If your Singapore company employed five or more people at any point during 2025, you are now in the IRAS Auto-Inclusion Scheme — whether you signed up or not. The IRAS Auto-Inclusion Scheme (AIS) is the mandatory electronic-submission regime that pulls employment income data from employers directly into employees’ personal tax returns, and it is now the single most important payroll-compliance touchpoint between an employer and the Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore.
This guide is the employer’s walk-through: who is in scope, what data must be submitted, when the IR8A deadline falls, what happens to foreign employees on Employment Pass and S Pass, and the practical steps an HR or payroll lead must run between January and March every year. Where regulations are quoted, they are stated as at 9 May 2026.
What the IRAS Auto-Inclusion Scheme actually does
Per IRAS’s Auto-Inclusion Scheme page, AIS is the regime under which participating employers electronically submit employment income information for their staff to IRAS. The submitted data is then auto-populated into the employee’s individual income tax return, removing the need for the employee to enter the figures manually and reducing the volume of paper IR8A forms that previously moved between employers and employees.
The IRAS Auto-Inclusion Scheme covers Form IR8A (the main employment-income return), Appendix 8A (benefits-in-kind such as accommodation, vehicles and stock options), Appendix 8B (Employee Stock Option/Share Ownership), and Form IR8S (where excess CPF contributions arise). Per IRAS’s January 2026 release, approximately 123,000 AIS employers were due to submit their 2025 employee data by 1 March 2026, enabling IRAS to pre-fill over two million individual tax returns.
For a Singapore HR team, the IRAS Auto-Inclusion Scheme is therefore not just a filing — it is the upstream feed that determines what each employee sees when they log in to their YA2026 return. Errors in the AIS submission flow downstream into the employee’s tax assessment, and corrections are slower than getting it right the first time.
Who must use the IRAS Auto-Inclusion Scheme in 2026
Per IRAS’s AIS participation page, the headline rule for 2026 is straightforward: employers with five or more employees at any time during 2025 are mandatorily in AIS for YA2026. Employers already in AIS remain in AIS regardless of workforce size — there is no exit because headcount drops below five.
The “five employees” count includes full-time, part-time, non-resident, company directors (where remuneration is paid), board members and executive directors. Employees on no-pay leave or unpaid sabbatical are still counted as employees if the employment relationship was active during 2025. Foreign employees on Employment Pass, S Pass, Work Permit, Letter of Consent, Personalised Employment Pass and ONE Pass are all in scope, as are employees on Dependant’s Pass who work under a Letter of Consent — covered in our Dependant’s Pass and LTVP Singapore 2026 guide.
Employers operating below five employees can still register voluntarily, and IRAS’s published encouragement is to do so — once registered, the employer enjoys the same digital filing flow and the same downstream pre-population benefit for staff. Where the company is brand-new and just incorporated, the corporate-secretarial registration sequence is in our sister firm’s coverage at Raffles Corporate Services.
The IR8A core: what must be reported
Form IR8A captures the employee’s calendar-year employment income — gross salary, bonuses, director’s fees, allowances, gratuities, retrenchment payments, leave pay, commissions and any other employment-related income. Per IRAS, employers complete one IR8A per employee per calendar year, irrespective of whether the employee was full-time, part-time, resident or non-resident.
The most common categorisation errors in IR8A submissions involve transport allowance (taxable if not reimbursement of business mileage), housing allowance (taxable in full unless paid as fully accountable reimbursement), telephone allowance (taxable unless tied to a specific work-line), and overseas-posting allowance (taxability depends on the apportionment between Singapore and overseas service). Employers should also clearly distinguish CPF contributions made on behalf of Singapore citizen and PR employees from non-CPF cash for foreign-pass holders.
Appendix 8A: benefits-in-kind that catch employers out
Appendix 8A captures benefits-in-kind. The most commonly under-reported items in 2026 are employer-funded private medical insurance above the IRAS-permissible exemption tier, employer-funded school fees for expat children, employer-paid club membership, employer-funded car park season passes, and employer-paid accommodation. Where the employer pays the rent of the EP holder’s apartment directly, the full annual value is taxable to the employee, not the cash differential the employee pays.
Appendix 8A also covers stock benefits granted but not yet exercised, while Appendix 8B captures the gain on exercise. For groups with RSU and ESOP programmes — increasingly common in tech, consumer and family-office structures — the interaction between Appendix 8A and 8B is where the largest discrepancies appear, and audit risk concentrates.
The 1 March 2026 IRAS Auto-Inclusion Scheme deadline
The hard deadline for YA2026 AIS submission is 1 March 2026, which has already passed for the 2025 income year. For YA2027, the equivalent deadline is 1 March 2027, and the planning window for HR teams is October to February of the preceding year. The submission is electronic only — there is no paper-channel alternative for AIS employers.
Submission modes vary by employer size. The CPF Board myTax Portal direct submission flow is the simplest for small employers up to about 50 staff. Larger employers typically submit via approved payroll software vendors (most major Singapore payroll platforms — Talenox, Justlogin, HReasily, Carbonate, Whyze and Times Software — are AIS-approved). The largest employers and the corporate service providers handling multiple-client submissions usually use the Application Programming Interface (API) flow.
For company secretaries managing AIS as part of a multi-client portfolio, IRAS provides a Validation and Submission Application (V&SA) that performs pre-submission checks on the file structure. We strongly recommend running the V&SA before the live submission — the most common reason a submission is rejected is a structural error on the file rather than a data error, and the V&SA catches those upstream.
How AIS data interacts with foreign-employee tax filings
For Singapore-resident foreign employees — those who have stayed or worked in Singapore for at least 183 days in the previous calendar year — the AIS submission feeds directly into the employee’s individual income tax return, which is then assessed under the resident progressive rates of 0–24%. The employee logs in to myTax Portal in April or May, sees the pre-populated figures, makes any necessary additions or claims, and files. Our Singapore Expat Personal Income Tax 2026: Filing Season Guide covers the resident-vs-non-resident determination in detail.
For non-resident foreign employees — typically those who join part-way through the year and have not yet hit the 183-day threshold — the IR8A still flows into AIS, but the assessment is at the higher non-resident rate of either 15% or 24% (whichever is greater). Employers handling AIS for departing EP holders should also coordinate with the IR21 tax-clearance process; we cover the IR21 mechanics in IR21 Tax Clearance: When and How to File for Departing Foreign Employees (2026).
For employees on Letter of Consent, the AIS treatment follows the underlying employment status — a DP holder working under LOC for a Singapore employer is reported in IR8A in the same way as any other employee. The interaction with the wider HR-compliance calendar is in A Singapore HR Manager MOM Compliance Calendar (2026).
Common AIS errors and how to avoid them
The 10 most common AIS submission errors in 2026, in order of frequency, are: (1) incorrect calendar-year boundaries (using fiscal year instead of calendar year for income inclusion); (2) failure to include retrenched employees who left in the year; (3) incorrect categorisation of allowances (transport, housing, telephone) as non-taxable; (4) under-reporting of employer-paid private medical insurance; (5) missing Appendix 8A entries for benefits-in-kind; (6) incorrect treatment of partial-year employees (joining or leaving mid-year); (7) double-counting of bonus payments at the year boundary; (8) missing Appendix 8B for ESOP/RSU exercises; (9) incorrect CPF allocation between citizen-PR and foreign employees; and (10) submission of files using outdated XML schemas.
The remediation pathway for errors discovered post-submission is the Amendment Form, which IRAS accepts for up to two prior years of assessment. Small errors discovered before the employee files their personal return are easier to correct than errors that flow through to assessed tax — and once an assessment is finalised, the employee bears the administrative cost of correction.
Why the IRAS Auto-Inclusion Scheme matters more in 2026
Three factors are pushing AIS up the HR risk register in 2026. The first is the broader workforce expansion of pass holders — the 2026 work-pass renewal cycle is at its highest year-on-year volume in a decade, and every renewing pass holder generates a YA2026 IR8A entry. The second is the Workplace Fairness Act 2025, which reads employee compensation data as part of the protected-characteristic compliance evidence — covered in our Workplace Fairness Act 2025: An HR Manager’s 2026 Compliance Primer. The third is the Local Qualifying Salary uplift to SGD 1,800 from 1 July 2026 — discussed in our Local Qualifying Salary 2026 guide — which tightens the alignment between LQS, CPF reporting and AIS classification.
Where the employer is also navigating ICA’s holistic assessment for an employee’s PR application, the AIS submission becomes evidentiary — a clean three-year IR8A history is the cleanest documentation of stable employment that ICA’s holistic assessment looks for, as covered in our Complete Singapore PR Pathway Guide 2026.
Action checklist for a Singapore HR or payroll lead
Three months before the next 1 March deadline (i.e. December), reconcile your payroll year against your CPF submissions and your bank-paid salary records. Pull a benefits-in-kind audit for each employee — housing, medical, transport, club membership, school fees — and categorise each line correctly under Appendix 8A. For employees with ESOP or RSU events in the year, pull the Appendix 8B records.
One month before the deadline, run the IRAS V&SA validation on the prepared file. Resolve any structural errors before scheduling the live submission. After submission, retain the acknowledgement reference for at least seven years per the Income Tax Act record-keeping rule. Where the company is also preparing for a SOC 2 or PDPA audit, the AIS submission acknowledgement is part of the standard evidence pack.
For the licensed-agency support that takes Singapore HR compliance — including AIS, IR21, work-pass renewals and PR planning — from a checklist to a managed workstream, speak with us at Singapore Employment Agency, the consumer brand of Little Big Employment Agency Pte Ltd (MOM Licence 19C9790). For corporate-side accounting, AIS file preparation and audit-ready record keeping, our sister firm Raffles Corporate Services handles the broader corporate-services workstream.
— The Editorial Team, Little Big Employment Agency