More firms in Singapore utilise wage credits to employ disabled employees

Approximately 6,600 organisations received wage credits that supported the employment of over 10,000 disabled people in 2022. Of these, close to 2,000 had not worked for at six months, said Eric Chua, Singapore’s Senior Parliamentary Secretary for Social and Family Development.

The Enabling Employment Credit, which started in 2021 and will continue running until 2025, provides up to 20% wage support for disabled employees earning below SGD $4,000 (USD $2911.20) per month, with a cap at SGD $400 (USD $291.12) a month per employee.

Organisations which hire disabled people that have been working for less than six months will receive an additional 20% in wage offsets, capped at $400 a month per employee for the first nine months.

The objective of the Enabling Employment Credit is to push more organisations to hire disabled people who have not been able to secure a job for long periods of time and are more likely to be financially dependent on their family members. 

Chua also highlighted the Open Door Programme that originated in 2014, where disabled employees can receive up to one year of job matching and customised employment support from trained job coaches, as well as subsidised training courses for disabled employees run by the Enabling Academy.

READ MORE: Building an inclusive workplace for disabled employees

Between 2020 and 2022, SG Enable, an agency representing disabilities in Singapore, and its partners helped an average of 500 disabled people find employment every year, said Chua, and more than 380 job and training opportunities have been filled under these two programmes since they were introduced in 2021, said Chua.

The average resident employment rate for disabled employees aged 15 to 64 is steadily increasing, he noted, from 28.2% in 2018 and 2019, to 31.4% in 2021 to 2022, moving to meet Singapore’s objective of hiring 40% of the disabled community by 2030.