C.1Bottom Line

Hawkers are neither gig workers nor true entrepreneurs. They are dependent contractors of the state who carry an entrepreneur's risks – with less protection than a gig worker now has.

Platform operators' CPF share, 2026 → 2029: 7% → 17%7% → 17%: Platform operators' CPF share, 2026 → 2029, on the figures page
Anyone's CPF share for a hawker: 0%0%: Anyone's CPF share for a hawker, on the figures page
Self-employed in MediSave arrears (end-2024): \~25%
CPF LIFE for most MediSave-only hawkers: ≈ $0≈ $0: CPF LIFE for most MediSave-only hawkers, on the figures page
Hawker income measured officially: about $1,470 a month in 2021, in a chart on riders: Once

1
Riders overtook hawkers in 2025The Platform Workers Act gave every rider work-injury insurance and a bargaining agent, and the younger ones platform-paid CPF (Central Provident Fund, Singapore's compulsory savings for retirement, health and housing). Hawkers received none of these.
2
Little to retire onA MediSave-only hawker reaches 55 with little in a Retirement Account: only MediSave (the part of CPF that pays for health care) above the $79,000 ceiling spills over into retirement savings. The other safety nets pay only to people on low incomes, or stop when the work stops.
3
The bill comes lateMediSave is billed once a year, for the year before. GIRO (a bank's automatic monthly payment) can spread it and the stall licence makes hawkers pay, but nothing is collected as they earn.
4
The body is uninsuredHawkers must run the stall personally, yet have no injury cover, no sick pay and no income-loss insurance of their own: only means-tested ComCare (paid only to those whose income and property fall below set limits), or a policy they buy.
5
The state is barely countingThe State has measured hawkers' income once, in passing, in a chart about platform workers: about $1,470 a month in 2021, below two of the three groups the Act now protects. It does not measure their hours, savings or injuries. For riders it publishes CPF, opt-in and injury counts every month.

The ask: parity, not privilege

Keep hawkers' commercial status – their pricing freedom and their ownership of the recipe – and add the floor every other group of workers already has: MediSave collected as they earn, someone who pays a share into their CPF (as an employer or a platform does), shared injury and hospital cover, relief cooks, and proper figures. In its base form, the Government matches what every public-centre stallholder under 55 tops up in their own CPF, up to $1,200 a year. An existing scheme already does this from 55, for those who pass its income and home tests. The floor would then cost at most about $4.1M a year. That is less than half the one-off cost of the cooked-food part of July 2026's six-month rent support (about $8.3M, C.9.1). In its stretch form – every stallholder, coffeeshops and food courts included, as C.7 argues it must be, at 70% take-up (the share of those eligible who join) and with shared hospital-cash cover – about $7.9M (C.9.2). The match is a ceiling in both: fewer than half of stallholders are under 55.