Employer of Record (EOR) Services in Singapore

An Employer of Record (EOR) is a company that legally employs staff on your behalf. Duellix becomes the employer on paper: we issue a locally compliant contract, run payroll, and handle statutory contributions and filings. The employee works for you day to day, on your projects, under your direction.

The split is the whole idea: legal employment sits with the EOR, operational control stays with you. Your overseas company gets a Singapore team member without needing a Singapore entity.

One important limit before you plan around it: an EOR cannot sponsor work visas. If your Singapore plan involves relocating a foreigner, you'll need your own entity to sponsor the Employment Pass. The decision tree below walks through what that means in practice.

The classic cases:

• Hiring before (or instead of) incorporating. You've found the right person in Singapore and don't want entity setup on the critical path.
• Testing the market. One salesperson or country manager to validate Singapore before committing to a company, an office, and a compliance calendar.
• Keeping a wind-down clean. Retaining one or two staff after restructuring an entity away.

One caveat: EOR is a per-employee subscription. It works well for one or two hires and gets increasingly poor value as the team grows, which is where the comparison below comes in.

For a company building a presence in Singapore, the choice usually comes down to two questions.

First: will you hire foreigners? If part of the plan is sending over an internal transfer to set up the business, or hiring anyone who needs a work visa, you must incorporate an entity. An EOR cannot sponsor an Employment Pass, and there's no way around that. If you're hiring locals, the EOR is the less committal, faster, and cheaper way to get started: no entity, no compliance calendar, cancel any time.

Second: how many people, and how committed are you to Singapore? The EOR fee is per employee, so the economics shift as the team grows. As a rule of thumb, your own entity pays for itself from around two to three staff. The cost comparison below puts numbers on it.

The arithmetic is straightforward. EOR costs S$500 per employee per month, which is S$6,000 a year for one hire. There's nothing to set up, you carry no entity obligations, and you can stop any time. Running your own entity means incorporation (S$380), a company secretary (from S$335/year), accounting (from S$1,400/year), and payroll (from S$100/month): roughly S$3,000-4,000 in year one, plus the obligations that come with owning a company.

So on pure cost, an entity wins even for one employee, if Singapore is a committed, permanent base. EOR wins on speed and reversibility, and it spares you a compliance calendar while you're still deciding. Many clients start on EOR and switch later: we incorporate the entity, transfer the employment, and the same team keeps handling payroll. Nothing about the employee's day changes.