Spouse relief and tax saved.
Spouse relief
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Tax saved
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Your breakdown
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A modest relief with one strict condition
Spouse Relief recognises the cost of supporting a husband or wife who has little or no income of their own. It is $2,000, deducted from your chargeable income, with the cash benefit being that $2,000 multiplied by your marginal tax band. It is not a large relief by the standards of the parenthood reliefs, but it is easy to claim and easy to overlook, particularly in a single-income household where one spouse stays home or has stepped back from work. This tool checks eligibility against the income condition and then estimates the tax it saves you.
If your spouse has a physical or mental disability, you claim Handicapped Spouse Relief instead, which is $5,500 and, importantly, carries no income test at all. That distinction is the heart of how this relief works, so it is worth understanding the income cliff that governs the ordinary version.
The $4,000 cliff that catches people out
Ordinary Spouse Relief is available only if your spouse’s own annual income did not exceed $4,000 for the year. This is a cliff, not a slope. Earn $3,999 and you get the full relief. Earn $4,001 and you get nothing, with no taper in between. That all-or-nothing design is exactly where people lose the relief without realising it. A spouse who took on a few months of part-time work, or drew a small amount of taxable income from an odd source, can tip just over the line and quietly cost the household the entire claim. The income counted here is the spouse’s assessable income, so it is worth checking the real figure rather than assuming a non-working spouse had zero.
Supporting a non-working spouse in the 11.5 percent band
Take the common case: your spouse had no income for the year, is not handicapped, and your top dollar of income sits in the 11.5 percent band. Because the spouse is comfortably within the $4,000 limit, you qualify for the full $2,000 relief.
The relief is $2,000 and the tax saved is $230 at this band. It is a smaller sum than the child or parent reliefs, but it costs nothing to claim. The bars below show the income test as a switch: below $4,000 the relief stands, above it the relief drops to zero.
When the handicapped version changes everything
Handicapped Spouse Relief is the one case where the income test disappears. At $5,500 it is nearly three times the ordinary relief, and you can claim it even if your spouse earns well above $4,000, because the relief is recognising the cost of supporting a spouse with a disability rather than the absence of income. Households dealing with a spouse’s long-term condition sometimes default to assuming no relief applies because the spouse still works, when in fact the larger, income-test-free relief is available to them. If this fits your situation, claim the handicapped version, not the ordinary one.
Two boundaries to keep in mind. You cannot claim Spouse Relief for a spouse you are no longer supporting, and in the year of a divorce the relief generally falls away. Maintenance paid under a deed or court order to a former spouse can attract a separate relief, which is a different provision from this one, so do not conflate the two. And like every personal relief, Spouse Relief counts toward the overall $80,000 personal income tax relief cap, though at $2,000 it is rarely the line that pushes a taxpayer over that ceiling on its own.
Can both my spouse and I claim Spouse Relief on each other?
No. The relief flows in one direction only, to the spouse who is providing the support, in respect of the dependent spouse with little or no income. It is not a mutual relief that both partners claim. In practice the higher-earning spouse claims it for the lower or non-earning spouse, which is also where it is worth the most, since the saving scales with the claimant’s marginal rate.
Does my spouse’s income include CPF payouts or rental income?
The $4,000 test looks at the spouse’s assessable income, which would capture taxable income such as rental income or trade income they earn. Pure CPF retirement payouts are generally not taxable income, so they usually do not count toward the limit, but taxable income streams do. If your spouse has any income at all beyond CPF, total it up honestly against the $4,000 line before claiming, because crossing it removes the relief entirely rather than reducing it.