Singapore Prime Minister Lawrence Wong announced a sweeping package of family support measures Sunday, pledging nearly 70,000 Singapore dollars (about $55,150) in direct assistance per citizen child through age 17, as the city-state confronts a historic collapse in its birth rate.
Speaking at his National Day Rally — Singapore’as most closely watched political address of the year — Wong said every Singaporean child will now receive a S$10,000 baby gift as the centerpiece of a broader effort to ease the cost and pressure of raising children. The government also plans to significantly expand paid childcare leave and aims to cut monthly fees for subsidized full-day childcare to just S$150.
“With these changes, the government will absorb a much larger share of childcare and preschool costs,” Wong said, calling the investment one of the best the country can make, though he stopped short of naming a total price tag for the expanded spending.
A Historic Low
The urgency behind the announcement is stark. Singapore’s total fertility rate fell to 0.87 in 2025 — a new record low and less than half the 2.1 rate needed to sustain the population without immigration. It’s part of a grim, multiyear slide: the rate first dropped below 1.0 in 2023, landing at 0.97, then stayed essentially flat in 2024 despite the Lunar New Year’s auspicious Year of the Dragon, a period that has historically nudged birth rates upward across Chinese communities. Officials said that effect has clearly faded as younger generations rethink marriage and parenthood.
Roughly 30,800 babies were born to Singapore residents in 2024, barely above the 30,500 recorded a year earlier — a far cry from the baby boom years the country was once desperate to rein in.
Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong warned earlier this year that without further action, Singapore’s citizen population could begin shrinking by the early 2040s. The government has since formed an inter-agency workgroup, led by Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office Indranee Rajah, dedicated to reversing the trend.
What’s New in the Package
Among the specific policy shifts:
- Childcare leave tied to family size. Parents will receive more paid childcare leave depending on how many children they have, with the government now covering the full cost — a shift from the previous model, in which employers shared the expense.
- Subsidized childcare fees slashed. The government aims to bring monthly fees for full-day subsidized childcare down to S$150.
- Education account top-ups. Additional government contributions will flow into children’s post-secondary education savings accounts.
- Expanded Baby Bonus-style cash support. The near-S$70,000 lifetime figure builds on years of incremental increases to Singapore’s Baby Bonus scheme, which has been enhanced repeatedly since its introduction — including expansions in 2015 and 2023 — but had never reached this scale.
The Long Shadow of “Stop at Two”
For a fuller picture of why this moment carries such weight in Singapore, it helps to look back nearly 60 years.
In the 1960s, Singapore was a young, resource-strapped state facing a postwar baby boom it considered an existential threat to housing, schools and jobs. The government responded with one of the most aggressive population-control campaigns of the 20th century. The Singapore Family Planning and Population Board was established in 1966, and by 1972 the state had launched its now-famous “Stop at Two” campaign, built around slogans urging couples to see two children as the ideal.
The campaign went well beyond messaging. Between 1969 and 1972, the government rolled out a series of financial disincentives aimed squarely at larger families: civil servants lost paid maternity leave after a second child, government hospitals charged progressively higher delivery fees for each additional birth, income tax relief was capped at the first few children, and larger families were pushed down public housing waitlists. Abortion and voluntary sterilization were legalized in 1970, with sterilization itself rewarded through paid leave. Top primary school placements were, for a time, reserved for children whose parents had undergone sterilization before age 40. Officials of the era did not mince words about the goal — the country’s health minister at the time reportedly described a third child as a luxury and a fourth or fifth as antisocial.
The policy worked almost too well. Singapore’s fertility rate hit the 2.1 replacement level by 1975, just three years after the formal campaign launched. But it never stabilized there. By 1977 it had slid to 1.82; by 1986, to 1.4. Even as the numbers kept falling, many of the disincentive policies stayed in place for roughly another decade — a delay demographers now point to as one of the clearest missteps in the entire saga.
Singapore finally reversed course on March 1, 1987, with a new campaign bluntly titled “Have Three or More, If You Can Afford It.” The government rolled back the old penalties and introduced tax rebates, childcare subsidies, expanded use of Medisave for delivery costs, and priority housing upgrades for larger families. A Baby Bonus cash program followed in the 2000s and has been broadened multiple times since.
Yet despite nearly 40 years of pro-family incentives, the birth rate never recovered — and this week’s package is, in effect, the latest and largest chapter in that decades-long effort to undo what an earlier generation of policymakers built.
Immigration as the Other Lever
With birth-rate interventions showing limited traction over the decades, Singapore has increasingly turned to immigration to offset the demographic gap. Earlier this year, Deputy PM Gan announced that Singapore will grant between 25,000 and 30,000 new citizenships annually through 2030 — up 17% to 41% from the 2020–2024 average — while permanent residency intake will rise to about 40,000 per year, up from roughly 35,000 in 2025.
The approach remains selective rather than open-ended. Employment Pass and S Pass salary thresholds are being raised to align with local wages, and a government framework known as COMPASS is used to assess whether foreign hires complement, rather than compete with, the local workforce. Officials have said intake levels will be reviewed again by 2030, with room to adjust in either direction depending on how the birth rate and public sentiment evolve.
Singapore’s total population stood at 6.12 million as of last year’s official population report, up from 5.64 million in 2022.
What Comes Next
Wong’s announcement doesn’t resolve the underlying tension policymakers have wrestled with since the 1980s: cash incentives and subsidized childcare have so far not been enough to meaningfully move the needle on how many children Singaporean couples choose to have. Whether a nearly $55,000 lifetime commitment per child changes that calculation — in one of the world’s most expensive cities to raise a family — will likely take years, not months, to assess.
For now, the shift marks one of the most significant recalibrations of Singapore’s family policy in years, arriving as the government treats its record-low fertility rate as one of the defining challenges of the current administration.
