10 High Paying Part-Time Jobs in Singapore That Pay the Best

You may be a university student who is looking for high paying part-time jobs in Singapore to do in your free time. Or you may be in between jobs and are looking for a job to pay for your expenses before your next permanent job.

Whatever your situation is, you are looking to make some cash during the extra time that you have. This article lists the high paying part-time jobs out there, so that you can maximise the amount you can make part-time. 

1. Swimming Coach is a High-Paying Part-Time Job in Singapore

Giving lessons as a swimming coach can be a profitable part-time job. It can also be fulfilling to help your students improve their swimming techniques and abilities. As a coach, you can charge up to $20 per hour per student. So if you hold a swimming class with a group of students, you can potentially earn much more.

Choosing Your Venue

If you’re looking to give lessons at a country club, you would likely have to pay a fee to the management to use their pool facilities. This adds on to your expenses and thus reduces the amount you can eventually earn.

However, the good thing about giving lessons privately at a country club or a swimming pool at a condominium is that formal qualifications are not strictly needed. Thus, as long as you have a reasonable amount of swimming experience, you should be able to do this job.

On the other hand, you require a valid swimming licence if you wish to teach at a public swimming pool. This is a requirement of the Singapore Sports Council and this involves obtaining the necessary life saving and swimming theory certificates.

Signing Up with a Company

If you would much rather not have to deal with all the administrative details, you can always sign up with a private swimming company to give lessons as an instructor with them. They would give you a standard pay per hour and help to procure the swimming pool venue as well as the students for you. In fact, these swimming schools usually offer free training programs to teach you how to become a part-time swimming coach.

Minimum income: $20 per hour

Basic Qualifications: Not strictly required

2. High Paying Part-Time Job as a Tuition Teacher

In our highly competitive education system in Singapore, it is no surprise that being a tuition teacher can make you a lot of money. Even if you’re doing it part-time.

So what exactly will you earn as a part-time tuition teacher? The amount you can charge depends on your academic qualifications and the education level of your students.

For example, if you hold a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Cambridge and give lessons to JC students, you can probably charge over $100 an hour. If you decide to teach secondary or primary school students, the amount you can earn per hour is substantially less, which can range from $30 to $60.

The following provides a rough guide of the fees you can expect as a tuition teacher, with 1 being the lowest pay you will receive and 7 being the higher end of the pay spectrum:

Education level of student / Qualifications	A-Levels / Diploma	Undergraduate	Degree Holder	MOE Teacher
Lower Primary	1	2	3	4
Upper Primary	2	3	4	5
Secondary	3	4	5	6
Junior College	4	5	6	7

Issues to Consider for this High Paying Part-Time Role

Before you rush into being a part-time tuition teacher, you have to ask yourself several questions.

Do you have the necessary knowledge to teach the students? Are you aware of the curriculum of the subject which you want to specialise in? Do you have the patience to teach children, especially if they do not grasp concepts quickly?

If your answer to all the above questions is yes, then being a part-time tuition teacher may be the high paying part-time job for you. Not only is the pay good, but you may also very possibly be shaping the minds of the future leaders of Singapore.

Minimum Pay: $30 per hour

Basic Qualifications: A-level / Diploma holder

3. High Yielding Part-Time Job of Fitness Trainer / Personal Trainer

Being a part-time fitness trainer or personal trainer can give you a high part time income, especially if you are in the health and fitness space. On average, personal trainers can command a pay of $50 to $70 an hour. This is a relatively good income, considering the fact that you get paid to tell people what to do.

But you may be thinking, “How do I begin getting clients?” A pro-tip is that you can start out by giving personal training classes to acquaintances and friends. Ideally, these initial customers will help promote your services through word of mouth.

It also helps if you make friends with the gym owners who can tell them about you to their gym-goers.

Qualifications

Although formal qualifications would help boost your credibility as a personal trainer, you don’t actually need any certification or qualifications to provide fitness training.

However, it does help if you are studying or have studied a course such as sports science or physiotherapy, which allows you to better understand the human body and the proper techniques to strengthen the muscles.

At the bare minimum, you should look the part. This means that you should look fit and healthy, and have a decent amount of lean muscle mass.

Challenges of the Job

Being a part-time personal trainer may seem profitable. However, it has its disadvantages as well. For example, there is an especially high chance of students cancelling their personal training classes at the last minute.

This is because the idea of pushing themselves physically to the point of exhaustion creates inertia in students to go for lessons. Additionally, if you are coaching working adults, they may not always be able to make it for classes due to their uncertain work schedules. Thus, your source of income may not be very stable and you find yourself being stood up more time than you would like to be.

To overcome these issues, you could request for a lump sum payment from your clients as part of a package deal. This ensures that clients have an incentive to actually turn up for their lessons to use their money’s worth. You could try to make the classes interesting and fun by including different work out techniques every session. This may make your sessions more enjoyable and motivate your students to keep coming back for more.

Minimum Pay: $50 per hour

Basic Qualifications: Looking fit

4. Taxi Driver is Another High Paying Part-Time Job In Singapore

You don’t have to go at it full-time if you want to earn money from driving a taxi. There are many part-time drivers who earn quite a decent income from doing part-time driving. What’s more, you may stand to earn even more if you qualify for the incentives provided by the cab companies. To get these incentives, you usually must have a good driver rating, a low cancellation record and a high rate of accepting trips that are broadcast to you.

At the moment, the predominant private hire taxi company in Singapore is Grab, which allows you to drive part time as a grab driver or grab hitch driver. On Grab’s website, it is stated that their drivers earn on average $38 per hour during peak hours and $30 per hour during non-peak hours (excluding incentives).

Licensing Requirements

The basic requirements to be a taxi driver are being at least 21 years old, having a Private Hire Car Driver’s Vocational Licence (PDVL) with a minimum of two years of driving experience and own a four-door car. If you don’t have a PDVL, you need to submit an application for one.

In general, it takes around four to six weeks for the LTA to process your PDVL application. After you have received the approval letter from the LTA, you would have to attend a PDVL course and pass the relevant tests.

However, if you sign up with a taxi company such as Grab, they provide express application services that allow you to get your PDVL  in three to five weeks.

Other Requirements

You have to complete some simple requirements such as converting your vehicle for private-hire purposes at ONE.MOTORING. In addition, you are required to obtain commercial insurance to protect you and your passengers.

Most taxi companies would also need you to go down to their offices to activate your account or membership with them. If you don’t have your own car, many taxi companies also offer rental services, which can be as low as $50 a day.

Minimum Pay: $30 per hour

Basic Qualifications: PDVL

5. Freelance Writer as a High Paying Part-Time Position

If you like writing and are good at it, being a freelance writer is the perfect part-time job for you to earn some extra money. There are many companies out there, especially content-based websites, that require talented writers like yourself.

Some may offer to pay you an hourly rate while others may pay you a fixed price for each article you write. If you’re charging by the hour, you may be paid from a range of $20 to $60 per hour for each project. On the other hand, you can expect to earn between $50 to $200 for each fixed-pay project.

Writing Opportunities

But where do you actually find such writing opportunities? You can actually find them on the many Singapore job portals out there.

However, if you don’t want to actually work for a company, you can use websites such as Upwork.com as a platform to find your own freelance work. On these websites, you can reach people from all over the world and even showcase your writing samples for their consideration. If you have built up your resume and reputation on the platform, you can progressively charge higher fees on the site.

The more articles you write and the more positive reviews you accumulate, the easier it is for you to command better pay in the future. In fact, some part-time freelance writers have made so much from their part-time job that they have decided to work on it full time.

Minimum Pay: $20 per hour

Basic Qualifications: Writing well

6. High Paying Part Time Job in Singapore – Music Teacher

Being a music teacher such as a piano teacher can be a profitable endeavour. To do this as a part-time job, you need to be at least skilled in playing the musical instrument of your choice.

Similar to giving tuition, potential students and their parents will be looking at your music qualifications and experience before deciding to hire you as a part-time tutor.

Let’s assume you are thinking of teaching piano as a part-time job since it is one of the most popular musical instruments out there. To have some level of credibility, you should have at least a grade 8 in piano from Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music and Trinity College London and at least a grade 5 in music theory.

In terms of logistics, you can work out of your own home if you have a piano or you can travel to your student’s home to give lessons. As a music teacher teaching piano, you can expect to charge rates of $30 to $60 an hour.

Minimum Pay: $30 per hour

Basic Qualifications: Grade 8 (piano) and Grade 5 (music theory)

7. A Mascot is a Part-Time Job that Pays Quite Well

Do you like the idea of wearing a costume and making the people around you laugh? If yes, then being a mascot is the part-time job for you. You can expect to earn an hourly rate of $20 to $30 for walking around in a mascot suit and entertaining the people you meet.

An added bonus is that you don’t have to show your actual face as you do all those funny antics. So there’s no need to worry about your relatives recognising you on the streets.

Difficulties of being a Mascot

However, this part-time job is not for everyone. Some people you encounter may be mischievous or downright rude. In fact, people have been known to push mascots around or even try to unmask them.

Also, it can get really hot under the costume, which may cause you to tire out easily. This is especially because being a mascot is physically demanding, where you are expected to dance and move about as part of the job.

Despite all that, many mascots still find joy in the job. It can be rewarding to interact with the audience, make children happy and bring entertainment to their audiences. Thus, if you are able to handle the difficulties of the job and still have a good time, this high paying part-time job is for you.

Minimum Pay: $20 per hour

Basic Qualifications: Not required

8. Another Profitable Part-Time Job – Website Developer

If you have coding experience or know web design, being a website developer is another high paying part-time job option. For some projects, you could even charge upwards of $50 per hour.

If you decide to take up a web development project at a fixed fee, you could even charge up to $5,000. Of course, this depends on the complexity of the website you need to design and produce. Furthermore, in order to command such a high pay, you have to demonstrate to your customers that you have a good track record and have developed high-quality websites in the past.

Minimum Pay: $50 per hour

Basic Qualifications: Diploma or Degree in computer science / information technology

9. Photographer as a High Paying Part-Time Job in Singapore

If you’re interested and passionate about photography, you can consider being a photographer as a part-time job. You can provide your freelance photography services at various events such as wedding functions. At the start, you may only be chosen to be the backup photographer for these events.

However, gradually, as you build up your portfolio and develop a reputation, you may start to get bigger roles which translate to higher pay.

Being a part-time photographer can be quite profitable, netting from $50 to $200 per hour or a few hundred dollars for a photoshoot. Things you would probably need are a professional camera like a DSLR and good operational knowledge about how to use a camera.

Selling photos online

If you’re not a particularly outgoing person and don’t really like to interact with large crowds at events, you can explore the idea of taking photos and selling them online for royalties. You can literally take a photo of anything, ranging from notable landmarks to delicious food dishes, and upload them as stock photos to various websites.

This allows you to get paid royalties each time somebody downloads your photo for their personal or commercial use. What an interesting part-time job!

Minimum Pay: $50 per hour

Basic Qualifications: Photography experience

10. Emceeing Part-Time to Make Money in Singapore

If you have thick skin, are extroverted and can think quickly on your feet, then being an emcee may be the ideal part-time job for you. You can earn quite a lot of money from emceeing, but the exact amount depends on the size of the event and your experience.

For example, a big event at the Suntec City Convention Centre may earn you a few thousand dollars. Conversely, an emcee gig at a mall event may bring in somewhere between $800 to $1200.

Honing Your Emceeing Skills

If you are really serious about emceeing, you may want to get some experience in public speaking by joining the Toastmasters Club in Singapore. You can even emcee at your friend’s or relative’s wedding to get some practice and exposure as well.

Ultimately, a good emcee must be able to entertain the crowds with his banter and to captivate the audience’s attention. He or she must do this while remaining true to the central message and theme of the event. If you can master these skills, you can expect to earn a substantial amount from your part-time emceeing stints.

Minimum Pay: Few hundred dollars per event

Basic Qualifications: Good at public speaking

Conclusion

There are many high paying part-time jobs in Singapore should you wish to make some extra money. All you have to do is to know what positions to look out for.

With a better understanding of the highest paying part-time jobs in Singapore, you can now decide which job best suits your interest and personality.

What are you waiting for then? 

Let’s go out there and make some serious cash!

If you’re looking to boost your chances of getting a job, check out these 13 Sure-Fire Strategies for Writing a Great Resume.

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