National Minimum Wage

A statutory floor per ordinary hour

South Africa sets a National Minimum Wage per ordinary hour worked under the National Minimum Wage Act 9 of 2018. From 1 March 2026 the general rate is adjusted to about R30,23 an hour, and farm workers and domestic workers are now at full parity with the general rate — the separate lower tiers those groups once had have closed.

What a monthly wage floor looks like

The minimum is expressed per ordinary hour, not per month, so a monthly-equivalent depends entirely on the hours actually worked. At R30,23 an hour, more ordinary hours in a month mean a higher monthly floor and fewer mean a lower one — there is no single statutory monthly figure. It is a gross floor as well: PAYE and UIF still apply on top for anyone earning above the tax threshold, so the minimum wage and the take-home this calculator produces are answering two different questions.

How the figure is sourced

The R30,23 rate and its 1 March 2026 effective date are corroborated across the government news service and multiple independent sources, and the adjustment is carried in Government Gazette No. 54075. It is presented here as a paraphrase, not a verbatim quote from the gazette — the underlying PDF could not be opened when the figure was checked.

What it is not

The minimum wage is a wage floor, not a take-home figure, and some sub-sectors run their own transitional rates set by sectoral determinations or bargaining councils. Those sit outside the general rate shown here. The figure follows the Government Gazette cited above; the floor is reset each year, so a recent uprating may not be here yet, and it carries no final sign-off from us.

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