High-yield / bonus-interest savings accounts

These are ordinary current or savings accounts dressed up with a tiered bonus-interest structure. A small base rate applies to your whole balance, then extra interest is stacked on for each activity you complete in a month, such as crediting your salary, transacting on the bank's credit card, paying bills via GIRO, or growing your balance.

The headline rate you see in advertising is the maximum, reached only if you tick every box and keep your balance under a stated cap (often the first S$100,000 or so, though some accounts use a higher cap). Balances above the cap, or in any month where you miss the conditions, fall back to the low base rate.

You open the account with a local bank, set up salary credit and GIRO, and route your spending through the linked card. The bank recalculates your bonus tiers every month based on what you actually did, so the effective rate moves around with your behaviour.

Money is held with a MAS-licensed bank, so it falls under the SDIC deposit insurance scheme, which protects eligible SGD deposits per depositor per scheme member up to the statutory limit. Funds are fully liquid: you can withdraw or transfer at any time with no lock-in.

Banks revise these structures fairly often, adding or removing tiers and changing caps, so the account that pays the most this year may not next year.