Frequently asked questions

Your employer follows the SARS annualising method. First your monthly pay is annualised — multiplied by the number of pay periods in the tax year — to get an annual equivalent. The marginal tax scale is applied to that annual figure, then your age rebate and any medical tax credit are subtracted, and the result is divided back across the pay periods to give the PAYE withheld this month. Because the annual assessment is the ground truth and SARS's own deduction tables round in their own way, a real payslip can differ from this calculator by a few rand.

Both reduce the tax itself, not the income the tax is worked out on. Every taxpayer gets the primary rebate of R17 820 a year; a secondary rebate is added from 65 and a tertiary rebate from 75, and they are cumulative — so an older taxpayer pays tax only above a higher income. The Medical Scheme Fees Tax Credit is a fixed monthly amount for each person on a registered medical scheme — R376 for the main member and the first dependant, then R254 for each additional dependant. Both are subtracted from the tax on the scale, and PAYE cannot go below zero.

UIF is 1% of your remuneration, but only up to a monthly earnings ceiling of R17 712. Once your pay passes that ceiling, no further UIF is charged on the excess, so the most you contribute is R177,12 a month however high your salary. That ceiling was set on 1 June 2021 (Government Gazette 44641) and has not changed since. Your employer pays a matching 1%, capped the same way.

No. The Skills Development Levy is 1% of an employer's payroll and is paid entirely by the employer — it is never a deduction from an employee's wage. Employers whose total payroll is at or below R500 000 over the coming year are exempt from it altogether. The only things that come off your take-home are PAYE and your own 1% UIF; the matching employer UIF and the SDL sit on top of your wage as employer costs.

The 2027 tax year, which runs from 1 March 2026 to 28 February 2027 — the year currently in force for South African payroll. The brackets, rebates and thresholds were adjusted for inflation in the 2026 Budget. UIF, SDL and the National Minimum Wage follow the calendar rather than the tax year and are dated separately on their own pages.

No. Every rate and amount follows a primary source such as SARS and is independently re-fetched, but a recent change may not be reflected here yet, and none of them has been through our final sign-off. A couple of figures are also still open: the Section 11F retirement-deduction cap is in effect from 1 March 2026 per the 2026 Budget even though SARS's own pages still show the older amount, and the minimum-wage figure is corroborated across sources but written as a paraphrase of the gazette rather than its text. Treat everything here as an order-of-magnitude estimate, not an official SARS calculation.