people have more challenges, more options, we have to ask ourselves the hard questions. How do we inspire the people to step forward? And how do we try to lower the barriers when their commitment to serve is clear? And that is what we are talking about.

So, all these adjustments do not guarantee success, but it will give us a better chance to assemble the team necessary. And ultimately it is about leaving behind a better system to give ourselves the maximum chance to find those leaders that Singaporeans deserve.

So, Mr Speaker, Sir, let me conclude. This debate is ultimately not what MPs will get for their allowances. This is not about what Ministers will earn. It is about what Singapore can achieve and want to achieve, whether our people have opportunities, whether our people can continue to look to the future with confidence, and whether the next generation will inherit a better Singapore so that we can continue to defy the odds of history for us to be a shining beacon in a turbulent world. We cannot promise any of this outcome, no government can, but we can give Singapore a better chance of achieving them. And the leadership Singapore needs tomorrow must be built today. This is what we owe to the next generation, and this is what we must do right by Singapore and for Singaporeans.

Thank you, Mr Speaker, Sir.