The National Minimum Wage in South Africa
How South Africa's National Minimum Wage works: the hourly floor, the annual review, who's covered, and why deductions can't take pay below it.
Pay someone below minimum wage and it won't help that they agreed to it, that business is tight, or that it's "only for now." South Africa's National Minimum Wage Act doesn't recognise any of those as a reason. Here's how the rule actually works, without a rand figure attached, because that number is the one thing in this guide worth double-checking before you rely on it.
A floor per hour, and a figure with a shelf life
The National Minimum Wage is set as an amount per ordinary hour worked. Whether someone is paid monthly, weekly, daily, or by the piece, their pay converts to an hourly rate to check it against the floor. That's the bit that catches employers out: a monthly salary that looks perfectly respectable can still fail the test once you divide it by the hours actually behind it.
The rate itself moves. The National Minimum Wage Commission reviews it annually, and an increase is usually announced to take effect around the start of March. So any rand figure printed in a guide, an article, or a spreadsheet has a shelf life of about a year. Check the amount currently gazetted by the Department of Employment and Labour before you use one, because a stale figure here is worse than no figure at all: it feels like diligence while quietly underpaying someone.
Almost everyone is covered
The National Minimum Wage applies to nearly all workers, regardless of sector or job title. Categories that used to sit on separate, lower sectoral rates, domestic work and farm work among them, have been folded into the general minimum.
A small number of exceptions remain, and they're narrow and specifically defined rather than a general escape hatch. Workers on the Expanded Public Works Programme, for instance, are set at their own lower rate because of what that programme is for. If you think an exception applies to someone on your payroll, you should be able to name it. "They're still learning" isn't on the list.
Below it is illegal, and deductions can't get you there either
Paying under the minimum wage isn't a civil dispute to sort out quietly. It's a breach of the Act, and the Department of Employment and Labour can act on it.
It also isn't something you can arrive at sideways. A permitted deduction, for a uniform, for damage, for anything at all, can't reduce an employee's actual pay below the minimum wage for the hours they worked. A payslip that clears the floor before deductions and falls below it afterwards still fails, which makes the order of operations on your payslip a compliance question rather than a formatting one.
Confirm the current rate, apply it to every hour on every payslip, and E·BIZI Pay keeps it there automatically instead of leaving it to whichever number was correct last time someone checked.