Employing a Domestic Worker in South Africa: Labour Law and Immigration Rules (2026)

The moment you start paying someone to clean, garden, cook or look after your children or an elderly parent in your home, even for one morning a week, you become their legal employer. The minimum wage and the Compensation Fund bind you from that first hour, no exceptions. Most of the rest, contracts, leave, UIF and notice, scales up with how many hours they actually work for you. Most households that get this wrong aren't trying to cut corners, they simply don't realise a private home counts as a workplace in law at all.

This is what the law actually requires if you employ a domestic worker in South Africa in 2026, covering pay, leave, UIF and the Compensation Fund, and, if the person you employ is a foreign national, the separate set of immigration rules that comes with that.

What applies depends on how many hours they work for you

Two protections apply to a domestic worker no matter how few hours they work for you, and they're the two that matter most. The minimum wage applies from the first hour, the National Minimum Wage Act carries no hours exemption. So does the Compensation Fund, covered below, which has no threshold of any kind since the Constitutional Court struck out the old exclusion for domestic workers.

Most of the rest of the Basic Conditions of Employment Act works differently, and Sectoral Determination 7, the rules written specifically for domestic work, follows the same line. The chapters covering working hours, leave, written particulars of employment and payslips, and notice of termination each carry the same carve-out: they don't apply to an employee who works less than 24 hours a month for that employer, and SD7 says explicitly that only its wage clauses reach below that line. A worker who comes in for one short session a week can fall under it. Nothing stops you giving a written contract, a payslip or paid leave anyway, and it's good practice to do so regardless, but the law only compels it once the 24-hour line is crossed. Most regular domestic arrangements, a day a week or more, clear it easily.

Once you're above that line, you need a written contract, or at least written particulars of employment, covering duties, hours, pay, leave and notice, signed by both of you. The Department of Employment and Labour publishes a free sample domestic worker contract you can adapt. You also need to give a written payslip every time you pay your worker, showing the gross wage, any deductions and the net amount, and keep copies of both the contract and the payslips for at least three years.

Pay, hours and what you can't deduct

Domestic workers are covered by the same National Minimum Wage as everyone else, there is no separate, lower domestic rate any more. From 1 March 2026 that rate is R30.23 an hour, up from R28.79. Ordinary hours are capped at 45 a week, which works out to 9 hours a day on a five-day week or 8 hours a day if your worker is there six days. They're entitled to at least 12 consecutive hours of rest between shifts, which can be reduced to 10 by written agreement for a worker who lives in and gets at least a three-hour meal break, and at least 36 consecutive hours off each week.

Overtime is paid at 1.5 times the normal rate and, by agreement only, may not exceed 15 hours in a week, and total hours worked including overtime may not exceed 12 on any single day. A domestic worker can't be forced to work a public holiday. If it's a day they'd ordinarily work anyway, working it means double pay for the hours worked. If it's a day they wouldn't normally be there at all and they agree to come in, they're owed their ordinary daily wage on top of what they earned for the hours worked, which can add up to more than double. You may not deduct money from wages for breakages, damage, meals provided during working hours, or uniforms and equipment, without a specific written agreement in place beforehand, and even a deduction for genuine, proven loss or damage is capped at a quarter of the worker's pay and needs a fair process first, not a snap decision.

Leave your domestic worker is entitled to

Annual leave is 21 consecutive days a year, or by agreement one day for every 17 days worked. Sick leave is six weeks' paid leave over a rolling 36-month cycle from the day they start, but access to it is throttled for the first six months, when it's instead one day's paid sick leave for every 26 days worked, and you're allowed, though not required, to offset whatever was used that way against the six-week cycle total. A medical certificate can be required once an absence runs longer than two consecutive days, or once it's the third occasion of absence within an eight-week period. Family responsibility leave, three paid days a year for a sick child or the death of an immediate family member, applies once someone has worked for you for more than four months on at least four days a week.

Maternity and parental leave changed materially in October 2025. The Constitutional Court's Van Wyk judgment struck down the old split of four months for mothers and ten days for anyone else as unfair discrimination, and read in an interim replacement that already binds every employer, including households, while Parliament works on permanent legislation. A single parent, or the only one of a couple who is employed, still gets the full four consecutive months. Where both parents are employed, they now share a combined pool of four months and ten days between them, split however suits their family, with neither able to take more than that full amount alone. The leave itself is unpaid by you as the employer, your worker claims a UIF benefit instead, which is one more reason to keep UIF registration current rather than something you get around to later. Our BCEA Leave & Pay Calculator works out exactly what leave your domestic worker has built up, including the notice-period rules further down this page, in days and in rand.

Registering for UIF

If your domestic worker works for you more than 24 hours a month, and a single regular day a week almost always clears that, you must register them for UIF. Because most households aren't registered with SARS as an employer for PAYE purposes, you don't do this through SARS eFiling, you register and submit monthly declarations through uFiling, the Department of Employment and Labour's own portal built for exactly this case, or at any Labour Centre. Both you and your worker contribute 1% of gross pay each, 2% total, capped at a monthly earnings ceiling of R17,712, so R177.12 a side at most. Declare and pay by the 7th of each month, and keep the UI-19 record up to date, since it's what your worker will need to actually claim benefits later, whether that's unemployment, illness or the parental benefit above.

Registering for the Compensation Fund

This one catches people out because it has no threshold at all, not even the 24-hour UIF cut-off. Since the Constitutional Court's Mahlangu ruling in November 2020 struck down domestic workers' exclusion from workplace injury cover, every household that employs domestic help must register with the Compensation Fund within seven days of the worker starting. Registration is online at cfonline.labour.gov.za, the Department of Employment and Labour's own portal, using your own income tax number, with your home address entered as the workplace.

Each year, between 1 April and 30 June, you file a Return of Earnings declaring what you actually paid your worker, and the Fund assesses what you owe. For the 2026 assessment year the minimum annual amount for a domestic employer is R560, gazetted effective 1 March 2026, scaling up from there with what you pay, on earnings up to a ceiling of R668,000 a year. You have 30 days to pay once you get your Notice of Assessment, after which you can download a Letter of Good Standing. If you skip registration and your worker is then injured doing the job, you personally carry the full cost of the claim, with no cap, rather than the Fund.

Do you need to register for PAYE?

Usually not. Most domestic workers earn well under the annual tax threshold, R99,000 for the 2026/27 tax year, roughly R8,250 a month, so there's no PAYE to withhold and no need to register with SARS as an employer on their account. If you pay more than that, a full-time housekeeper or nanny on a higher salary, for example, you would need to register, deduct PAYE and issue an annual IRP5. Either way, this is separate from UIF and the Compensation Fund, being under the tax threshold doesn't excuse you from either of those, they run on their own rules and their own registrations.

Ending the employment relationship fairly

Where the BCEA's statutory notice periods apply, meaning your worker is over that 24-hour-a-month line, a domestic worker's notice is one week for the first six months, then four weeks from six months onward for as long as they're with you. That's a faster jump than the general BCEA scale other employees sit on, where a middle two-week tier applies from six months to a year and four weeks is only reached after a full year of service. Notice can't be given while your worker is on annual, sick, family responsibility or parental leave, if it is, the notice period only starts running once they're back. Below the 24-hour threshold, these specific notice periods don't bind you by law, though giving reasonable notice is still fair practice and worth putting in the contract regardless.

The right to a fair dismissal sits in a different Act and isn't limited by that hours threshold at all. Ending someone's employment still needs a fair reason, misconduct, incapacity, or a genuine change in your household's circumstances, and a fair process to go with it. There's no exemption for households or for how few hours someone works, a domestic worker can refer an unfair dismissal to the CCMA the same as anyone else.

If your domestic worker is a foreign national

A second, separate legal framework applies here, the Immigration Act and the Employment Services Act, on top of everything above. You may only employ someone who holds a visa or permit that actually entitles them to do that specific job, and domestic work and gardening aren't on Home Affairs' critical skills list, so a general work visa is very unlikely to be granted for this kind of role. In practice, lawful employment usually rests on the worker holding permanent residence, a spousal or life-partner visa endorsed for work, recognised refugee status, a valid asylum permit that allows work, or, for Zimbabwean nationals, a Zimbabwe Exemption Permit, valid to 29 May 2027 at the time of writing under the Minister's most recent extension, though this permit's future has moved before and is worth checking closer to the date.

The duty to check status sits with you, and it doesn't end once you've hired someone. The Immigration Act requires an ongoing, good-faith effort to verify a foreign employee's right to work, and if it's later shown that you employed someone without the right to work, the law presumes you knew at the time, unless you can show both that you acted in good faith and that you made that good-faith effort to check. Keep a copy of the passport and the relevant visa or permit, since that's the practical evidence of having checked.

Knowingly employing someone without the right to work is currently a criminal offence under the Immigration Act itself, a fine or up to a year in prison for a first conviction, a fine or up to two years for a second, and up to five years in prison with no option of a fine for a third or further conviction. A bill before Parliament, the Employment Services Amendment Bill introduced in May 2026, proposes adding specific administrative fines on top of that, up to R100,000 per undocumented worker for a first offence and up to R1 million or 10% of turnover for repeat cases, but that bill hadn't passed at the time of writing, so treat it as a direction of travel rather than the current law. None of this changes if you pay in cash and keep things informal. You're still the employer under the BCEA, UIF and Compensation Fund rules above, and you carry the immigration risk in addition to them.

Put together, that's a written contract, the minimum wage, correct leave, UIF and Compensation Fund registration, and, if your worker is a foreign national, a verified right to work, before anything else. Work out exactly what your domestic worker is owed in leave and notice with our BCEA Leave & Pay Calculator, or see every free tool on our tools and calculators page.

This article is general information to help households understand their obligations, not legal advice. Wage, UIF, Compensation Fund and tax figures are reviewed periodically and can change, and the interim parental leave arrangement described above may still be replaced by permanent legislation. Confirm current figures and your specific position with the Department of Employment and Labour, SARS or a labour law practitioner before relying on them. Last reviewed August 2026.