How the distance is worked out

When a phase is oversubscribed, MOE gives priority by citizenship and by what it calls the Home-School Distance category, based on the address used for registration: within 1km, between 1km and 2km, and beyond 2km, according to MOE's page on how distance affects priority admission.

MOE measures from the school's land boundary, not from a point on the school. Its stated method is the shortest straight-line distance from any point on the boundary around the school to your official residential address, based on your building's outline, using the Singapore Land Authority's OneMap School Query service, according to MOE's page on the address used for registration. That land-boundary basis replaced a single reference point from the 2022 exercise onwards.

The bands on this page are School Query's own answer for your address, not our arithmetic. When you enter a postal code we ask the service which schools it puts within 1km of you and which it puts between 1km and 2km, and the results show you what it said. That is the same answer you would get by typing the postal code into SLA's OneMap School Query yourself, which is the tool MOE tells parents to check.

The distance beside each school is still ours, because the service publishes a category and never a figure in metres. We measure to the same school land boundaries it uses, so the school end of that measurement is MOE's. The home end is not: we measure from the single address point OneMap returns for your postal code, while MOE measures from your building's outline, and a long block can reach tens of metres closer to a school than its address point does. Where our figure and the service's band disagree, the row says so, and the band is the one that counts.

If the service cannot be reached, the page falls back to our own measurement and says so above the results. That fallback was checked against School Query across 853 school and address combinations on 31 July 2026: 833 of them, or 97.7%, landed in the same band. Of the 20 that did not, 15 put the school further away than MOE does and 5 put it nearer. So in fallback, a figure within about 200m of a band line is marked, because at that range MOE could call it either way.

A band can change between years when a building outline or a school boundary is updated, so it is worth checking again in your registration year.

One school is measured from an address other than its current campus, because MOE has said the new address governs distance for this exercise. Its card says so.

Sources

2026 application and vacancy figures: MOE past vacancies and balloting data. MOE data last updated 21 August 2026, 4:29pm SGT
Past balloting records, 2019 onwards, per school and per phase, cross-checked against MOE's published figures for 2025.
School locations: OneMap, the Singapore Land Authority's map service, looked up by each school's MOE postal code. 179 of 179 schools placed, geocoded 2026-07-30.
School land boundaries, which the distance is measured to: SLA's OneMap School Query, the service MOE tells parents to check. 179 of 179 schools, checked 12 August 2026.
The within-1km and 1-to-2km bands themselves: the same SLA OneMap School Query service, asked live for the postal code you enter. Your postal code is used to make that one request and is not stored or logged here.
Relocating schools and which address MOE uses for distance: MOE SchoolFinder, checked 29 July 2026.

Page copy last checked against official sources on 29 July 2026.