Passport renewal

My maid's passport is due for renewal. What is the normal practice? Are we responsible for the cost of renewal?

Well the PH passport is extremely cheap compared to others and takes around 14 days to process now. You aren't responsible for the passport, however she needs the passport to work for you so I would personally pay it.

Of course she needs the passport to work for YOU! Firstly for the visa, secondly how would she travel outside of her country to be at your place? Try seeing how long she is able to stay in HK with no passport! But for a cost of $425 which isn't much (actually is a fair chunk of a DH monthly wages) not too much of an issue. And as a legal document what other expectations would it bring?


Let me make a comparison. I require staff to travel to China on a regular basis, meaning visa costs and obviously regular passport renewals. Now there is no obligation for me to provide any of this but like most employers I do, and to be honest it's expected in the expat world. Now by doing this do I leave myself open to other expectations from my staff?

That is entirely true and that is what I said. There is no responsibility. I have no responsibility to provide the costs of passports, visas to my company staff and no responsibility to provide for my DH. In fact because of the salary differences I would rather pay for a DH passport. $425 out of a basic minimum salary of $3580 is 11.9% of their monthly wage. For our lowest paid Brit whose passport costs $2020 a time now (cost is down) the % is 4. Big difference. And to be honest the expats expect or they whinge about their hardships at spending $2000 every couple of years or so! For others the %'s are much, much less.


It's comparable with traveling allowance, actually it's something that does not need to be paid. When people take on the job they know they have to work somewhere else as well. So again an expense no company has to actually pay. Send someone to US, no problem point them to the site that sells flight tickets......!