Checking your tenant

Before you sign a tenancy agreement, the question that should worry you is not whether the rent clears the mortgage. It is what you are exposed to if the person moving in is not who they say they are. Singapore does not ask a landlord to be a detective. It asks a landlord to run three specific checks, keep the record, and understand that the law presumes you were careless if you skipped them. That presumption is the whole reason this page exists: the burden of proof runs against you, not the tenant.

The mechanics: what checking your tenant actually means

For a foreign tenant or occupier, the standard is to check the original immigration, work or student pass, cross-check its particulars against the original passport, check the photograph against the person standing in front of you, verify the pass's validity directly with ICA or MOM through their own websites, and keep the screen capture or acknowledgement slip as your record. This is not optional diligence for a cautious landlord; it is the due-diligence standard a court will measure you against if the person you housed turns out to be an overstayer.

• Ask for the original pass and the original passport, not a photo or a photocopy.
• Cross-check the pass number, name and photo against the passport in front of you, in person.
• Verify the pass is still valid directly through ICA's or MOM's own check, not by taking the tenant's word for it.
• Where a security deposit is changing hands, prepare and sign an inventory list with the tenant before handover.
• Keep the screen capture or acknowledgement slip from the ICA or MOM check as your record.

MOM's own 'Check Work Pass and Application Status' e-service, reached through the myMOM Portal, lets anyone check the status of a Work Permit, S Pass or Employment Pass by pass type, the holder's date of birth and their FIN or passport number, with no login required. A companion SGWorkPass app can scan a work pass card's QR code to verify it on the spot. There is no cost and no appointment needed; the only way to get this wrong is to not do it at all.

Homeowners renting out property must ensure their tenants are not illegal immigrants or overstayers. This is stated as an obligation, not a suggestion: verify pass validity through ICA's or MOM's own checks, then confirm the tenant is the rightful holder of the original pass and passport in front of you. Harbouring an immigration offender carries imprisonment of up to two years and a fine not exceeding S$6,000.

The penalty scales with how much of the checklist you skipped, and the law does not give you the benefit of the doubt. Knowing or reckless harbouring, meaning you ran only one of the three checks, carries six months to two years and a fine up to S$6,000. Negligent harbouring, meaning you ran two of the three, carries up to twelve months and or a fine up to S$6,000. A person found to have given shelter to an immigration offender is presumed to have done so recklessly or negligently unless they can prove otherwise. You are not innocent until proven guilty here; you are careless until you can show your own paper trail.

Eligibility: who can rent out, and who can rent

If your own property is an HDB flat, whether you can rent it out at all turns on your citizenship, not just your ownership. Only Singapore Citizens who have fulfilled the Minimum Occupation Period can rent out their flats; Singapore PR flat owners may not rent out a whole flat at all. The whole flat may be let after the five-year MOP, or three years for a non-subsidised flat bought on the open market without a grant before 30 August 2010. Prime and Plus flat owners may never rent out the whole flat, even after the longer ten-year MOP that applies to those schemes. And if HDB's non-citizen quota for your block or neighbourhood has been reached, you can only rent to Singaporeans and Malaysians until it clears.

For private property, URA sets the occupancy ceiling rather than a citizenship test: a minimum stay of three consecutive months, no daily or weekly lets, and a headcount cap on unrelated occupants of at most six persons for a unit under 90 sq m. Units of 90 sq m or more can temporarily house up to eight unrelated persons on registration and a S$20 fee, a concession currently running from 22 January 2024 through 31 December 2028. There is no URA tenant registration requirement for private property the way there is for HDB — but the headcount cap is the thing a landlord actually gets caught on, usually through a neighbour's complaint about an over-partitioned unit, not through any registration you filed.

Renting out individual bedrooms rather than the whole unit is a different product with its own eligibility rule: HDB requires the flat owner to keep living in the flat throughout the rental period, only bedrooms HDB itself originally built may be let (not a partitioned room), and only an owner of a 3-room or larger flat can rent out any bedroom at all — owners of 1- and 2-room flats cannot. A company renting a bedroom for an employee still has to ensure that employee clears the same tenant eligibility conditions as any individual tenant would.

Citizenship status: yours, and theirs

It is worth being precise about what citizenship actually governs here, because the two citizenship regimes on this site's other pages do not reach this one. FTA parity, the rule that gives US, Swiss, Liechtenstein, Norwegian and Icelandic nationals the same stamp duty treatment as a Singapore Citizen, is a stamp-duty rule that applies to a buyer at purchase. It does not touch the Residential Property Act's approval requirements for a foreigner buying landed housing, and it has no bearing at all on this page: a tenant's FTA nationality does not exempt them from a pass check, and it does not change what you owe if you skip one. The check you run is the same regardless of which passport the tenant holds — Singaporean, Malaysian, FTA national, or anyone else on a work, student or dependant pass. The only citizenship question that changes your obligations is your own, as the HDB landlord eligibility rule above shows.

Taxes: stamping the tenancy, and what rental income costs you

The tenancy agreement itself is a dutiable document. Stamp duty on a lease of four years or less runs at 0.4% of the total rent for the whole lease period, or 0.4% of four times the average annual rent for a lease longer than four years or of indefinite duration; it is computed on the higher of the contractual rent and the market rent. Rent for this purpose includes maintenance and service charges and furniture and fittings charges, and excludes GST.

By convention the tenant pays this duty, though the lease can assign it otherwise, and it must be stamped within 14 days of signing if the agreement is signed in Singapore. The lessee, meaning the tenant, is responsible for making sure it is stamped and for holding the stamp certificate, even where the landlord or the agent actually did the stamping. Skip it and the exposure is not just a late-payment penalty: an unstamped tenancy agreement generally cannot be used as evidence in court, which matters a great deal if the tenant you failed to screen also turns out to be the tenant you later need to sue.

Once the flat is tenanted, your property tax changes too. Owner-occupier rates are granted to only one property you own and occupy yourself; the moment you let a property out, it moves to the higher non-owner-occupier residential bands. There is no relief for a vacant stretch between tenants either — a vacant residential property is taxed at the same non-owner-occupier rate, with no discount for the void.

On the income side, rental income from a tenanted residential property can use a 15% deemed-expense shortcut against the rent instead of itemising every actual cost — a shortcut that does not extend to commercial or industrial property, so it is specifically a residential landlord's convenience. Separately, from Year of Assessment 2022 a landlord may deduct expenditure on repair, insurance, maintenance or upkeep incurred while a property sits vacant during part of the year, and any property tax paid for that vacancy period, against rental income — conditional on having made a reasonable effort to find a new tenant during the void. And if you are not resident in Singapore yourself, filing is not optional: non-resident individuals earning rental income from Singapore property must file a tax return, at a flat non-resident rate of 24% (22% before Year of Assessment 2024).

Borrowing: how your tenant feeds back into your own mortgage

If you are servicing a loan on the property you are letting out, or using this rent to qualify for a loan on another one, the tenancy agreement you just stamped is not paperwork — it is underwriting evidence. A bank assessing your Total Debt Servicing Ratio must apply a minimum 30% haircut to rental income the way it does to any variable income, and it will only count that rental income at all if it is backed by a stamped tenancy agreement with at least six months remaining on it. A tenant who turns out to be unscreened, or a tenancy that collapses into an eviction, does not just cost you the rent — it can pull the stamped agreement out from under a TDSR calculation you were relying on for your next purchase.

If you already hold a mortgage and are financing a further property, the loan-to-value ceiling tightens with each outstanding housing loan: 45% on a second outstanding loan (25% if the tenure runs long), down to 35% on a third or subsequent one. A landlord's rental income helps offset that math on paper, but only for as long as the tenancy behind it is real, stamped, and current — which is exactly what the checks on this page exist to protect.

Control: the inventory, the deposit, and the paper trail

For most of this site's other products, control is exercised through renovation, addition and alteration, or a rebuild — the owner spending money to shape the asset. For a landlord checking a tenant, control looks different: it is the inventory list, the pass verification record, and the signed agreement, because these are the only levers you actually have once someone else is living in your property. Where a security deposit is involved, an inventory list should be prepared and signed by both landlord and tenant before handover — the document that lets you actually enforce a deduction later, rather than argue about it from memory.

Control also runs the other way at the end of a tenancy: a landlord who wants a non-paying or non-compliant tenant out cannot simply change the locks. Wrongful re-entry can expose a landlord to damages, and the standard advice is to obtain a court or tribunal order before physically retaking a unit. The tenant-screening discipline at the front of a tenancy and the lawful-eviction discipline at the back of one are the same instinct: control comes from following the process, not from asserting ownership.

Conveyancing: the tenancy agreement and the handover

CEA offers a Tenancy Agreement Template for Private Residential Property, and three checklists covering compliance under the Immigration Act and Women's Charter, a landlord-and-agent checklist, and a tenant-and-agent checklist. None of it is mandatory; the template leaves terms open to negotiation. A property agent's role, where you use one, ends once the landlord and tenant have signed and the property is handed over — property management beyond that point falls outside estate agency work and outside CEA's regulation entirely. CEA itself only handles disputes involving a property agent; everything else goes to a Community Mediation Centre, the Small Claims Tribunal, or a lawyer.

If you are overseas when the tenancy is signed, HDB requires a certified true copy of a Power of Attorney in HDB's own standard form, lodged with the High Court, submitted with the rental application. The attorney you appoint cannot be a tenant of the flat. A solicitor must prepare it, and it must be signed before a lawyer in Singapore, or before a Consular Officer at the Singapore Embassy or High Commission in the country where you are residing at the time.

Estate: if something happens to you mid-tenancy

A tenancy agreement is a contract, and a contract does not end just because the landlord who signed it dies. The tenant's right to occupy under the lease continues; it is your executor or administrator who steps into your shoes as landlord — collecting rent, holding the deposit, and answering for the property — until the estate is settled and the property either passes to an heir or is sold. This is exactly the moment the tenant-screening record you kept becomes someone else's problem to inherit along with the flat, which is one more reason to keep it, not just run it.

The frame: twelve questions before you sign

Two questions sort every property decision on this site, and they are not about whether you believe the market will rise. The first is whether you are borrowing to buy. The second, once you hold the property, is whether you are lending it out. This page's whole readership has already answered both: you hold the property, and you are letting it to someone else. That single answer — cash or borrowed, own-use or let-out — decides everything else below, because a let-out property is a yield play by construction: the return is the carry, not the address.

C0 — The play

Letting out a property you already own is a cash-flow play, not a balance-sheet bet. You are not waiting for the flat to be worth more; you are collecting rent against a mortgage, month after month, and the tenant you let in is the mechanism by which that cash flow either works or breaks.

C1 — Balance sheet

The property stays an asset and the mortgage stays a liability regardless of who is living there. A bad tenant does not touch this line directly — but a harbouring fine, a damages claim, or unpaid property tax on a void the tenant left behind can turn into a new liability sitting on top of it.

C2 — Cash flow

Rent comes in; mortgage, property tax, insurance, and agent's fee go out. This is the line a skipped pass check actually threatens: an overstaying or unauthorised occupant you have to evict means the inflow stops while every outflow keeps running, on top of the legal cost of getting the unit back.

C3 — P&L

Profit is rent minus expenses over the year, and it is not the same number as the cash sitting in your account this month. Keep this separate deliberately: a harbouring conviction is not a line item that reduces profit, it is a criminal exposure that sits entirely outside the P&L — a different category of loss than a bad month of rent.

C4 — Carry

Carry is what is left once financing cost is paid out of rent — positive, negative, or none. A void from a failed tenancy does not make your carry negative on paper; it takes carry to zero for however long the unit sits empty, while the mortgage keeps accruing regardless.

C5 — Give / get

You give possession of the property and an obligation to maintain it; you get the rent. What is easy to miss is that you are also implicitly taking on the tenant's own legal status as a condition of that trade — you cannot separate the rent from who, exactly, you are collecting it from.

C6 — Exposed to

What can move against you here is not the property market. It is an occupant whose pass lapses mid-lease, someone who was never on the pass at all, non-payment, damage beyond the deposit, or a headcount that quietly exceeds URA's occupancy cap because you never asked who actually moved in.

C7 — For how long

Your commitment runs for the lease term, typically one to two years — but the immigration exposure runs for as long as that person actually occupies the unit, and passes expire mid-lease. A check done at signing is not a check that stays valid for the life of the tenancy.

C8 — Failure cascade

If it goes wrong, the order matters. Skip the checks, and you may unknowingly house an overstayer: that risk sits dormant until discovered, then it hits cash flow through eviction cost and lost rent, accumulates into a worse year's P&L — and, separately from all of that, a harbouring conviction is a criminal exposure that never shows up as negative equity or illiquidity at all. It is its own, harsher category, outside the ordinary cascade this site describes for a failed carry trade.

C9 — Liquidity

How fast this becomes money again is the time it takes to lawfully remove a bad tenant, re-market the unit, and sign a new stamped agreement — not a quick process if it runs through mediation or the Small Claims Tribunal, and every week of it is a week of carry lost, not deferred.

C10 — Control

This is where this page actually sits. Screening the tenant, verifying the pass, and signing the inventory are not paperwork around the decision — they are the decision. Control, for a landlord, is the discipline of doing these checks before handover, because there is very little you can control once someone else has the keys.

C11 — The exit

Getting out means the lease ending on its own terms, or you lawfully ending it early — and both cost something: notice periods, the deposit-return process, and, if it goes badly, the cost of proving you followed the law rather than took the unit back yourself.

The B2B spoke: who this transaction actually employs

A tenancy this size runs through more than a landlord and a tenant. A CEA-registered property agent, where you use one, is the party expected to run the passport and pass verification against MOM and ICA and to prepare the inventory list. A lawyer is the one you turn to if the tenancy agreement needs to be enforced, if stamping was missed, or if eviction has to go through the courts rather than a changed lock. CEA itself only adjudicates disputes involving its own registered agents; everything else, including most landlord-tenant disputes, is routed to a Community Mediation Centre, the Small Claims Tribunal, or straight to legal action. Each of these exists because the tenancy agreement, once signed, is a live legal relationship, not a one-time transaction — and each of them gets paid, or gets involved, at a different point in that relationship's life than the agent who found the tenant does.

What the agent earns, and where the incentive points

CEA sets no fixed commission rate for a rental transaction; the amount is agreed between agent and client and should be documented before the agent starts work. Market convention for a private residential letting with an agent runs at about one month's rent from the landlord for a 12-month lease; for an HDB whole-flat rental with an agent on each side, roughly half a month from each party. None of this is prescribed, and it is negotiable in both directions.

Here is the incentive point worth naming plainly, including against the agent's own interest: the agent's role, and their payment, ends once the tenancy agreement is signed and the keys change hands. The tenant-screening obligation on this page does not end there — it runs for the length of the tenancy, and the harbouring exposure it protects against sits entirely with the landlord, not the agent who is already paid and gone. An agent has every reason to move a deal to signing quickly; a landlord has every reason to slow down at exactly that point and make sure the three checks were actually done, not just described as done.