If I asked you what your package buys, you could answer from memory. School fees. The mortgage. Your parents’ medical cover. The December trip that makes the other eleven months defensible.
If I asked what it costs you, the answer usually takes longer. That is what golden handcuffs do to a senior career in Singapore.
They are compensation designed to make leaving expensive. The bonus that lands in March. The shares that vest next year. The package a competitor would struggle to match.
Stay or quit is the surface question. Underneath it sits a different one: is the money buying your life, or renting your attention, and for how long?
Singapore has the data on this
The Global Talent Barometer put numbers to something I had only seen one person at a time.
In the Singapore sample, 60% of workers intend to remain with their current employer, while 73% are actively seeking new opportunities. Both figures, from the same people.
ManpowerGroup calls it job hugging. Staying put, browsing constantly, committing to neither.
The same survey found 72% reporting recent burnout. So the average holder of a good Singapore package is exhausted, looking, and not moving.
Money sits at the centre of it. In Randstad’s 2026 Workmonitor, compensation overtook work-life balance as the top reason Singapore talent gave for wanting to leave an employer, 44% against 43%.
Pay is the reason to go and the reason nobody goes. That contradiction has a shape, and if you are reading this at a senior level, you are probably inside it.
What golden handcuffs actually hold
Greed has nothing to do with it. The package is spoken for before it arrives: a mortgage serviced in Singapore dollars, school places that cannot be interrupted mid-year, parents ageing in two countries at once.
Walking away from the money means renegotiating promises made to other people. Of course you hesitate.
Then there is the maths error, and almost everyone makes it. You compare the next role’s offer against your current package, see a gap, and stay.
The comparison that matters is different. What will three more years of this cost, against what those same three years could build somewhere else, or in a redesigned version of the role you already have?
Salary against salary misses all of that. Handcuffs survive on the wrong sum.
Singapore adds its own tightening. This is a small market with a long memory, and senior people here know it. Leave a strong name for something unproven and the move is visible to everyone who matters within a week.
The kiasu instinct, never lose out, does quiet work in the background. Staying feels like holding your gains, even when the daily experience says otherwise.
Then the vesting schedule refreshes, just often enough that the exit date keeps sliding twelve months to the right. There is always a tranche worth waiting for. There always will be.
The line I hear, in one version or another, is this: I am miserable, but I cannot afford to leave.
Notice what that sentence has already decided. It frames the situation as a choice between money and everything else, then declares the money non-negotiable. Almost nobody has actually run the numbers on the second half.
Is it the package, or is it you?
Here is the harder question, and the reason job boards do not fix this.
Some people in golden handcuffs have a compensation problem. The role genuinely no longer justifies what it takes, and a well-planned exit is the honest answer.
But a good number have a meaning problem wearing a compensation costume. Change the employer and the restlessness relocates with you, because the drivers that chose this path are still choosing.
You can test which one you have. When you imagine the same package in a different company, does the dread lift?
If yes, the problem is the environment, and that is a career move. If it stays put, the problem is closer to home, and a new employer is an expensive way to avoid meeting it.
I wrote about that second pattern in When your career is working but you are not. It overlaps with what senior people describe in Lonely at the top, where the isolation of the role makes every option look like the wrong one.
Sunday night is useful evidence. A dull, recurring dread is information. So is rereading the same job ads for weeks without applying.
Both say this cannot continue. Neither says what has to change. Years disappear in that gap.
The decision the handcuffs hide
Strip it back and there are three sums to run, none of them on a payslip.
First, separate what the money is buying from what it is renting.
It buys the school fees, the mortgage, the obligations you would honour in any version of your life. What it rents is your best working decade, your evenings, the version of you your family gets.
The bought list is usually shorter than people expect, and it prices the actual cost of a change. Senior people who run this audit tend to find the number they truly need sits well below the number they currently earn. That gap is the size of their freedom.
Second, price the cost of staying, and price it over three years rather than one. Same role, same Sundays, compounding.
People price the risk of leaving with great precision and price the risk of staying at zero. Staying is a decision with a cost of its own, renewed annually by default. It deserves the same scrutiny you would give an offer.
Third, find the smallest move that changes the trajectory without detonating anything. This is the part the stay-or-quit framing misses entirely.
Between misery and resignation there is a wide middle: renegotiating the role you have, moving internally, timing an exit to a vesting date with an actual plan attached rather than a fantasy one. Fix before you abandon.
Some of the best career moves I have seen involved no resignation at all. Once the person could see what the money was renting, they took it back inside the role they already held.
In the coaching room, this is mapping work: what actually drove your last three moves, what your values produce against what your week produces, and one deliberate move.
No drama in it. Often it is the first honest audit the career has ever had, and it is what career coaching at The Clarity Practice is for.
The handcuffs are real. The gold is real too, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
But handcuffs only hold someone who has not examined the lock. The lock, again and again in this work, turns out to be a set of sums nobody has run and a question nobody has asked out loud.
Common questions
What are golden handcuffs?
Golden handcuffs are compensation structured to make leaving expensive: deferred bonuses, vesting shares, and a package a competitor would struggle to match. They do not stop you leaving. They raise the price of it, which is usually enough.
Why do so many well-paid people in Singapore stay in jobs they dislike?
Obligations are denominated in the package. Mortgages, school places and family support are all serviced by it, so leaving means renegotiating promises made to other people. Singapore adds a small-market effect: senior moves are visible quickly, so staying feels like protecting a reputation as well as an income.
How do I know if my problem is the job or something else?
Imagine the same package at a different company. If the dread lifts, the problem is the environment and a career move is the answer. If the dread stays, the problem travels with you, and changing employer is an expensive way to avoid meeting it.
Do I have to resign to change the situation?
Rarely. Between misery and resignation there is a wide middle: renegotiating the role you hold, moving internally, or timing an exit to a vesting date with a real plan attached. Some of the strongest career moves involve no resignation at all.
Thirty minutes to talk through where you’re stuck: theclaritypractice.asia/lets-talk. No agenda beyond your situation, and no assumption that the answer is leaving.
