HR · Compliance · Singapore
Singapore MOM overtime compliance
— automated inside Lark.
Published Apr 23, 2026 · 5 min read
The Singapore Employment Act caps overtime at 72 hours per month for employees earning up to SGD 4,500 (workmen) or SGD 2,600 (non-workmen). Exceeding the cap is a prosecutable offence. Penalties reach SGD 5,000 per offence and potential imprisonment for repeat violations.
Yet most SMBs enforce the cap through a spreadsheet someone updates monthly. By the time anyone notices an employee crossed 72 hours, the month is over — and so is the defensible compliance position.
The 3 checks every OT approval needs
- 1. Cumulative month-to-date — does this request push the employee past 72 hours? Without a running counter you cannot catch it until the month closes.
- 2. Continuous-days detection — 7+ consecutive overtime days is itself a rest-day violation regardless of total hours. Common to miss because the week boundary resets mental accounting.
- 3. Compensation type — time-off-in-lieu vs cash compensation has to match the employee's role. Salaried vs non-workman vs workman rules differ; a blanket cash OT approval for a salaried employee is a red flag.
How automation inside Lark closes the loop
When an overtime approval lands, Kopi looks up the employee's cumulative month-to-date OT from its pattern memory, adds the requested hours, and compares against the 72-hour cap. The math happens in under 500ms. If the request would breach the cap the card comes back red with specific numbers: "Current 68h + requested 10h = 78h. Exceeds 72h MOM monthly cap by 6h."
Continuous-days detection works the same way. Every approved OT request writes a date to the pattern memory. If the incoming request creates a streak of 7+ consecutive OT days, the card goes red regardless of hours — because the statute is about rest, not volume.
The approver still clicks approve or reject in Lark's native UI. Kopi doesn't replace the human; it just surfaces the right information before the click.
Exemptions are real — and should be explicit
Not everyone is covered by the MOM cap. Senior managers earning above the threshold, executives, and professionals (subject to Part IV interpretation) are exempt. Kopi treats exemptions as tenant-configurable rules: mark specific employees as cap-exempt and their OT requests show a yellow warning instead of a hard block.
The approver still sees the cumulative total (so they know when someone exempt is working too many hours as a practical matter), but the compliance blocker is lifted.
Turn on MOM-compliant OT in 10 minutes
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