Flexible work arrangement requests for EP / S Pass

Since 1 December 2024, Singapore has had a formal process for asking to work flexibly: the Tripartite Guidelines on Flexible Work Arrangement Requests, usually shortened to TG-FWAR. You'll still see the claim online that MOM now forces employers to allow working from home. It doesn't. What actually changed is narrower than that, and more useful: if you make a formal request, your employer has to genuinely consider it and answer you in writing. Whether they say yes is still a business decision. If the process itself breaks down, that's a TAFEP conversation, and we've written that up separately in what happens when an FWA request is mishandled.

Nothing here carves foreigners out. If you're on an EP or S Pass under a contract of service, the Guidelines cover you the same way they cover the colleague sitting next to you. Your pass type doesn't earn you the right to work from Bali either, which is a different problem entirely, and we come back to it below.

What a "formal" request actually means

Filing it so that it counts

Check first whether HR already publishes an FWA form. If they do, use it — a request that arrives outside the company's own process is the easiest kind to lose in an inbox. If there's no form, send a written request that at least covers:

1. The date you're making the request
2. The type of FWA you want, and how often or for how long
3. Your reason
4. When you'd like it to start, and when it would end if it's time-bound

MOM's PDF has a sample template at Annex A if you'd rather not start from a blank page. Completing probation is the usual eligibility gate in the Guidelines, though it's your employer's stated process you should check yourself against.

Rejection language that doesn't hold up

Plenty of business grounds are perfectly legitimate: clients who need you in the room, rostered coverage, data-security constraints, work that falls apart when the team isn't in one place. Those are the kinds of reasons the Guidelines contemplate, and an employer who gives you one of them has done what it asks.

"We don't have an FWA policy" isn't one of them. Not having a policy doesn't excuse an employer from assessing the request and replying to it. Neither does "I want to be able to see you working", which is the sort of reason TAFEP advice treats as weak precisely because it says nothing about the business.

Working from somewhere that isn't Singapore

Wanting to do the job from Bali is a different stack of problems, and none of them are FWA problems. You're into immigration rules in the destination country, your Singapore tax residency day count, and your employer's permanent establishment exposure in a country they don't operate in. MOM's public FAQs are clear that TG-FWAR is generally about arrangements in Singapore. Treating an overseas move as an FWA outcome, without anyone qualified looking at the tax side first, is how these stories end in tax panic — see career pivots and tax residency and filing.

When the real issue is sick leave

If you can't work, that's leave, not flexibility, and Employment Act leave and notice covers what you're entitled to. An FWA request isn't the vehicle for "let me WFH while I'm infectious".

Where it does fit is the other case: you can work, but you need flexibility in where or when, around ongoing treatment. A time-bound formal request is the right tool there, and time-bound is doing real work in that sentence. A manager who balks at a permanent change will often sign off on the same thing with an end date attached.

Before you send it

• Read the company's FWA process before writing a free-form email. It exists more often than people assume
• Ask for a trial with a defined end date if a permanent change is a hard sell; you can always extend it
• Keep the written rejection if you get one. It's the document any TAFEP or union conversation starts from
• Don't muddle FWA with unpaid leave, annual leave, or the parental leave schemes. Separate things, separate rules
• If it's the process that failed rather than the answer, escalation runs to TAFEP, and the detail is in FWA to TAFEP. Salary or dismissal fights go somewhere else entirely: TADM