I believe you are talking about single post pages. The template hierarchy does not make provision for single templates according to the category a post belongs to, so single-{$category}.php
does not exist.
To make single-{$category}.php
work, we can make use of the single_template
filter
add_filter( 'single_template', function ( $template )
{
global $post;
// Check if our post has our specific category
if ( !has_category( 1, $post ) ) // Change to your specific category
return $template;
// Locate and load our single-{$category}.php template
$locate_template = locate_template( 'single-my_category.php' ); // Change to your exact template name
if ( !$locate_template )
return $template;
// single-my_category.php exists, load it
return $locate_template;
});
You can now just create our own custom single template and use it for any single post that belongs to the specific category you need to target