Bringing your family to Singapore: Dependant's Pass, LTVP, and what your spouse can't do

Most people work out the family question too late — after the offer is signed, sometimes after the flights are booked. Two things decide it, and both are simpler and harsher than people expect: your salary, and a rule change from 2021 that means your spouse cannot simply find a job here.

Before you read. This is personal experience and opinion, not immigration advice. Thresholds and rules are set by MOM and ICA and change; the links at the end go to the official pages, and the “last checked” date is at the top.

The short version

The salary that counts is your fixed monthly salary — the figure on your pass, not your total package. Bonuses, allowances and equity do not help.

Two consequences worth sitting with. First, S$6,000 is well above the S Pass floor of S$3,300, so most S Pass holders cannot bring anyone. Second, Work Permit holders cannot bring family at all, whatever they earn.

Both passes are applied for by your employer, both are tied to your own pass, and both end when yours does. If you lose your job, your family’s passes go with yours.

The part that breaks plans: your spouse cannot just get a job

This is the single most common wrong assumption we hear, and it costs couples real money.

Until 2021, a spouse on a Dependant’s Pass could work for an employer on a Letter of Consent — a light-touch permission that was quick, free of salary thresholds, and the reason “we’ll both find work when we get there” used to be a reasonable plan. From 1 May 2021, MOM ended that route. A DP holder who wants an ordinary job now needs a work pass of their own.

In practice that leaves three doors:

Their own Employment Pass or S Pass. A prospective employer applies exactly as they would for anyone else, and your spouse must clear the same salary floor for their age and sector and the same COMPASS scoring. For a returning professional, a part-time role, or anyone re-entering the workforce after a move, this bar is often out of reach — not because they aren’t good, but because the job on offer doesn’t pay S$5,600.

A Work Permit tied to the Dependant’s Pass. Less known and genuinely useful: there is a Work Permit route specifically for DP holders, with no minimum salary, valid for as long as the Dependant’s Pass is. The employer applies, and the usual employer-side Work Permit conditions apply, so check MOM’s page with any prospective employer before counting on it. For many spouses this is the realistic option.

A Letter of Consent — but only to run their own business. The LOC survives in one form: a DP holder who owns a business can still get one. The conditions are specific. The business must be ACRA-registered, and your spouse must be a sole proprietor, a partner, or a company director holding at least 30% of the shares. To renew it, the business must employ at least one Singaporean or permanent resident earning the prevailing Local Qualifying Salary who has received CPF contributions for three consecutive months. First LOCs run a year or until the DP expires, whichever is sooner.

One thing that needs no pass at all: unpaid volunteering for a charitable purpose.

Don’t confuse this with the LTVP of a citizen’s spouse

Search for “Letter of Consent Singapore” and half the results will tell you it is alive and well. They are describing a different situation.

A Long-Term Visit Pass issued by ICA to the spouse or unmarried child of a Singapore citizen or permanent resident can still come with a Letter of Consent to work, applied for through MOM. That is a different pass, a different sponsor, and a different rule from the MOM-issued LTVP your employer sponsors for a common-law spouse or step-child.

The test is simple: if your family’s right to be here flows from your work pass, the employment LOC is not available to them. If it flows from being married to a Singaporean or PR, it may be.

Parents: the S$12,000 wall

Bringing parents on a Long-Term Visit Pass requires a fixed monthly salary of at least S$12,000 — double the threshold for a spouse, and out of reach for the large majority of pass holders. There is no lower tier and no exception for a parent who needs care.

What most families do instead is bring parents on social visit passes and manage the visits around the allowed stay, which works for a few months a year and not for living here. If ageing parents are part of your long-term plan, this threshold deserves to be in the conversation before you accept an offer, not after.

The practical bits

• Apply together where you can. Your employer can submit family applications alongside or after your own pass; doing it together avoids a gap where your family is here on visit passes.
• Children and school. A Dependant’s Pass lets a child study here, but a place at a government school is a separate matter — foreigners are allocated after citizens and permanent residents, and fees are set by MOE. The budget guide has the numbers.
• Renewals follow yours. The family passes are renewed with your pass, and are re-assessed against the rules in force at that time. If your salary or the thresholds move, so does your family’s position.
• Divorce and job loss both end it. The passes are derived from yours and from the relationship. Neither survives on its own.

Before you accept the offer

• Is the fixed monthly salary at least S$6,000, and will it still clear the bar at renewal?
• If your partner intends to work, have you checked which of the three doors is actually open to them — and have you asked a prospective employer whether they will sponsor?
• If you’re relying on two incomes to make the budget work, redo the budget on one.
• If parents are part of the plan, does the offer reach S$12,000?

Read next

• Employment Pass vs S Pass vs Student’s Pass — the pass your family’s passes hang off.
• A real monthly budget — what a family of four actually costs here.