REGULATION UPDATE
Singapore now publishes a public list of roughly 860 companies carrying workplace safety demerit points, searchable by anyone before they sign a contract. Almost none of those points come from the dramatic accident you’d expect. Most come from the cheapest, most avoidable citation an inspector can issue — signage that was missing, wrong, or never put up — and few contractors realise how fast those small citations add up to a hiring freeze.
A Public List Most Employers Never Look At Until They’re On It
MOM’s demerit points registry sits quietly on the Ministry’s website, updated regularly and open to anyone — a potential client, a tender evaluator, a competitor — who wants to check a contractor’s safety record before signing a contract. Today it names roughly 860 companies, each carrying somewhere between 1 and 30 accumulated points. For most of those companies, the number is a rounding error: a single composition fine from years ago, still ageing off an 18-month rolling window. For a smaller set climbing toward the higher tiers, it is the difference between hiring the workers a project needs and being locked out of the market entirely. The list itself explains almost none of this — no context on what triggered each company’s points, no breakdown of severity. The mechanics only become clear once you read the regulation behind it.
How a Point Actually Gets Assigned
The demerit points system has applied to construction since 2000 and was extended to manufacturing from October 2023, and it works on a straightforward tariff. A composition fine — the administrative penalty MOM issues for a breach of the WSH Act without going to court — costs a company one point. A partial stop-work order costs five. A full stop-work order, which halts an entire worksite until MOM is satisfied it’s safe to resume, costs ten. Prosecution following a major injury or a single death costs twenty-five, and prosecution following two or more deaths costs fifty. Every point stays live for eighteen months from the date it was issued, and points aggregate across all of a company’s worksites under the same Unique Entity Number — so a contractor running several sites can’t insulate one from another’s record.
The Five Thresholds That Freeze a Workforce
Once a company’s rolling total crosses 25 points, the consequences move from reputational to operational. Between 25 and 49 points, MOM bars the company from hiring new migrant workers for three months. Between 50 and 74, that ban extends to six months; between 75 and 99, a full year; between 100 and 124, two years. Past 125 points, the ban runs two years and the company loses the ability to even renew its existing migrant workers’ permits — a point at which a labour-dependent contractor’s workforce simply starts shrinking, whether or not it wins new business. Existing permit renewals stay possible through the lower tiers, which is often the only thing keeping a struggling company’s current sites staffed while it works through its penalty period. None of this requires a courtroom. A string of composition fines, quietly issued and quietly paid, is enough on its own to reach 25 points well before a single prosecution ever enters the picture.
Why Signage Is the Cheapest Way to Rack Up Points
This is where the system connects directly to what’s actually posted on a worksite wall. A composition fine is the lowest-cost, fastest-to-issue enforcement action available to an inspector, and it’s overwhelmingly used for exactly the kind of gap that a missing or incorrect sign represents: an administrative control that should have been in place and wasn’t. MOM’s own inspection checklists — the same ones referenced in this year’s stepped-up metalworking inspections — treat warning, prohibition, mandatory and emergency signage as baseline items to verify, not extras to note in passing. A hazard zone with no barricade tape, a confined space with no entry-permit sign, a chemical store with no hazard pictogram — each is a one-point citation that costs an inspector minutes to issue and a company nothing to have avoided. Multiply that across several site visits over eighteen months, and a company that has never had a serious incident can still find itself closer to the 25-point line than its safety record would suggest.
The Review Underway, and What Doesn’t Wait For It
MOM’s mid-year Workplace Safety and Health Report, released 8 September, put a number on why this matters now: the fatal injury rate for the first half of 2026 rose to 1.1 per 100,000 workers, missing the 1.0 target Singapore set itself for 2028, even as major injuries fell to a record low of 14.6 per 100,000 outside the pandemic-distorted 2020 figures. In response, MOM said it is reviewing “further measures to strengthen ownership and accountability,” specifically naming the demerit points system and asking whether bizSAFE certification actually reflects a company’s real safety performance. Nothing about that review changes how points are being assigned today — the tariff above is the one currently in force, and every composition fine issued this month counts toward it exactly as it did last month. Whatever the review changes, the cheapest way to stay off the registry entirely hasn’t: keep every hazard, exit, mandatory-PPE zone and prohibition area correctly and visibly signed, before an inspector has a reason to look for what’s missing.
Singapore’s demerit points system doesn’t distinguish between a company with one serious lapse and a company with twenty-five small ones — the ledger only counts, it doesn’t explain. For most worksites, staying off it is less about compliance culture and more about a walk-through with a checklist and a supplier who can turn it around fast. Browse our full range of SS 508-compliant safety signs at safetysigns.sg.
Author: safetysigns.sg Team
Date: 27 September 2026