The Older Person's Grant
South Africa has no contributory state pension — the Older Person's Grant, means-tested on current income and assets, is the whole of it. This page sets out the current grant amount, straight from National Treasury's own Budget Review, and what this section could and could not confirm about the means test that reduces it.
Nothing you paid in decides it
South Africa has no contributory state pension. There is no insurance fund an employee or employer pays into that a retiree later draws from — the Older Person’s Grant is the entire state old-age system, and it is paid for out of general tax revenue, means-tested on your CURRENT income and assets rather than on anything you earned or contributed over your working life.
That is the single biggest difference from a market like the United Kingdom or Germany, where a longer contribution record buys a larger pension. Here, qualifying is qualifying — a person who has never held a formal job and a person who worked for forty years meet exactly the same age condition, and receive the same maximum grant before the means test runs.
What the grant pays
The maximum Older Person’s Grant for 2026/27 (SA fiscal year, 1 April 2026 - 31 March 2027) is:
Per month
R2 400
Per year
R28 800
Unlike some other markets this site covers, this is not a decades-old base figure sitting beneath a separate indexed amount — it is the actual current figure, published directly by National Treasury. The Act itself sets no rand amount at all; the figure moves whenever the annual Budget says it does, rather than on any fixed statutory schedule.
No standing statutory indexation formula was found.
As published, no standing statutory indexation formula applies. Treasury’s 2026 Budget Review sets different percentage increases for different grant categories in the same year — old age +3.7%, war veterans +3.6%, foster care +3.6% — which reads as each figure being set individually in the Budget Speech rather than by one shared formula. The Act's own indexation provision, if any, was not itself reachable from here, so this finding rests on that published pattern rather than a direct read of the Act.
A means test reduces it, and this page cannot tell you by how much
The figure above is the maximum. National Treasury’s own words confirm the actual grant is set by “the sliding scale, which bases grant values on recipients’ incomes” — so most recipients are paid something below it, on income and assets. The thresholds and taper rate that decide how much less have no sourced figure here. Read the full finding on the means test page.
No single/couple rate distinction was found.
No relationship between a single and a partnered/married rate was found — every secondary source describing the grant states one flat amount with no couple-rate distinction.
Rules with nothing beneath or above them
Two more things are worth stating plainly because a reader coming from a contributory pension market might expect them and not find them here.
No separate minimum-pension floor exists.
No separate minimum-pension guarantee exists beneath the Older Person's Grant — the grant IS the state's old-age provision, means-tested down from its own maximum ("sliding scale") toward zero as income/assets rise, with no floor beneath that taper found in any source.
No ceiling caps the grant beyond its own maximum.
No provision caps the grant beyond its own maximum rate (R2,400/month, 2026/27) — that maximum is the figure the means test reduces from, not a separate ceiling on top of a computed amount.
There is nothing to bring to present value.
The grant is a flat administratively-set amount, means-tested on CURRENT income and assets — nothing in its mechanism reads a claimant's past earnings, so there is nothing to bring to present value. The same structural finding AU's fixture states for the identical reason.
Who qualifies, and what this section will not do
Qualifying takes one condition, not a contribution record — see eligibility. The Older Person's Grant is one flat monthly amount, reduced by a means test — there is no formula for a calculator to run. The one number that would decide a reduced amount, the sliding scale's income and assets thresholds, has no sourced figure here (see the means test below), so a calculator here would either need no real inputs or ask for ones it has nothing to test them against.