Home–School Distance · Singapore P1
Which primary schools sit inside your 1 km line?
Enter a postal code. We measure to the edge of each school's land boundary, show the reading in metres, and say plainly when a result is too close to the line to trust.
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What the 1 km line decides
The 1 km line does not admit or reject anyone. It sorts. When a school gets more registrations than it has places in a phase, MOE ballots, and home-school distance sets who is drawn first. Closer families go into the hat before further ones.
That one rule is why forty metres can change which flat a family buys, which lease they renew, and which year they move.
How the distance is measured
Not walking distance. Not driving distance. MOE takes the shortest straight line from the school's land boundary to your building outline, calculated on SLA's OneMap. OneMap is the only authoritative answer.
Two details catch people out. It starts at the school's boundary, not the school hall — a long campus frontage can be closer than its address suggests. And it ends at your building outline, not a pin on your block — on a long HDB slab, the nearest corner can be seventy metres closer than the centre.
What this tool does
It geocodes your address, loads the mapped land boundary of every primary school, and measures to the nearest edge of each one. That closes most of the gap to the official figure. It cannot close all of it: your home is treated as a point, not an outline, and community-mapped boundaries are not SLA's dataset.
So every reading carries a margin — about 40 m where a boundary is mapped, about 120 m where only a point is. Anything landing within that margin of the 1 km or 2 km line is marked borderline: confirm it on OneMap before you act on it.
The checker
Measure your address
Checking dataset…
Measurement log
- Locating address
- Loading school land boundaries
- Measuring boundary to home
- Sorting into distance categories
Your address is geocoded to the block. Pinch or scroll to zoom. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors.
A parent's guide to home-school distance
The phases, in order
Each phase fills before the next opens. Distance never moves you between phases — it only orders people inside one.
- 1Sibling already in the school
- 2AAlumni, advisory or management committee, staff
- 2B40-hour volunteers, connected church or clan, community leaders
- 2COpen to everyone not yet placed
- 2CSStill unplaced after 2C
- 3Neither citizen nor PR
MOE holds back 20 places per school for Phase 2B and 40 for Phase 2C, so the open phases are never fully crowded out.
The ballot order
When a phase is oversubscribed, applicants are drawn in this fixed order.
Singapore Citizens
Permanent Residents
Citizenship outranks distance completely. A citizen five kilometres away is drawn before a PR across the road.
This also explains why 1 km matters at some schools and not others. At an undersubscribed school everyone gets in and distance never applies. At a heavily oversubscribed one, the ballot can be settled entirely inside the citizen-within-1 km group and the next band is never reached.
Which address counts
The official residential address on the registering parent's NRIC at the time of registration. Not the child's birth certificate address. Not an address you are about to move into — the NRIC must already be updated when registration opens.
Caregiver addresses are allowed in defined circumstances with their own rules. If that is your situation, read the current-year MOE guidance rather than copying what worked for another family.
The 30-month stay requirement
A child admitted through a distance category must live at the registered address for at least 30 months from the start of that year's exercise, with different start points for new property, resale property and caregiver addresses. MOE does check. Anyone weighing a short lease near a preferred school should treat 30 months as the real cost.
Six mistakes that cost families a place
Estimating
"About a kilometre" covers both categories.
Stale readings
Address data and school sites change. A check today is research, not a decision.
Holding sites
Schools rebuilding elsewhere are still measured from their permanent location.
Centre to centre
Ignoring boundary and building outline can be off by over 100 m.
Trusting borderline
0.97 km unofficial is not a within-1 km result. It needs confirming.
One target school
A shortlist of one turns a ballot into a coin toss.
Using a shortlist well
Run the checker, note every school in the two priority bands, then confirm each on OneMap — a minute per school settles it. With confirmed categories, check how each school subscribed in recent years: one that cleared 2C without balloting is open to you regardless of band; one that has balloted inside the citizen-1 km group for years is realistic only if you are inside it with metres to spare.
Considering a move for distance reasons? Run the prospective address too, and re-confirm on OneMap in the year of registration, not the year of the move.
Frequently asked questions
How does MOE measure home-school distance?
Through SLA's OneMap School Query service. The shortest line from any point on the school's boundary to your official residential address, based on the building outline. Not a walking or driving route.
Is 1.01 km still counted as within 1 km?
No. There is no rounding. 0.99 km is within 1 km; 1.01 km is in the 1–2 km band. Always confirm a borderline reading on OneMap.
Does living within 1 km guarantee a place?
No. Distance only sets your order in a ballot, and only if the phase you qualify for is oversubscribed.
Which address is used?
The official residential address on the registering parent's NRIC at the time of registration — not the child's birth certificate address, and not a future address.
What is the 30-month stay requirement?
A child admitted on a distance category must stay at the registered address for at least 30 months from the start of that year's exercise. Start rules differ for new property, resale property and caregiver addresses.
How accurate is this compared with OneMap?
It measures to the nearest edge of the mapped school boundary rather than a centre point — close to MOE's method, not identical. Expect about 40 m of uncertainty where a boundary is mapped, up to about 120 m where only a point is. Anything inside that margin of a threshold is flagged borderline.
Why do some schools show a wider margin?
OpenStreetMap holds a full land boundary for some schools and only a point for others. A point is less precise, so the margin widens and the result is labelled accordingly.
Can I use this to decide where to buy or rent?
Use it to shortlist, then confirm on OneMap in the year of registration. Boundaries and address data change, and schools on temporary sites are measured from their permanent location.
1kmschool.sg is independent and not affiliated with MOE or SLA. Readings are estimates derived from OpenStreetMap data. The official home-school distance is the one shown by the OneMap School Query service. Verify every result before making a registration, tenancy or purchase decision.