National Budget Speech 2025
On 12 March 2025, the National Treasury presented South Africa’s 2025 Budget Speech.
There have been no changes made to personal income tax tables, rebates, or thresholds. The proposed changes to these which were announced on 19 February 2025, mentioned in our previous blog, have not been included in the Budget Speech as expected.
In this blog, we’ll briefly take a look at the minor announced changes that will affect your payroll.
What will change?
Subsistence Allowances
Where an employee is entitled to a subsistence allowance, the daily amount in respect of meals and incidental costs have increased with effect from 1 March 2025:
- The allowance for incidental costs only will increase from R169 to R176 per day.
- The allowance for meals and incidental costs will increase from R548 to R570 per day.
Rates per Kilometre
SARS adjusted the fixed rates per kilometre, which are used when calculating travel allowances, from R4.84/km down to R4.76/km.
ETI
The planned changes to the calculation of ETI amounts have been postponed to 1 April 2025. This will be updated on the system as soon as the changes have been confirmed in the SARS ETI Guides. A separate blog post will cover these changes in detail.
To read more about the items listed above, please visit our help pages below:
What do I have to do?
As discussed in our previous blog post, the changes to the allowances for subsistence and travel will be applied retroactively from 1 March 2025, and payslips which have been finalised before the change will have the old rates listed.
Due to the requirement that employee payslips must match the tax certificates and EMP submissions, these amounts cannot be adjusted retroactively (particularly where employees have been paid already), and the new rates will need to be accounted for during your SARS assessment.
Payslips that have not been finalised yet will automatically be updated.
Since the ETI changes will take effect only on 1 April 2025 and will apply only to the April EMP201, you will not be required to take any action. The new amounts will automatically be applied on SimplePay from 1 April 2025.
If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact our friendly Support team at support@simplepay.cloud.
Want to know more about SimplePay? Check out our website, or try our payroll software for free with a 30-day trial.
Take care,
Team SimplePay