Your registered office address is public. Here is what the law requires.

The registered office is one of those requirements that sounds administrative until you realise two things: the address is published, and it carries obligations about how it must operate.

What the requirement actually is

• Every Singapore company must have a registered office address in Singapore.
• It must be a physical location. A PO box does not satisfy the requirement.
• It must be open and accessible to the public for at least three hours during ordinary business hours on each business day.
• It appears on the public ACRA record, where anyone can look it up.
• Official correspondence from ACRA and IRAS is served there. Service is effective whether or not you actually read it.

The part people miss

That three-hour accessibility rule is a real obligation, not a formality. It exists so that anyone with legitimate business — a regulator, a creditor, a process server — can reach the company. If your registered address is an apartment nobody is at during the day, you are not meeting it.

Can you use your home?

Often, yes. Singapore’s Home Office Scheme permits certain businesses to operate from a residential address subject to conditions and approval. But permitted and advisable are different questions, and there are three consequences worth weighing.

• Your home address becomes public. Anyone who searches your company — a customer, a competitor, a disgruntled counterparty — sees where you live.
• You are agreeing to the accessibility obligation at your home.
• Correspondence that matters gets mixed with correspondence that does not, and official mail is easy to lose in a domestic pile.

What a service address does

A registered office service provides a compliant address, receives your official mail, and handles the accessibility obligation on your behalf. Mail is typically held for collection, forwarded, or scanned and emailed, depending on what you ask for.

What it does not do is give you a place to work or meet clients. A registered address is a compliance and correspondence service. If you need desk space or a meeting room, that is a different arrangement entirely — worth being clear about, because the two are often marketed together.

Changing it

If you move, the change must be filed with ACRA within the period the law allows. This is a common gap after an office move: the physical relocation happens, the ACRA record does not follow, and official mail keeps going to an address nobody visits. Where we hold the corporate secretarial file, the update is part of the move rather than an afterthought.