Last Updated: 2025-11-15

The only difference between hasOne and belongsTo is where the foreign key column is located.

Let's say you have two entities: User and an Account.

• If the users table has the account_id column then a User belongsTo Account. (And the Account either hasOne or hasMany Users)

• But if the users table does not have the account_id column, and instead the accounts table has the user_id column, then User hasOne or hasMany Accounts

In short hasOne and belongsTo are inverses of one another - if one record belongTo the other, the other hasOne of the first. Or, more accurately, eiterh hasOne or hasMany - depending on how many times its id appears.