S$170,000 is the average annual pay of a software engineer in Singapore. Which roles pay best?

Disclaimer: Any opinions expressed below belong solely to the author. Data comes from Ministry of Manpower as well as surveys conducted by CBRE and Michael Page.

Despite the fears of continuing layoffs in the tech sector and the warnings about the potential impact of AI on computer science graduates, the situation for tech talent in Singapore remains very good. Perhaps due to its small size and key role as a major business hub in Asia, the local market is still reporting shortages of qualified tech workers.

According to the latest job vacancy report by the Ministry of Manpower, IT sector leads in the creation of new vacancies, looking to draw more talent to the city-state:

It’s no surprise then, that in CBRE’s Global Tech Talent Guidebook 2025, Singapore is named together with 11 other cities as a Powerhouse of tech, a list that includes San Francisco, New York, Beijing, Shanghai, London, Paris, Boston, Seattle, Tokyo, Toronto, and Bengaluru.

Average salaries of software engineers in 2024, by city

All figures in USD

With an average base pay of over US$111,000 and nearly US$130,000 in total remuneration, Singapore ranks fifth among the top paying countries, behind the USA (which dominates the list), as well as Switzerland, Australia and Belgium (for total pay) or the UK (for base pay).

USD figures translate into around S$140,000 for base and S$170,000 per year for total pay, and it’s quite likely that in terms of disposable income S’pore would rank a few places higher among global tech cities, considering their much higher taxation.

Which roles pay best here?

Software engineering is a highly capacious term, which encompasses a long list of jobs of varying degrees of responsibility, complexity and, as a result, salary levels.

Fortunately, an earlier, annual Salary Guide 2025 by Michael Page, gives us some idea about the discrepancies between roles of different seniority in the broadly defined software engineering segment (please note that the company only provides figures for base salaries).

In strictly defined software development jobs there are no surprises, with the highest pay going to engineers dealing with back-end programming in some way:

In Data & AI, the hottest new industry, salaries climb higher with corporate seniority, with Data Directors taking a quarter of a million dollars (SGD) home. AI might be taking some jobs but not in the sector that builds it, that’s for sure.

Among selected roles in other areas, even tangentially related to software engineering, we begin to notice a pattern that you can now spot in the previous two tables as well. That is—direct value-added roles tend to pay considerably better than maintenance roles do.

Jobs in IT infrastructure—its design and upkeep—fall considerably behind on remuneration compared to engineers designing and implementing solutions and/or software products (and non-engineering consultancy, excluded from these tables, is even less generous).

Keeping things running is clearly considered a cost more than an investment and salaries reflect that. To make more you have to be on the creative side of things, all the way up to senior positions, which pay around S$100,000 more than the average.

That said, however, a five-figure monthly pay, even as one of many software developers, is nothing to scoff at. And despite the spread of AI and recurring layoffs from the biggest tech companies, the employment situation in the tech sector in Singapore doesn’t show any cracks.

Featured image: mast3r / depositphotos