By Sugidha Nithiananthan and Adilah Rafey

Disclaimer: AWARE is a non-partisan civil society organisation. We do not endorse or support any political party or candidate. This analysis of Budget 2025 is part of our ongoing research and advocacy to promote gender equality and social inclusion in Singapore’s laws, policies, and institutions.

Why does AWARE talk about politics? 

As Singapore heads to the polls, it is more important than ever to examine how public policies shape the lives of different communities. At AWARE, we evaluate policies through a feminist lens. That means asking how they impact women, caregivers, low-income families, and marginalised groups.

In the words of the rich tradition of feminists who came before us, “the personal is political”. What this means is that politics has tangible effects on the lived realities of various communities, and the fight for gender equality must engage in the political arena. This engagement through the years has resulted in so many of our proposals becoming policy, and many more gaining traction in parliament and appearing in the manifestos of various parties across the political spectrum.

Our role is not to take sides, but to push for bold, evidence-based change. This Budget analysis is part of our role in raising awareness during this election season. We hope to be your reliable source of non-partisan feminist analysis of Singapore’s current policies as they exist, our recommendations, and our evaluation of the alternative proposals in the space. Keep an eye out for our social media posts on parties’ manifestos and positions through a feminist lens!

Last year, AWARE critiqued the package of one-off cash vouchers announced in Budget 2024, stating that they were “merely a bandaid and not a sustainable solution” to the cost of living crisis. Was 2025’s Budget more of the same? Did it outperform public pessimism on account of being an “Election Budget”?

More for the middle 

Many have commented that this is an “Election Budget” and we certainly see why. A recent survey by Milieu Insight showed that Budget 2025 received more positive sentiments than its 2024 predecessors, while negative sentiments dropped slightly. This isn’t surprising – a large number of the benefits in this Budget are targeted at expanding access to existing policies for the large middle class. This applies across the board – such as an expansion of access to U-Save and Climate Vouchers, the expansion of the EASE programme to private dwellings, a reduction in property tax rates, and increased eligibility for long-term and home caregiving subsidies, amongst others. While the Budget has certainly been effective in achieving more positive reactions, more for the middle does not also mean more for the more disadvantaged.

Measures for low-income families

MSF has announced that it will increase ComCare payouts – the example given is an increase of $120 for a one-person household receiving Long-Term Assistance. This example is estimated to be a 20% higher disbursement. There’s little else that is provided about how much more spending will be allocated towards ComCare, most likely due to the case-by-case basis upon which ComCare is disbursed to families.

Additionally, the ComLink+ housing benefit allowing eligible families to buy new flats with shorter leases, which was previously only eligible to second-timers, is now expanded to first-time families as well. This mechanism, alongside the increased Fresh Start Housing Grant increase for second timers from $50k to $75k will definitely make owning one’s own house more accessible to many lower-income families.

However, given rising cost pressures, the peak of the GST increase, as well as worrying trends in wage security for the lowest earners, we are disappointed that the more inclusive approach in the 2024 Budget towards the bottom 20% of Singaporeans was not continued in this Budget. More can certainly be done, given that this demographic is most vulnerable to our cost-of-living crisis.

ComCare remains an opaque and stringent means-tested scheme which puts families under high amounts of scrutiny with no publicly available eligibility criteria – making the process highly dependent on officers in Social Service Offices, where it is disbursed. The enhanced amount of roughly $720 per month for a one-person household (the example provided by MSF in its Budget factsheet) is not even half of the living wage amount set by the Minimum Income Standards of $1,492 per month for a single elderly person – a common single-household demographic which ComCare hopes to serve.

It is critical to provide support that actually enables families to achieve positive outcomes and escape poverty. We recommend that disbursement amounts should be derived at by reference to evidence-based benchmarks and should be provided for a length of time that is sufficient to achieve these outcomes. Good benchmarks to follow would include Minimum Income Standards and the amounts provided by AWWA in its recent randomised UCT trials as part of the Family Empowerment Programme.

Opacity of ComCare’s eligibility criteria continues to be a barrier to access for many families. Public disclosure of its criteria, such as income thresholds, housing status and other socio-economic indicators, can further empower families to self-assess their eligibility and better prepare their applications for ComCare. This will also enable other stakeholders to assess the efficacy of these criteria on the ground.

While enhancements to ComLink+ and the increased provision of the Fresh Start Housing Grant are certainly a step in the right direction, vulnerable families taking realistic steps toward home ownership require much more support – even if the immediate benefits of higher financial aid are not apparent. The positive effects of supporting families working towards their housing aspirations are far-reaching and go beyond individual families, “spilling into” the rest of society. This is apparent from AWARE’s report “Why Stable Housing Matters”. It shows that sustained and sufficient financial support, and even the free provision of housing to particularly vulnerable groups such as single parent families, unwed mothers and victim-survivors of family violence, produces outcomes that far exceed the expenditure of such programmes.

Therefore, we reiterate our call to implement housing programmes to provide unwed mothers and family violence survivors who have no place to go with free stable housing or interim housing for at least 2 years, alongside support services. We also reiterate our recommendations that the income cap for rental housing should be increased and set on a per-capita basis, and eligibility should be expanded to cover non-nuclear family structures. Everyone should have a right to safe and affordable housing even when they do not fall within nuclear family structures, and should not suffer from the “benefit cliff” of being unable to afford to buy their own flat and yet being over the cut-off point to qualify for rental housing.

Labour and Workers

This year’s budget disbursements in the area of labour are overwhelmingly aimed at incentivising employers to comply with previously established policies, as well as a large effort at making skills training more accessible and widely adopted.

The Progressive Wage Credits Scheme provides financial support to firms for wage increases as a result of the Progressive Wage Model (PWM) through a co-funding scheme. While this certainly will increase compliance with the PWM, it is not an additional form of income support  for workers themselves. With the ever-rising cost of living, the time has come for Singapore, as an advanced economy, to adopt a living wage standard which allows workers to live with dignity. Singapore has sufficient resources to meet minimum wage standards, as opposed to relying fully on PWM, which does not address the continued existence of a reliable pool of low-salary foreign workers that companies continue to have access to without very few market controls.

AWARE does commend the additional training allowance of up to $3,000 per worker for selected full-time courses under the SkillsFuture Level-Up Scheme as well as the enhanced tier of support under the Workfare Skills Support. All workers, regardless of their income level or career should be supported to access training and upskilling.

We are also highly encouraged by the newly announced Jobseeker Support Scheme (JSS), which will provide newly-retrenched workers with financial support of up to $6,000 over 6 months while undergoing training or searching for jobs. This is a step in the right direction – it is similar in design and principle to retrenchment insurance, which most workers in advanced social democracies around the world have a right to. While the amount of financial support, the proposed structure of payouts and the length of assistance would certainly be more helpful if they were more generous, we believe that this scheme has the potential to provide much needed support for many vulnerable workers and their families when they face unavoidable retrenchment. Evidence from other countries has shown that retrenchment and unemployment benefits can provide a social safety net that ensures vulnerable communities are able to have the option to look for better work. We await reviews of and enhancements to the JSS, which could potentially expand beyond retrenchment and into the field of general unemployment.

Support for Seniors

This year’s budget pushes strongly towards enhanced financial support for seniors and their caregivers. This includes the expansion of EASE to seniors in private properties, the 5-year Matched Medisave Scheme, increases in long-term care subsidies in both residential homes and community care, and enhancements to the Home Caregiving Grant. These numerous schemes and improvements efficiently tackle the challenges of ageing for all groups in our society, regardless of income.

We commend these efforts, which aim to provide much needed support especially to caregivers, who do much of the highly gendered and unpaid work of caring for the elderly. We need to reiterate however the need for caregivers to be paid a living wage as they perform these highly critical services for society. This can be based, for example, on the Minimum Income Standard. Alternatively, we have long-proposed a Caregiver Support Grant that has both a cash and a CPF component (without the need for self-contribution), with the amount linked to the salaries of those providing the kind of care work involved. Payment levels can also be linked to the number of Activities of Daily Living (ADL) which each caregiver assists with, to recognise that caregivers need to invest greater resources into caring for care recipients who need help with more ADLs.

We particularly commend the Matched Medisave Scheme, which compliments the Matched Retirement Savings Scheme (MRSS). PM Wong rightfully stated that these schemes will be especially beneficial for “lower-income seniors, especially our grandmothers, mothers and aunts who were homemakers and caregivers”. This goes some way to address our 2024 recommendation to make the MRSS accessible to “caregivers who have had to take a step back from their careers before 55 years of age to fulfil caregiving duties”. However, we continue to echo our calls for more support for this group of people, who will still have much lower savings in their Medisave, Ordinary and Retirement Savings Accounts. Thus we recommend that this demographic should receive government top-ups as grants, rather than as matched top-ups.

Our Budget 2025 Wrap-up – Let’s build trampolines, not safety nets

Singapore’s Budget 2025 demonstrates a clear shift toward more structured, evidence-based welfare policies, moving beyond one-off cash handouts to sustained support for seniors, caregivers, those who were retrenched, and low-income families. While these measures are welcome, more targeted interventions that directly address cost-of-living pressures and broader structures  — backed by disaggregated data — are needed to ensure equitable outcomes. It’s time for us to invest in building “trampolines” rather than safety nets, so that more people can bounce back from crises.

Broader gaps remain, particularly in gender-responsive budgeting and the lack of disaggregated data to provide better evidence for policy proposals. As Singapore progresses, embedding these principles into our governance and policies will be crucial to foster a more inclusive and resilient society for all.

Sugidha Nithiananthan is the Director of Advocacy and Research at AWARE. Adilah Rafey is a Research Executive at AWARE.