ONE Pass

ONE Pass Dependants: What MOM Confirms About Family Passes and Spouse Work Rights

What the Overseas Networks & Expertise Pass requires of the main applicant, and what MOM's official pages confirm — and leave to separate pages — about family passes…

Pass & Permit Desk 7 min read

The short answer

The Overseas Networks & Expertise Pass (ONE Pass) is a work pass for top talent, and it comes with family provisions. MOM’s key facts page lists “passes for eligible family members” as a feature of the pass, and states that your spouse will be able to apply to work on a Letter of Consent (LOC). Those two statements are the confirmed core.

Everything more specific — who qualifies as a dependant, which pass they receive, what each dependant may do — sits on MOM’s separate family pages, not on the ONE Pass eligibility page. Anyone planning a move on the strength of “the whole family can come” should read those pages directly, in the order set out below.

Who the ONE Pass is actually for

The ONE Pass targets top talent in business, arts and culture, sports, academia and research, and AI and Tech. MOM assesses candidates on a case-by-case basis, and you must meet all the criteria within the category you choose.

Applications can come from the candidate, from an appointed employment agency, or from an employer. One limit applies at the filing stage: you may only submit one work pass application per candidate at a time. You cannot, for example, run a ONE Pass application and an Employment Pass application for the same person simultaneously.

The pass carries no foreign worker levy and no quota. It also exempts the holder from the Complementarity Assessment Framework (COMPASS) and from Fair Consideration Framework (FCF) job advertising requirements.

MOM also lists operational flexibility: the holder may concurrently start, operate and work for multiple companies at any one time, subject to employment contract terms. And changing jobs does not require a new pass application.

The two eligibility routes

Route one is salary and employment. You must have earned a fixed monthly salary of at least S$30,000, or its equivalent in foreign currency, for the 12 consecutive months leading up to the date of application. If applicable, you must also have worked for an established company overseas for those same 12 consecutive months.

“Established” has a published definition. The company must have a market capitalisation of at least US$500 million, or annual revenue of at least US$200 million. Amounts combined from the entire global office can also be considered, and MOM assesses this case by case.

A prospective-employment variant exists. If you are applying on the basis of a job you have not started, the Singapore employer must be an established company under the same tests, and the salary must likewise be at least S$30,000 a month. MOM’s instruction here is a timing rule: submit the application only when your employment will start within 6 months.

Route two is outstanding achievements. You may apply without meeting the salary criterion if you have outstanding achievements in at least one of these areas — sports; arts and culture; academia and research. MOM reviews these holistically with other agencies, including MCCY, MOE, NRF and A*STAR.

One date to note: candidates may apply under the AI and Tech track from 28 January 2027.

What the family pages cover, and what this article will not invent

MOM publishes family criteria for ONE Pass holders on dedicated pages. The eligibility page for dependants of ONE Pass holders is separate from the main applicant’s eligibility page, and it is the controlling document for who can come and under what pass.

This article does not restate the contents of that page, because the conditions, family categories and thresholds belong there and should be read in their original form. Treat any summary — including one written by a consultancy — as a starting point only.

Do not carry rules across from other passes. The Dependant’s Pass eligibility page states its own conditions for Employment Pass and S Pass holders: a minimum fixed monthly salary of $6,000, dependants limited to a legally married spouse and unmarried children under 21 (including legally adopted children), and sponsorship by an established, Singapore-registered company. That page explicitly directs dependants of ONE Pass holders elsewhere. Mixing the two sets of rules is the most common way plans go wrong.

MOM lists the spouse’s ability to apply to work on a Letter of Consent as a feature of the ONE Pass. Read plainly, that means the spouse’s route to employment runs through an LOC rather than through a standalone work pass application.

MOM does not, on the pages relied on here, publish LOC processing times, approval rates, or the volume of LOCs issued to ONE Pass dependants. Any figure of that kind should be treated as unsourced unless you can point to the page it came from.

The same caution applies to the other dependant categories. Whether children, parents, or other relatives may work, how long they may stay, and what documents they need are questions for the MOM family pages and, where relevant, for the Immigration & Checkpoints Authority (ICA).

Duration, renewal and the annual filing duty

First-time ONE Pass candidates may be granted a pass of up to 5 years. Subsequent renewals are also up to 5 years, and the pass is renewable on meeting the renewal criteria.

The holder carries an ongoing reporting obligation. You must notify MOM about your professional activities and annual income by 31 January of the following year. You must also notify MOM of any change to your residential address or personal information. Dependants’ status is tied to the main pass, so letting the main pass lapse creates problems for the whole household.

What these official pages do not establish

These pages publish no counts, no approval rates and no processing-time benchmarks for ONE Pass holders or their dependants. If you see numbers of that kind quoted, ask which official page they came from.

School admission is not covered. Student’s Pass requirements and school enrolment for foreign children are handled by ICA and the Ministry of Education, not by MOM’s pass pages, so the question “does my child need a Student’s Pass” cannot be answered from the material here.

Permanent residence is not covered either. The pages relied on here say nothing about a combined family PR submission or any ONE Pass-specific PR route. PR applications are assessed by ICA, and MOM’s ONE Pass pages do not describe the criteria.

A practical order of checks

Treat the following as preparation advice, not as an official procedure.

  1. Decide which eligibility route fits you — salary and employment, or outstanding achievements.
  2. If you use the salary route, gather 12 months of salary records showing a fixed monthly salary of at least S$30,000.
  3. Confirm your employer or prospective employer meets the established-company test.
  4. If you are applying on prospective employment, confirm the start date falls within 6 months.
  5. If you are using the achievements route, assemble evidence for the relevant sector.
  6. Open MOM’s ONE Pass family pages before you assume anything about dependant eligibility.
  7. Check the spouse’s Letter of Consent route on those pages.
  8. Submit only one work pass application per candidate at a time.
  9. After the pass is issued, diarise the 31 January notification of professional activities and annual income.

Official sources

Briefs filed under the same topic.