Workplace Fairness Act: What Happens When Your Singapore SME Crosses 25 Employees

If your Singapore SME has 25 or more employees when the Workplace Fairness Act commences at the end of 2027, the Act applies to you: you must not make employment decisions on the basis of protected characteristics, you must have a written internal grievance process, and you must not retaliate against staff who use it. Below 25 employees, you are initially exempt — though the Government has said it will review that exemption within roughly five years of commencement, with smaller employers expected to follow in a later phase. That single number is why a Q4 2026 headcount decision is also a compliance decision, and why the sensible time to build the paperwork is while you are at 22 people rather than the week you hit 26.

What does the 25-employee threshold actually trigger?

Parliament passed the Workplace Fairness Act in January 2025 and the accompanying Dispute Resolution Bill in November 2025. The Act is slated to take effect at the end of 2027 — later than the originally signalled 2026–2027 window, which is a gift of lead time rather than a reason to forget about it.

Once it applies to you, three things become legal obligations rather than good practice. First, adverse employment decisions — hiring, performance review, training, promotion, dismissal — must not be based on protected characteristics. The list covers age, nationality, sex, marital status, pregnancy, caregiving responsibilities, race, religion, language ability, disability and mental health condition. Second, you must operate a written grievance-handling process that lets an employee raise a fairness complaint and protects the confidentiality of the complainant and the information involved. Third, retaliation is prohibited: no demotion, pay cut, reassignment to a worse role or dismissal for someone who raised a complaint in good faith or helped with an inquiry.

Where an internal process does not resolve matters, the route runs through TADM mediation and, if that fails, a private action for the statutory tort of discrimination. Claims up to S$250,000 are heard by the Employment Claims Tribunals; anything larger goes to the General Division of the High Court. Any contract term that tries to stop an employee from raising a grievance or bringing a claim is void.

Why does a Q4 2026 hiring decision decide your 2027 status?

Most SMEs do not cross 25 employees deliberately. They cross it in November, when the year-end order book needs three more pairs of hands, or in January, when two part-timers become full-timers. The headcount is decided months before anyone reads the payroll report and notices the number changed.

That matters because the obligations are not the kind you can produce on demand. A grievance process is only credible if it existed before the grievance did. A merit-based hiring rationale is only persuasive if it was written at the time of the interview, not reconstructed afterwards for a tribunal. The lead time between now and end-2027 is the whole point: you are being given roughly fifteen months to make ordinary HR documentation habitual, so that when the Act commences you are not starting from a blank template.

The detailed counting rules — how part-timers, contract staff and related entities are treated — sit in subsidiary legislation and MOM guidance still to be published. If you are anywhere between 20 and 30 headcount, plan on the assumption you are in scope and watch mom.gov.sg and TAFEP for the final rules rather than betting your position on a favourable reading.

What does a workable grievance process look like in a 30-person company?

It does not look like a multinational's HR manual. In a 30-person firm, a compliant process fits on two sides of paper and answers five questions: who an employee raises a concern with, what the alternative channel is when that person is the problem, how quickly they will get an acknowledgement, who investigates, and how the outcome is communicated. TAFEP publishes a model procedure you can adapt rather than draft cold.

The operational trap is the second channel. In most SMEs the named recipient is the office manager or the owner's spouse, and there is no route around them. Name a second person — a director, an external HR adviser, a designated email that two people can access — and write it into the document.

The other trap is the filing. A grievance process that lives in someone's personal inbox is not confidential, not retrievable and not evidence of anything eighteen months later. It needs a location with controlled access and a retention rule, which for most of our clients means a restricted folder in the same document system that already holds employment contracts.

Which systems already hold the evidence you will need?

This is where fairness compliance stops being an HR project and becomes an integration one. The evidence that protects you in a discrimination claim is contemporaneous and mundane: what the job ad said, who applied, what each candidate scored, why the offer went where it went, what the performance reviews recorded in the three cycles before a dismissal.

Most SMEs hold all of that — scattered across a recruitment inbox, a WhatsApp thread with the hiring manager, a spreadsheet of interview notes, a payroll system that knows the dates, and a shared drive of PDFs nobody has opened since signing. Nothing is missing. It is simply unassemblable in under a week, which for practical purposes is the same as missing.

The fix is unglamorous and cheap at this size. Move interview scoring out of WhatsApp into a form that timestamps itself. Keep job ads in one place with a version history, so you can show what was actually published. Make performance reviews a record with a date rather than a conversation someone remembers. None of this requires an HRIS purchase; it requires deciding which of your existing systems is the system of record for each artefact and then not writing it anywhere else.

What should you do before the end of 2026?

Four things, none of which take a quarter. Count your headcount honestly, including part-timers, and write down which side of 25 you expect to be on in eighteen months. Audit your job-ad templates and strip out preferences tied to protected characteristics — age brackets, nationality, marital status — replacing them with requirements grounded in the job itself. Adopt a written grievance procedure and tell staff it exists, because an unpublicised process protects nobody. And pick your systems of record for hiring and performance documentation, then move this year's activity into them so that by the time the Act commences you have two full cycles of real evidence rather than a policy written the month before.

Until commencement, the Tripartite Guidelines on Fair Employment Practices still apply and are still enforced through work-pass restrictions. Nothing you do now is wasted effort against a future rule; it is compliance with the current one, filed properly.

Frequently asked questions

We have 18 employees. Can we ignore this entirely until 2030?
You are outside the initial scope, but not outside the Tripartite Guidelines, which apply to every employer today. The exemption for firms under 25 is expected to be reviewed within about five years of commencement, with employers of 5 to 24 staff anticipated in a later phase. Treat the current position as a timing advantage, not a permanent exclusion.

Do we need to buy an HR system to comply?
No. The Act requires a grievance process and non-discriminatory decisions, not a particular piece of software. What causes SMEs to fail is scattered evidence, and that is usually solved by consolidating into tools you already pay for rather than adding a new one.

What happens if an employee complains and we handle it badly?
An unresolved internal grievance can proceed to TADM mediation and then to a private discrimination action, with claims up to S$250,000 heard by the Employment Claims Tribunals. Separately, taking adverse action against the complainant is itself prohibited — so a poorly handled complaint can generate a second, independent exposure on top of the original one.