Incorporate a Company in Singapore

Incorporation is the legal act of creating your company: registering it with the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority (ACRA) so it exists as its own legal entity. For most businesses that means a private limited company (Pte Ltd). The structure keeps the company's liabilities separate from your personal assets, lets you take on investment, and is what banks and customers expect to see.

A Pte Ltd can be fully foreign-owned, needs share capital of as little as S$1, and can have between 1 and 50 shareholders, either individuals or corporate entities.

ACRA's requirements for a Singapore private limited company:

• At least one shareholder. Individual or corporate, local or foreign. 100% foreign ownership is allowed.
• At least one locally resident director. If all your directors are overseas, our nominee director service covers the requirement.
• A registered office address in Singapore. Our registered address service provides one in the CBD.
• A company secretary, appointed within six months of incorporation.
• An approved company name, reserved with ACRA before registration.

Foreign entrepreneurs can incorporate without relocating. If you later move to Singapore to run the company, an Employment Pass (EP) lets you become the resident director yourself.

For most businesses the right structure is the private limited company. It's a separate legal entity, so the company's debts aren't your debts. It pays corporate tax rates with the start-up exemption, can be 100% foreign-owned, and has shares you can sell or issue to investors. It's also what banks, customers, and investors expect to see. If you plan to grow, hire, raise money, or sell one day, the Pte Ltd is almost always the right answer.

The alternatives suit narrower situations. A sole proprietorship is cheap to set up, but you and the business are legally the same person: its debts are your debts, profits are taxed at your personal rate, and there's no route to outside investment. A limited liability partnership (LLP) gives partners limited liability with personal taxation, and is mostly used by professional practices rather than trading businesses.

You can register a company yourself through ACRA's BizFile portal, and the government fees are the same either way. The catch is that the decisions you make at incorporation follow the company around. A financial year end chosen carelessly can cost you part of the start-up tax exemption, and a constitution that doesn't fit your shareholder arrangements causes friction the first time you raise money or fall out with a co-founder. Classification errors are tedious to unwind.

Since every company must appoint a company secretary within six months anyway, we bundle incorporation with our corporate secretarial service. You pay S$380 all-in for the incorporation (government fees included) and start life compliant, with the statutory calendar already managed.

The registration certificate is just the start. In the first weeks you'll typically:

• Open a corporate bank account (banks will want your ACRA profile and KYC documents).
• Set up Corppass for government transactions.
• Check whether your activities need licences, and whether Goods and Services Tax (GST) registration applies to you.

Then the recurring calendar begins: accounting records and financial statements, Estimated Chargeable Income (ECI) within three months of your first year end, the annual return, and your Annual General Meeting (AGM) obligations. As your company secretary, we track all of it from day one.