Insights / Lasting Power of Attorney
What it covers, how it is made, and what happens to your family without one.
A Lasting Power of Attorney lets you — the donor — appoint one or more people, the donees, to make decisions for you if you lose mental capacity. It is made while you still have capacity, registered with the Office of the Public Guardian, and lies dormant unless and until it is needed.
You must be at least 21, have mental capacity at the time you make it, and, if the LPA covers property and affairs, you must not be an undischarged bankrupt.
A widely held assumption is that a spouse or an adult child can simply step in. They cannot. Without an LPA, nobody has authority over your bank accounts, your property or your medical decisions, and the family must apply to the Family Justice Courts for a deputyship order.
Deputyship works, but it is heavier in three ways. It requires a medical report and a court application rather than a form. It takes considerably longer — weeks for a simplified application, and several months for a standard one, during which bills go unpaid. And it does not end with the order: a deputy is supervised by the Public Guardian and generally files regular reports for as long as the appointment lasts.
The court also decides who is appointed. It will usually choose a family member, but not necessarily the one you would have chosen.
An LPA covers two distinct domains, and you can appoint different people to each.
Personal welfare — where you live, day-to-day care, and consent to most medical treatment.
Property and affairs — bank accounts, investments, property, insurance, and the running of your financial life.
Splitting them is common and sensible. The adult child who is the right person to sit with doctors is not always the right person to manage a share portfolio.
Form 1 grants general powers with standard restrictions. It covers the overwhelming majority of cases and is what most people should be using.
Form 2 is for customised powers — wider authority to make gifts, specific directions about a business, or arrangements that do not fit the standard template. It must be drafted by a Singapore-qualified lawyer, and it is used comparatively rarely.
If your affairs include an operating company, a trust interest, or property abroad, Form 2 is worth at least considering rather than defaulting to Form 1 because it is simpler.
An LPA cannot simply be signed and filed. It must be certified by an LPA certificate issuer — an accredited medical practitioner, a psychiatrist, or a practising Singapore lawyer.
The certificate issuer must meet you, satisfy themselves that you understand the authority you are granting and the consequences of granting it, and confirm that you are not acting under pressure or undue influence. They then certify accordingly. It is a safeguard rather than a formality, and it is the step that makes the document difficult to challenge afterwards.
This is the decision people give the least thought to and later regret most.
The donee should be someone likely to outlive you and still be competent when needed, which argues against appointing a spouse of similar age as the only donee. Appoint replacements. Where two or more donees are appointed, decide deliberately whether they must act jointly — every decision requiring unanimity, which protects against unilateral action but produces deadlock if they fall out — or jointly and severally, where any one may act alone, which is faster and less safe.
Tell the person before you name them. A donee who first learns of the appointment in a hospital corridor is not in a good position to act.
It has no effect after death. At that point authority passes to your executor under your Will, and the donee's powers end immediately.
It is not an Advance Medical Directive. An AMD is a separate document under its own statute, in which you state in advance that you do not want extraordinary life-sustaining treatment if you are terminally ill and unconscious. It is a direction you give, not an authority you delegate, and an LPA donee cannot override it.
A donee cannot make or change your Will, and cannot make unlimited gifts of your assets — the authority to make gifts is restricted, and this is one of the areas the Public Guardian scrutinises.
An LPA over property and affairs allows a donee to deal with your shares in a company. Whether that is enough depends on your constitution and any shareholders' agreement, which may have their own provisions on incapacity — occasionally provisions that conflict with the LPA.
For an owner-manager, the LPA should be read alongside the company documents rather than in isolation, and where the arrangements do not match, a Form 2 with specific directions is usually the cleaner answer.
This page is general information about Singapore law as at September 2026, not legal advice, and no reader should act on it without advice on their own circumstances. Ng & Partners is an estate planning consultancy; where a matter calls for a solicitor, a licensed trustee or a professional executor, we appoint one from our network and coordinate the work.
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