6 m below the surface

The Draw

What the reservoir pays into the Budget each year

This is the one place the reservoir touches daily life: the Net Investment Returns Contribution, drawn each year from expected returns on the reserves into the national Budget. For four consecutive years it was the largest single line in the Budget, larger than any one tax; corporate income tax has since overtaken it. And because the rule setting it is public — up to half of expected long-term real returns — it is also the only official number from which the reservoir's scale can even in principle be bounded.

S$295bn

drawn from the reserves into 22 Budgets, FY2005–FY2026, summed from the published series

A plain sum of the SingStat series below — around a third of a trillion Singapore dollars of public spending funded by the reservoir while its size stayed secret.

The draw, against what it is compared to official

The sentence above used to read that the NIRC funds more of Singapore’s spending than any single tax. It was stated and never shown, so it was never checked. Putting the revenue lines beside it — other series of the same SingStat table the draw itself comes from — shows it was true, and is not any more.

S$ billion, last 12 financial years
FY	NIRC	Corp tax	GST	Personal tax
2015	8.9	13.8	10.3	9.2
2016	14.6	13.6	11.1	10.5	largest
2017	14.7	14.9	11.0	10.7
2018	16.4	16.0	11.1	11.7	largest
2019	17.0	16.7	11.2	12.4	largest
2020	18.2	16.1	10.3	12.7	largest
2021	20.4	18.2	12.6	14.2	largest
2022	22.4	23.1	14.1	15.5
2023	23.0	29.0	16.6	17.5
2024	24.1	30.9	20.0	19.1
2025	27.5	35.2	21.3	20.6
2026	28.5	37.8	22.3	21.8

The NIRC was the largest single line in FY2016, FY2018, FY2019, FY2020, FY2021. In FY2026 corporate income tax raised S$37.8bn against the draw’s S$28.5bn — the gap has widened every year since FY2022.

Nothing here diminishes the draw: at S$28.5bn it is still roughly a fifth of operating revenue, and unlike a tax it is levied on nobody. The correction is only that a superlative went unchecked on a site that exists to check them.

SingStat TableBuilder M130561, Overall Fiscal Position (Annual) — the same table the draw series itself comes from. budget.json.

The draw, FY2005–FY2026 official

S$28.5bn

FY2026

S$ billions. SingStat TableBuilder M130561 'Overall Fiscal Position, Annual', series 6: Net Investment Returns Contribution · table ↗. The single largest revenue line in recent Budgets. The most recent one to two years are budgeted or revised estimates until finalised accounts are published; SingStat revises in place.

What the draw is not

It is not GIC's profit. The contribution is computed from expected long-term real returns across the relevant assets of GIC, MAS and Temasek — a smoothed, forward-looking figure the Government may spend up to half of. A year in which markets fall does not reduce it; a boom does not raise it. The tenfold growth since FY2005 braids three things together: reserves growing, the framework's coverage widening (Temasek's inclusion from FY2016 is the visible step), and the expected-return assumptions themselves — and the published series alone cannot fully unbraid them.

The next draw, extrapolated inferred

The published series has grown at 6.9% a year over the last five years and 6.9% over ten. If — and it is only an if — the trailing five-year pace simply continues, the FY2027 contribution would come in around S$30.5bn, against S$28.5bn drawn this year. The NIR framework makes this more than curve-fitting: the draw is set from expected long-term returns on a growing asset base, which is why the series compounds far more steadily than markets do.

Mechanical extrapolation of the SingStat series at its own trailing pace; no knowledge of the coming Budget is claimed. Graded by the Singapore Budget statement, expected February 2027.