This paper is addressed to study the existence of maximizers for the singular Moser–Trudinger supremum under constraints in the critical case $$\begin{aligned} MT_{N}(a,\beta ) = \sup _{u\in W^{1,N}({\mathbb {R}}^N),\, \Vert \nabla u\Vert _N^a + \Vert u\Vert _N^N =1} \int _{{\mathbb {R}}^N}\Phi _N\left( (1-\beta /N)\alpha _N |u|^{\frac{N}{N-1}}\right) |x|^{-\beta } dx, \end{aligned}$$where $$a>0$$, $$\beta \in [0,N)$$, $$\Phi _N(t) = e^t -\sum _{k=0}^{N-2} \frac{t^k}{k!}$$, $$\alpha _N = N \omega _{N-1}^{1/(N-1)}$$, and $$\omega _{N-1}$$ denotes the surface area of the unit sphere in $${\mathbb {R}}^N$$. More precisely, we study the effect of the parameter a to the attainability of $$MT_{N}(a,\beta )$$. We will prove that for each $$\beta \in [0,N)$$ there exist the thresholds $$a_*(\beta )$$ and $$a^*(\beta )$$ such that $$MT_{N}(a,\beta )$$ is attained for any $$a \in (a_*(\beta ), a^*(\beta ))$$ and is not attained for $$a a^*(\beta )$$. We also give some qualitative estimates for $$a_*(\beta )$$ and $$a^*(\beta )$$. Our results complete the recent studies on the sharp Moser–Trudinger type inequality under constraints due to do O, Sani and Tarsi (Commun Contemp Math 19:27, 2016), Lam (Proc Am Math Soc 145:4885–4892, 2017; Math Nachr 291(14–15):2272–2287, 2018) and Ikoma, Ishiwata and Wadade (Math Ann 373(1–2):831–851, 2019).