Abstract Assessment of industrial sustainability is an important step towards converting the theoretical goal of sustainable development into practice. One category of sustainability assessment tools is indicators. Indicators are useful tool to summarise and condense complex data into meaningful information and track performance progress over time. This article identifies 40 most commonly used sustainability indicators for Singapore small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises (SMEs) from four internationally-recognised indicator frameworks through a systematic indicator selection method. These indicators could potentially facilitate local SMEs to manage their manufacturing systems. To ensure appropriate categorisation of the indicators into the sub-categories, content of each sub-category is analysed and a concise definition of nine sustainability terms are put forward. This study has proposed a comprehensive indicator framework in the context of Singapore.