More Childcare Leave Is the Easy Part. Getting It Taken Is the Hard Part

At the National Day Rally on 23 August 2026, Prime Minister Lawrence Wong announced a substantial expansion of support for Singapore families. Childcare leave goes up. Government picks up more of the cost. Preschool fees fall by more than half. There is a new SG Child Support Package worth up to S$62,000 per Singaporean child.

Then he said something most of the coverage passed over, and which I think is the most revealing line in the speech. He asked employers to support parents in taking the leave they are entitled to, to help them settle back in afterwards, and to make sure that “becoming a parent never becomes a disadvantage in someone’s career.”

Read that again. The Prime Minister, announcing a leave entitlement, thought it necessary to ask employers to let people use it.

I cannot prove what follows, and I will not pretend otherwise, because nobody publishes reliable utilisation figures. But after enough years of running payroll for other people’s companies, my judgement is that the binding constraint on parental leave in Singapore has rarely been the statute book. It is what happens in the office when someone actually asks.

What actually changed

Childcare Leave and Extended Childcare Leave merge into a single scheme for working parents with children aged 12 and below. Each working parent gets eight days for one child, 10 days for two, and 12 days for three or more. Today a parent gets six days if their youngest is six or under, or two days if the youngest is seven to 12, regardless of how many children they have. So a working couple with three young children goes from 12 days between them to 24. If their youngest is already in primary school, they go from four days to 24, which is the larger jump and the one nobody is quoting.

One condition that matters if you employ a mixed-nationality team: this entitlement turns on the child’s citizenship, not the parent’s. Parents of non-citizen children get two days under the Employment Act, and the National Day Rally did not change that. The SG Child Support Package and the preschool fee reductions are likewise for Singapore Citizen children.

Government will also cover the cost of all statutory child-related leave, across maternity, adoption, paternity, shared parental and childcare leave, for all child orders, up to the applicable reimbursement limits. This extends to eligible self-employed persons. No start date has been given.

Alongside that: full-day childcare fees at Government-supported preschools drop to S$150 a month and infant care to S$300, before means-testing, against roughly S$600 and over S$1,000 today. That phases in from 2028 with target levels by 2030, details in early 2027. First-timer families with or expecting children get an extra BTO or SBF ballot chance per Singaporean child aged 18 and below, from the February 2027 exercise. And the SG Child Support Package, whose cash payments begin in April 2027, is worth around S$70,000 per child from birth to 17 once the Medisave newborn grant and Edusave contributions are counted. Large families keep additional support on top, including the existing S$5,000 Large Family MediSave Grant.

Be precise about the funding change, because the headlines are not

This is the part I most want employers to get right, because I have already seen it garbled.

Paternity leave and shared parental leave are already fully Government-paid. Nothing changes there. The genuine change is in two places: Government-Paid Maternity and Adoption Leave for first and second child orders, where employers currently fund the first eight weeks of the sixteen, and childcare leave, where the first three days currently sit with the employer.

The reimbursement limits also differ by scheme, and conflating them will cost you money. Childcare leave is reimbursed at S$500 per day, totalling S$1,500 a year, with extended childcare leave at S$1,000. Maternity leave is capped at S$10,000 per four-week block, up to S$40,000 across sixteen weeks. Paternity and shared parental leave run at S$2,500 a week. Anyone telling you there is a single S$1,000 to S$1,500 annual cap across all parental leave has misread the schemes, and if you budget on that basis you will get a surprise.

So the funding change is real and worth having. It is narrower than “Government now pays for parental leave,” which is what a fast reader will take away.

Why the wage cost was never the whole problem

Here is the honest position of most small employers in Singapore, and I say it as someone who sits on that side of the table.

Resistance to parental leave is rarely ideological. Nobody in an SME is against families. The resistance is arithmetic, and leave costs you twice. You pay a salary for a day that is not worked, and you find someone to do the work. This package addresses the first cost. It does nothing about the second.

In a team of eight, when someone takes twelve days across a year, those twelve days of work land on colleagues. No reimbursement fixes that. NTUC’s Assistant Secretary-General Yeo Wan Ling raised precisely this in February 2025, flagging both the manpower gap and the cash-flow strain of waiting on reimbursements. The cash-flow half has now largely been dealt with. The manpower half has not.

And you cannot simply hire around it. In the same speech, the Prime Minister was explicit that Singapore will keep managing the size of its foreign workforce carefully, with no broad easing, and he addressed the services sector directly to say that is not the path the country will take.

Why leave still may not get taken

An entitlement is a legal fact. Taking it is a social act, and social acts run on different rules.

I have watched capable people decline leave they were owed. Not because anyone refused it. Because they could see the project timeline, they knew exactly which colleague would absorb the work, and they made a quiet calculation about how it would look. That calculation is not irrational. In a small firm, the person covering for you sits three metres away, and you will be covering for them next quarter.

Then there is the career question, which is harder to discuss honestly. Parents, and mothers especially, worry that visible leave-taking marks them as less committed. Sometimes that worry is unfounded. Sometimes it is an accurate reading of how their organisation actually hands out opportunity. I am not going to pretend the second category does not exist, because every experienced manager reading this knows it does.

So my expectation, and I offer it as a prediction rather than a finding, is that a gap will open between entitlement and utilisation. More days on paper, considerably fewer additional days genuinely taken. If we measure this policy by days granted, we will declare victory. If we measure days used, we will learn something far more useful.

The uncomfortable parts

Two, and I would rather raise them than pretend the package is frictionless.

The motherhood penalty is real, though it may not show up where you expect. Experimental research across many countries consistently finds women penalised in hiring, promotion and pay during their fertile years and after having children. That much is well established. What is less settled is whether expanding leave makes hiring discrimination worse specifically. The causal evidence there is mixed, and where researchers do find a penalty following leave expansion, it tends to land on training and promotion rather than on the decision to hire at all.

That is worth knowing because it tells you where to look inside your own firm. Not at the leave approval, which is easy to get right and easy to audit. At what happens to someone’s project allocation in the eighteen months after they come back.

Full Government funding does help here, incidentally. Once the state carries the wage cost, the commercial gap between employing a young parent and employing anyone else narrows. An employer who still discriminates afterwards is no longer making a calculation. They are just discriminating.

The best part of the package is the furthest away. The preschool fee reduction is worth roughly S$5,000 to S$8,000 a year per child to a household, which dwarfs a handful of leave days. But it phases from 2028, reaches target levels by 2030, and applies to Government-supported preschools, so families whose operator does not join the expanded network will not see it. A couple deciding this year whether they can afford a second child is being asked to price in money that arrives in two to four years on terms not yet published. That is not a scandal, since capacity must be built and infant educators trained. It is still a real limitation on a decision people are making now.

The yardstick problem

Singapore’s resident total fertility rate fell to 0.87 in 2025, from 0.97 the year before. There were 29,864 live births, down 11.4%, the first time the annual figure has fallen below 30,000 since 1965. Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong called it a serious and profound existential challenge, and used the phrase three times in one speech.

Will this package fix that? Almost certainly not. But the reason matters more than the verdict, and here I have to correct an argument I very nearly made myself.

The lazy version says cash and leave never move birth rates, so this is theatre. The evidence does not support that. The best current source is a systematic review by Bergsvik, Fauske and Hart, published in 2021, covering thirty-five quasi-experimental studies across Europe, North America and Australia. Its central finding is that childcare expansions raise completed fertility, while cash transfers produce mainly temporary effects, and that parental leave effects are stronger than the older literature assumed.

Read that against what Singapore just announced. The largest item in this package is a childcare cost reduction. On the evidence, that is the component most likely to have a durable effect, not the least. Whoever designed this package appears to have read the literature, and the preschool measure I have just criticised for being slow is also the one with the best evidence behind it. Both things are true.

The problem is magnitude, not mechanism. Australia’s Baby Bonus is among the better-identified cases, and a 2024 synthetic control study attributes to it a 6.8% increase in total fertility. Apply a lift of that order to 0.87 and you gain roughly six-hundredths of a child. Replacement is about 2.1. Nobody in this literature claims a childcare and leave package closes a gap of that size, and no honest reading of it would.

Which means that judging this policy by whether TFR recovers guarantees a verdict of failure by around 2030, against a target it was never capable of hitting.

A fairer scorecard exists and it is measurable. Does childcare leave utilisation actually rise, not just entitlement? Do fewer mothers leave the workforce after a first or second child? Does the share of fathers using their full shared parental leave increase? Do families who stopped at two report that a third became thinkable? Those questions test whether the policy reduced the penalty on people who already wanted children, which is something government can genuinely influence. Whether Singaporeans want children at all is shaped by housing, careers, marriage rates, working hours and much else that no leave scheme reaches.

I would rather we chose the honest yardstick now than let someone else choose a rigged one in 2030. It is also worth remembering that these are the first recommendations of the Marriage and Parenthood Reset Workgroup, with a fuller report due in early 2027. This is not the final word.

What employers should do

None of this requires waiting for a start date.

Work out your actual exposure scheme by scheme, using the correct reimbursement limit for each, rather than assuming one figure covers everything. For most SMEs the number will be smaller than feared, but for firms with well-paid staff on long maternity leave it will not be zero.

Solve coverage before you need it. Cross-train deliberately so no single person is the only one who can do a given thing. That is good operational hygiene regardless of parental leave, and it is what actually lets someone take their days without guilt.

Say something out loud. If leadership never mentions parental leave, staff read the silence accurately. A manager visibly taking their own leave does more than any policy document.

Then watch how the interesting work gets distributed after someone returns, because on the evidence that is where the penalty actually lives.

If you are a parent reading this: ask early, put it in writing, and plan the handover properly. Being organised makes it considerably harder for anyone to treat your leave as an imposition.

Where we fit

Our group covers both halves of this. Singapore Employment Agency handles employment and work pass support, and Raffles Corporate Services runs payroll, HR compliance, corporate secretarial, accounting and tax. The practical end of this change lands in payroll administration: tracking the new entitlement correctly, applying the right reimbursement limit to the right scheme, and filing government-paid leave claims so the money you are owed is the money you actually receive.

That is unglamorous work. It is also the point at which a well-intentioned policy either reaches an employee or quietly does not.

Over to you

Two questions, and I would like real answers rather than agreement.

For employers: now that Government carries more of the cost, what is honestly still stopping you from encouraging your team to take this leave? If the answer is coverage rather than money, say so, because that is the problem worth solving next and it needs naming publicly.

For parents: will you actually take the extra days? If not, what specifically would have to change at your workplace before you would?

Tell me in the comments. The gap between what a policy permits and what people feel able to do is where this succeeds or fails, and that gap does not show up in any government statistic. If you would rather discuss your own situation privately, please get in touch with the team at [email protected].

Requirements may change, so always check the latest guidance from MOM, MSF, IRAS or ACRA, or consult a professional adviser.

Disclaimer: This does not constitute legal or employment advice. If you require such advice, please engage a qualified professional.