Staff leave entitlements in a Singapore hair salon: annual leave, MC and public holidays

Your junior stylist, four months in, hands you an MC on a fully booked Saturday morning. Your senior colourist asks for a week off, and you realise you have never actually written down how many days she is entitled to. And somewhere in the back of your mind is the question every Singapore salon owner meets eventually: is it 7 days of annual leave or 14, and does the part-timer who does Thursdays and Saturdays get the same?

The statutory answers all live in the Employment Act and on mom.gov.sg, and they are more mechanical than most owners expect: a leave ladder that climbs with service, a two-tier sick leave scale, 11 gazetted public holidays and an hours-based formula for part-timers. This guide walks through each entitlement as it applies to a hair salon team, then the part no statute covers: what an approved week off does to a column of appointments sold three weeks ahead. That second half is where ViteUneCoupe, which publishes this blog, lives: it lets clients book your salon online with no commission, on a permanently free plan, with each stylist on her own schedule, and we will be precise later about what it does and does not do for leave.

Every rule below was checked on mom.gov.sg in October 2026. Employment contracts can always give more than the statutory minimums (many salon contracts do), and this is general information for salon owners, not legal advice: confirm anything you act on against MOM's current guidance.

Who is covered: the Employment Act and the Part IV distinction

The Employment Act covers every employee under a contract of service, local or foreign, full-time or part-time, paid monthly or hourly (mom.gov.sg, who is covered, checked in October 2026). The only exclusions, seafarers, domestic workers and public servants, are irrelevant to a salon. So every stylist, junior and receptionist on your payroll gets the leave entitlements in this article once they qualify. A genuine freelancer renting a chair is a different animal: no contract of service, no leave from you.

One distinction matters for the roster rules further down. Part IV of the Act, which governs rest days, hours of work and overtime, only covers workmen earning a basic monthly salary of S$4,500 or less and non-workmen earning S$2,600 or less. Salon staff are non-workmen, and "basic salary" excludes commission and allowances, which is exactly how most stylist pay is structured: a modest base plus commission. A stylist on a S$2,200 base who takes home S$4,000 with commission is still inside Part IV, because only the base counts. For where real salon pay sits, base and gross, MOM's own wage tables are read line by line in our guide to hairdresser wages in Singapore.

Annual leave: the 7-to-14 ladder

An employee covered by the Employment Act who has worked for you for at least 3 months is entitled to paid annual leave, starting at 7 days in the first year of service and rising by one day per year to 14 days from the eighth year (mom.gov.sg, annual leave eligibility and entitlement, checked in October 2026):

Between 3 and 12 months of service, leave is pro-rated by completed months: a stylist who joined in March and asks for leave in September has earned 6/12 of 7 days, so 3.5, rounded up to 4 (fractions of half a day or more round up). Approved unpaid leave months drop out of the calculation; a notice period counts in.

Two honest notes for a salon owner. First, these are floors, not market rates: in a hiring market where good stylists choose salons, a contract offering exactly 7 days in year one is a recruiting handicap, and nothing stops you granting 14 from day one. Second, whatever you grant must be written into the key employment terms you issue within 14 days of the first day of work; leave entitlement is one of the required KET items, and the whole paperwork sequence is covered in our guide to hiring a hairdresser in Singapore.

Sick leave and the MC: 14 outpatient days, 60 hospitalisation days

Paid sick leave also needs Employment Act coverage and 3 months of service, and it phases in on a scale (mom.gov.sg, sick leave eligibility and entitlement, checked in October 2026):

The two columns are not added together: the hospitalisation figure is the combined cap, so a fully qualified stylist has up to 14 days for outpatient MCs and up to 60 days in total if hospitalisation, day surgery or doctor-ordered bed rest is involved. Sick leave days are paid at the gross rate of pay, so commission that forms part of gross pay is in the calculation, not just the base.

The MC rules are the part salon owners most often get wrong:

• Any MC from a doctor registered under the Medical Registration Act or Dental Registration Act must be recognised, including one issued through a teleconsultation. You cannot make paid sick leave conditional on visiting a clinic you chose.
• The employee's duty is to inform you within 48 hours of being unable to work and to produce the MC on return. "Inform" is a message at 8 am, not a formality after the fact; make the expected channel explicit in writing, because on a salon floor the difference between an 8 am message and a silent no-show is whether reception can call the morning's clients in time.
• Medical consultation fees must be reimbursed when the visit produces at least one day of paid sick leave and the MC comes from a public medical institution or a doctor your company appointed (mom.gov.sg, medical reimbursements, checked in October 2026). An MC from a private GP of the employee's own choice still earns the paid day off; the consultation fee itself is only reimbursable if your contract says so.

One practical aside: MCs are medical information about an identifiable person. Store them with the same care as your client records, a discipline covered in our guide to client records and the PDPA for Singapore salons.

Public holidays: 11 days, and what working one costs

Singapore gazettes 11 paid public holidays a year: New Year's Day, two days of Chinese New Year, Hari Raya Puasa, Hari Raya Haji, Good Friday, Labour Day, Vesak Day, National Day, Deepavali and Christmas Day (mom.gov.sg, public holidays entitlement and pay, checked in October 2026). An employee covered by the Employment Act gets each of them on full pay.

Salons, of course, often open on exactly these days, because a public holiday is prime appointment time. The entitlement side is simple:

• A stylist required to work on a public holiday gets an extra day's salary at the basic rate, on top of the gross pay for the day, or, by mutual agreement, a full day off in lieu on another working day.
• For staff outside Part IV (a manager, or a stylist whose basic salary has climbed past S$2,600), time off in lieu can be sized to hours worked: 4 hours off for up to half a day worked, a full day off beyond that.
• A public holiday that falls on a rest day rolls forward: the next working day becomes a paid holiday. One that falls on a non-working day (a Monday, for the many salons closed Mondays) becomes a day off or an extra day's salary in lieu.

Whether opening on a holiday is actually worth it commercially, staffing costs against holiday-week demand, is a decision we work through separately; here, just budget that every holiday a rostered stylist works costs you roughly double for the day, and write the arrangement into the contract before the first Deepavali argument, not after.

Rest days: the six-day salon week

Most Singapore salons trade six days, and Part IV is built for exactly that: every covered employee gets at least 1 rest day per week, an unpaid whole day, and the longest allowed stretch between two rest days is 12 days (mom.gov.sg, hours of work, overtime and rest day, checked in October 2026). For a monthly-salaried stylist the rest day is already priced into the month, so "unpaid" changes nothing on the payslip; it simply cannot be taken away.

Asking a stylist to come in on her rest day has a statutory price when the request is yours: up to half a day worked costs one extra day's salary, beyond half a day costs two, plus overtime rates if the hours run past normal hours. That is worth knowing before you solve a sick-day crisis by calling in whoever is off: it is lawful with consent, and it is expensive, and a team whose rest days are regularly raided starts interviewing elsewhere.

The scheduling craft, which stylist rests on which weekday, protecting Saturdays, rotating the unpopular slots, is where the law stops and management starts. The one rule of thumb that survives every roster: fix the rest days in writing and change them by agreement, not by WhatsApp at 9 pm.

Part-timers: the pro-rating formula that works in hours

A part-time employee, anyone contracted for less than 35 hours a week, gets the same leave types under the Employment of Part-Time Employees Regulations, pro-rated by hours and granted in hours (mom.gov.sg, part-time employment: leave, checked in October 2026). The formula for annual leave:

(part-timer's weekly hours ÷ a similar full-timer's weekly hours) × the full-timer's leave days × the full-timer's daily hours

Worked through for a salon: your full-timers do 44 hours over 5.5 days (8 hours a day), and a part-time stylist does two 8-hour days, 16 hours a week. In her first year her annual leave is (16 ÷ 44) × 7 × 8 = about 20 hours, and her sick leave once she passes 6 months is (16 ÷ 44) × 14 × 8 = about 41 hours. Keeping it in hours is deliberate: a "day" means nothing consistent for someone whose shifts vary, and MOM's own guidance says there is no need to convert. Public holidays are pro-rated the same way, and can by agreement be encashed into the hourly rate instead of taken.

The management consequence: a part-timer's leave balance is a number of hours in a record, not a mental note. Write the calculation into her KETs once and the maths never gets argued about again.

Maternity, paternity and childcare leave, briefly

Family leave is a subject of its own, mostly funded by the government rather than your till; a salon owner needs the headlines and the links (all checked on mom.gov.sg in October 2026):

• Maternity leave: 16 weeks of Government-Paid Maternity Leave for a mother of a Singapore citizen child with at least 3 months of service; for the first two children the employer pays the first 8 weeks and the government reimburses the rest, capped. A mother outside the citizen-child scheme but covered by the Employment Act gets 12 weeks (mom.gov.sg, maternity leave).
• Paternity leave: 4 weeks of Government-Paid Paternity Leave, mandatory for eligible fathers of citizen children born from 1 April 2025, government-funded and with 4 weeks' notice expected (mom.gov.sg, paternity leave).
• Childcare leave: 6 days a year per parent of a Singapore citizen child under 7 (first 3 employer-paid, next 3 government-paid), 2 days under the Employment Act for a non-citizen child, plus 2 days of extended childcare leave for a youngest citizen child aged 7 to 12 (mom.gov.sg, childcare leave).

For a small salon the money is largely handled; the 16-week hole in the colour column is not. A stylist's regulars need a planned handover to colleagues months before the leave starts, or they quietly become some other salon's regulars.

The salon-floor reality: CNY season, a Saturday MC, and tracking it all

Three situations where the statute book meets the appointment book:

Leave requests in CNY season. The weeks before Chinese New Year are the busiest of a Singapore salon's year, and they are also when staff most want time off, for the same family reasons your clients are queueing for. The Employment Act sets the number of days, not the timing: annual leave is taken by mutual agreement, so you may lawfully decline specific dates. The sustainable pattern is to decide the rule once, publish it early, and apply it to everyone: for example, no annual leave in the final two pre-CNY weeks, with the two gazetted CNY days themselves honoured in full and first pick of post-CNY dates rotated year by year. A rule announced in November is management; the same rule invented in January, after one person already got her dates, is a resignation letter.

The colour-heavy Saturday MC. An 8 am MC message on a Saturday with six colour appointments in the column is the worst version of the sick-day problem, because colour work is long, personal and hard to redistribute. The triage order that works: first move what fits into genuine gaps in colleagues' columns that same day, starting with the chemical services; then offer the displaced clients the stylist's own next free slots; only then cancel outright. Which is why the 48-hour notification rule above deserves a stated channel and an early hour in your house rules, and why your booking system needs each stylist's day visible at a glance with every client's contact details one tap away. What you cannot do is dock the day or demand a panel doctor: a valid MC from any registered doctor earns the paid day, full stop.

Tracking leave simply. A five-person salon does not need leave software; it needs one authoritative record. A shared spreadsheet with a row per employee, columns for entitlement, taken and remaining, in days for full-timers and hours for part-timers, updated the moment a request is approved, satisfies both MOM's record-keeping expectations and every future dispute. The one discipline that makes it work: the same moment that updates the spreadsheet also updates the roster and the booking calendar. Approve leave in one place only and the other two will sell the stylist's chair while she is in Penang.

On that last point, the honest tool note. ViteUneCoupe is not a leave or payroll system: it does not track balances, compute pro-rating or know what an MC is. What it does, on its free plan with unlimited online bookings and 0% commission permanently, is give each stylist her own schedule on the salon's booking page, so approved leave becomes closed availability in one edit and no client can book a stylist who is away; the client database (Singapore +65 numbers included) then gives you names and contact details when a sudden MC means rebooking a full column. The Standard plan, from 29 € excluding tax per month with no commitment, adds automatic email confirmations, reminders and calendar sync. Billing is in euros, so the SGD amount on your card moves with the exchange rate and your bank may add a small foreign-transaction fee, and reminders are email only, with no SMS or WhatsApp on any plan.

Frequently asked questions

How many days of annual leave must a Singapore salon give a stylist?

The statutory minimum for an employee with at least 3 months of service is 7 days in the first year of service, rising by one day per year to 14 days from the eighth year. A contract can grant more, and many salons do to stay competitive; it can never grant less.

How much MC (sick leave) is a salon employee entitled to?

After 6 months of service: up to 14 days of paid outpatient sick leave and up to 60 days of paid hospitalisation leave per year, with the 60 being a combined cap that includes the 14. Between 3 and 6 months the entitlement phases in, from 5 outpatient and 15 hospitalisation days at 3 months. Under 3 months, no paid sick leave is required.

Can I refuse an MC from a clinic I did not approve?

No. An MC issued by any doctor registered under the Medical Registration Act or Dental Registration Act, including via teleconsultation, must be recognised for paid sick leave. You can require notification within 48 hours and the MC on return, and you only have to reimburse the consultation fee when the MC comes from a public medical institution or a doctor your company appointed.

What do I owe a stylist who works on a public holiday?

An extra day's salary at the basic rate on top of her gross pay for the day, or a full day off in lieu by mutual agreement. If the holiday falls on her rest day, the next working day becomes a paid holiday instead. Singapore gazettes 11 public holidays a year, including both days of Chinese New Year.

Does a part-time stylist get annual leave and sick leave?

Yes, pro-rated by hours under the Employment of Part-Time Employees Regulations once she has 3 months of service: her weekly hours divided by a full-timer's weekly hours, multiplied by the full-timer's entitlement in days and daily hours. The result is granted and tracked in hours, not days.

Can I block annual leave during the Chinese New Year rush?

Yes. Annual leave timing is by mutual agreement, so an employer may decline specific dates for business reasons, as long as the employee can still take the entitlement within the year. The two gazetted CNY public holidays themselves are separate and must be honoured. Publish the blackout rule well in advance and apply it evenly.