A founder I know spent three months identifying the perfect candidate for a senior engineering role. Negotiated the salary. Drafted the offer letter. Then the Employment Pass came back rejected.
The rejection wasn’t about the candidate’s credentials. It wasn’t a documentation issue. The application failed because no one had run a COMPASS assessment before the offer was made.
That’s an expensive lesson. And one I’m seeing repeated constantly across Singapore’s startup and SME community. The COMPASS Employment Pass Singapore framework isn’t especially complicated, but most founders don’t look at it until it’s already too late.
So what exactly is COMPASS?
COMPASS stands for Complementarity Assessment Framework. It was introduced by the Ministry of Manpower in September 2023 as a points-based scoring system for Employment Pass applications. Instead of relying solely on a salary threshold, MOM now evaluates EP candidates across six criteria and requires a minimum of 40 points to qualify.
The intent is straightforward: Singapore wants foreign professionals who complement — not simply replace — the local workforce. COMPASS is the mechanism for assessing that. What’s less straightforward is what it means in practice for the person doing the hiring.
How the scoring works
There are six criteria in total: four foundational (C1 to C4) and two bonus (C5 and C6). Each foundational criterion is worth 0, 10 or 20 points depending on where the candidate or your company sits relative to benchmarks. The bonus criteria can add additional points on top.
C1 — Salary
This is benchmarked against local PMET (Professional, Manager, Executive and Technician) salaries in your sector, adjusted by age. A candidate earning at the 90th percentile or above gets 20 points. Between the 65th and 90th percentile earns 10. Below the 65th percentile scores zero. The benchmarks are updated periodically — the most recent revision took effect on 1 January 2026 for new applications and 1 July 2026 for renewals. If you haven’t checked lately, your assumed benchmarks may be wrong.
C2 — Qualifications
Candidates from institutions in the QS World University Rankings Top 100, or Singapore’s autonomous universities, receive 20 points. Those with other degree-equivalent qualifications get 10. Those without degree-level credentials score zero. The list of institutions was refreshed in January 2026, as was the list of professional qualifications recognised as degree-equivalent — so it’s worth checking whether your candidate’s credentials still fall where you expect them to.
C3 — Diversity
This one catches founders off guard. It looks at the candidate’s nationality as a proportion of your company’s total PMET workforce. If that nationality makes up less than 5% of your PMETs, the candidate scores 20 points. Between 5% and 25% earns 10 points. At 25% or above, they score zero. In plain terms: if most of your team comes from the same country, this criterion is going to hurt you. And if you’ve built a tight-knit team that happens to skew heavily toward one nationality, it may be hurting you already without you realising it.
C4 — Support for Local Employment
This criterion looks at your company’s local PMET hiring relative to your industry subsector. Scoring at the 50th percentile or above earns 20 points. Between the 20th and 50th percentile earns 10 points. Below the 20th percentile scores zero. This is where companies that have deprioritised local hiring — or simply grown headcount quickly without thinking about the composition — tend to struggle most.
C5 — Shortage Occupation List (Bonus)
If the role is on MOM’s Shortage Occupation List and the candidate’s nationality makes up less than a third of your PMETs, the candidate earns 20 bonus points. If the nationality threshold isn’t met, it’s 10 points. If the role isn’t on the SOL, no bonus applies. The SOL was updated in January 2026 — notably, Cyber Risk Specialist and Product Manager (Digital) were removed, while two healthcare roles were added.
C6 — Strategic Economic Priorities (Bonus)
Companies participating in approved government programmes — including DEI initiatives, the Research, Innovation and Enterprise Credit Scheme (RISC), and NTUC-endorsed schemes — can receive a 10-point bonus, valid for up to three years. For renewals, applicants need a minimum of 10 points each in C3 and C4 to retain this bonus.
The small firm advantage
Here’s something many founders miss: if your company has fewer than 25 PMET employees, you automatically receive 10 points in both C3 and C4. MOM recognises that small organisations can’t meaningfully be assessed against sector benchmarks when there are only a handful of staff. This default scoring can make a material difference to your total — and it means that early-stage startups are in a better position than you might expect, provided C1 and C2 are solid.
Even with 10 points each from C3 and C4, you’d need to score at least 20 more points across C1 and C2 to hit the 40-point threshold. That means a candidate who scores zero on salary and zero on qualifications still won’t get through, regardless of the small firm concession. You still need the fundamentals right.
Who doesn’t need to go through COMPASS at all
There are three categories of applicants who bypass COMPASS entirely: those earning $22,500 or more per month, intra-corporate transferees under WTO agreements, and candidates filling roles that last one month or less. For most founders hiring into senior technical or commercial roles, the $22,500 threshold is the most relevant — if you’re bringing in a genuinely elite hire at that compensation level, COMPASS isn’t a factor.
The mistakes I see founders make
The most common one is making the offer first and checking eligibility second. COMPASS scores depend on company-level data — your workforce composition, your local hiring ratio, your sector benchmarks — not just the candidate’s profile. You need to run the numbers before the offer goes out, not after. MOM provides a self-assessment tool online, and it should be standard practice before any EP application.
The second mistake is assuming that a strong candidate automatically means a strong score. A highly qualified person from a nationality that makes up 30% of your existing PMET workforce scores zero on C3. That one criterion could be the difference between approval and rejection, regardless of how impressive their CV is.
The third — particularly for companies approaching the 25-PMET threshold — is failing to notice when the small firm concession drops away. If you’ve grown past 25 PMETs, you’re now being benchmarked against your sector peers on C3 and C4, and those benchmarks may not look as friendly as you’d assumed.
And finally: not tracking the updates. COMPASS is not a static framework. The salary benchmarks, the qualifications list, and the Shortage Occupation List are all reviewed and updated. If the last time you properly looked at this was when COMPASS launched in 2023, your working assumptions are probably out of date.
What to Do Before Your Next COMPASS Employment Pass Application
Before you start shortlisting or making offers for any role that’s likely to require an EP, do three things. First, run your company’s current PMET composition through MOM’s self-assessment tool to understand your C3 and C4 position. Second, check the current salary benchmarks for your sector and the role level — these are published by MOM and updated regularly. Third, check whether the role appears on the latest Shortage Occupation List.
If C4 is a structural issue — meaning your local PMET ratio sits below sector benchmarks — that’s a longer-term hiring strategy conversation, not a quick fix. The same applies to C3 if you’ve inadvertently built a team that skews heavily toward a single nationality. These aren’t problems you can solve on the day of application.
The point is to go in with your eyes open. The COMPASS Employment Pass Singapore framework isn’t designed to block foreign hiring. It’s designed to shape it. Founders who understand the framework can plan around it. Those who don’t tend to find out the hard way.
If you’d like to talk through how your current team composition sits against the COMPASS criteria, or if you’re building a hiring plan that involves EP applications, that’s exactly the kind of thing I help founders get right before it becomes a problem. Find out more about working with EPS here.
