How to submit IR8A in Singapore (AIS guide, YA 2026)

IR8A for income earned in 2025 is due 1 March 2026. If you paid anyone employment income in Singapore during 2025 — including directors who took a fee, part-timers, and a founder who put themselves on payroll — you have IR8A to file. There are no company-size exemptions, and the deadline is fixed: IRAS does not grant routine extensions.

If you employed five or more people at any point in 2025, you must file electronically through the Auto-Inclusion Scheme (AIS).

The essentials

Roughly 123,000 employers file through AIS for YA2026, pre-filling over two million tax returns.

Who must file, and who must be on AIS

Everyone who paid employment income files IR8A — for every person employed at any point in the year, including staff who have since left. Salary, bonuses, allowances, director's fees, commissions, and the taxable value of benefits-in-kind all count.

AIS is mandatory at five employees. If you employed five or more people at any point during 2025, you are in AIS whether you registered or not. Once you're in, participation is permanent — if headcount later drops below five, you stay enrolled.

Under AIS, employees receive no hardcopy IR8A — their income auto-populates their personal tax return. Employers with fewer than five staff who aren't on AIS instead give employees their IR8A by 1 March.

What changed for YA2026 — IR8S is gone

IRAS discontinued Form IR8S for YA2026. Previously used to report excess CPF contributions, it's been retired. Excess or voluntary employer CPF contributions are now reported directly on IR8A, under item d6 — not on a separate form.

One more change worth noting: leave encashment is now categorised under "Other Allowances" in Section D.

If you're working from last year's process or an older guide, these two are the errors most likely to trip you.

The supporting appendices

Depending on what you paid, IR8A may need appendices:

File the appendix alongside IR8A for any employee it applies to.

How to submit, step by step

1. 1
   Confirm you're on AIS. Log into myTax Portal → Employer Services, or check for the IRAS notice sent to your company. At five-plus employees, assume you're in.
2. 2
   Reconcile your payroll year. Match payroll against CPF submissions and bank-paid salary records. Pull a benefits-in-kind audit per employee for Appendix 8A, and ESOP/RSU records for Appendix 8B.
3. 3
   Generate the AIS file — from AIS-enabled payroll software, or enter records manually for a small team.
4. 4
   Validate before you submit. Run the file through IRAS's Validation and Submission Application (VSA), the free offline tool, to catch structural errors first.
5. 5
   Submit via myTax Portal → Employers → Submit Employment Income Records. Log in with CorpPass, upload or key in the data, review each record, and confirm.
6. 6
   Keep the acknowledgement number IRAS issues — you'll want it for audit and records.

Submit in February, not on 1 March. IRAS recommends filing at least a week early so any rejected lines have time to be corrected before the deadline.

Where Critical Mass Cloud fits

Critical Mass Cloud generates the AIS file and IR8A directly from your payroll data — with excess CPF already mapped to item d6 and Appendices 8A and 8B populated from the benefits and share-plan records you've entered through the year, rather than reconstructed each February.

If you already run AIS-enabled payroll and it's working, you may not need to change anything for IR8A alone. Critical Mass Cloud is worth a look when IR8A sits alongside monthly payroll, CPF, GST and e-signatures and you'd rather run one Singapore-native system than reconcile several.

Related

If your business is also GST-registered, see our guide on GST InvoiceNow deadlines.

Questions