Sharp decline in the chances of getting Singapore PR

If your Singapore PR application is rejected recently, you are not alone. More PR applications are rejected every year since 2009 when the Singapore immigration policy was sharply tightened to address Singaporeans’ growing anxiety over the pace of foreign intake. And as we have written before the tightening can be also seen in the sharp reduction of number of successful approvals as we have covered here, here and here. Now we also know how many are rejected since 2000.  And if you want to know how many applications are rejected since 2000, below are the figures.

The year the tightening started, in 2009, the number of Singapore PR applications rejected doubled compared to 2008 from 22,472 rejections to 58,923 rejections. This number increased to 68,143. The number of Singapore PR approved or rejected in 2011 are not available yet but I expect the approval numbers out in early 2012. Below are the number of Singapore PRs rejected and approved since 2004. 

Year	Singapore PR rejected	Singapore PR Approved	Total
2004	17,452	35,250	52,702
2005	13,213	52,300	65,513
2006	17,508	57,300	74,808
2007	18,385	63,600	81,985
2008	22,472	79,200	101,672
2009	58,923	59,460	118,383
2010	68,143	29,265	97,408

Looking at the totals also gives some interesting insight into percentage of rejections and chance of someone getting Singapore PR. Below chart shows approval, rejection and total numbers.

Many people are asking me what are the chances of getting PR in 2011 and 2012. I answer no one can know for individuals since the criteria applied to each application is naturally not public. But in general chances of PR approval sharply declined since 2009 and with these rejection numbers we can give some quantitative perspective for the chances of getting PR nowadays.

If you divide the number of rejections to total numbers (estimated as rejections + approvals), you will see that around 20-22% of all applications are rejected between 2005 - 2008. In 2009, nearly half of the applications are rejected. And in 2010, nearly 70 percent of all applications were rejected! So chances of one getting PR went dramatically down in just 2 years from 80 percent to 30 percent.