Tractor Fuel Consumption & Farm Diesel Cost Calculator (South Africa)

It depends far more on how hard the tractor is working than on how big it is. As a rule of thumb, a tractor at full load burns about 0.32 litres for every rated PTO kilowatt-hour, so a 90 kW tractor pulling hard is in the region of 20 to 25 litres an hour, while the same tractor on a boom sprayer might use half that. The South African Department of Agriculture guide to machinery costs puts it a slightly different way, at 0.30 litres per kilowatt-hour on a high power demand job using 60 percent of the engine's kilowatts, 0.35 at medium demand on 45 percent, and 0.40 at low demand on 35 percent. The calculator above will work out a figure from your tractor's kilowatt rating and the job, but the number worth having is your own: fill the tank, work a measured number of hours, fill it again and divide.

Ploughing is the heavy one. Published figures put mouldboard ploughing near 21 litres a hectare, chisel ploughing near 11, disking near 7, planting between about 4 and 6, spraying under 2, and combining near 11. Soil matters enormously: on clay and clay loam, primary tillage can take 35 to 45 percent more diesel than the same job on loam, and on sand it takes 15 to 20 percent less. Add the passes up over a season and a conventional maize programme lands somewhere near 60 to 65 litres a hectare, which is close to the roughly 60 litres a hectare Grain SA gives as a typical grain farm's annual use. The second tab above builds this up pass by pass and adjusts for your soil.

From 1 Jul 2026 the on-land rate for farming, forestry and mining is 382.2 cents a litre, which is R3.822 a litre, claimed on 100 percent of eligible litres since 1 April 2026. On inland 50ppm diesel at R26.41 a litre that is about 14 percent of what you pay, so a farm burning 20 000 litres a season gets back roughly R76 440. Be careful with figures you find elsewhere: several widely read articles still quote 366 cents a litre and describe the rate as unchanged since 2023, and others quote a saving of R5.80 to R6.20 a litre. Neither matches the Government Gazette. The rate moved five times between April and July 2026. The table below gives each rate with its own notice.

No, and this is the question most farmers get wrong in the hopeful direction. Diesel is zero rated for VAT in South Africa under section 11(1)(h) of the VAT Act, as a fuel levy good, precisely so that it is not taxed twice on top of the fuel levy and Road Accident Fund levy already in the price. There is no VAT in the price of the diesel, so there is no input VAT to claim back on it. What can carry VAT is a separately charged delivery or call-out fee, and if your supplier bills that as its own line you claim the input VAT on that line in the ordinary way. This calculator therefore has no VAT step, and says so on the price ladder, because quietly dividing your diesel price by 1.15 would flatter every figure on the page by about 13 percent.

Under SARS external policy SE-DSL-02, you must be registered as a VAT vendor, be registered for the diesel refund itself by completing the RAV01 form on eFiling, be carrying on farming, forestry or mining on land, keep a detailed logbook of all diesel purchases, storage and usage, and be both the buyer and the user of the diesel. In practice the storage logbook requirement means bulk diesel delivered into your own tank, with a record for each receipt into storage and a separate usage record per vehicle or engine drawing from it. Diesel burnt on a public road is not eligible, and for those trips our Trip Fuel Cost Calculator is the right tool instead. Claims go through Part C of your ordinary VAT201 return and must be submitted within two years of the purchase date, and the records must be kept for five years.

Whatever your own delivery note says, which for most farms is a bulk delivered price rather than a pump price. Diesel is not price controlled at the pump in South Africa, unlike petrol, so there is no single correct national figure to fall back on. What is published is a wholesale list price, by zone and by grade, and that is what the buttons in the calculator load as a starting point, August 2026 figures from the Fuels Industry Association of South Africa. Your delivered price will differ from it, usually upward for transport and downward for volume, and an emergency delivery can carry a premium of several rand a litre on top. Put in your real number and the whole page updates.

Yes, on the right jobs, and the effect is well documented. Changing up a gear and dropping the engine revs while holding the same ground speed keeps the work rate the same but moves the engine into a more efficient part of its map. Dropping revs about 20 percent typically cuts the burn by 11 to 14 percent on a lightly loaded tractor. The two conditions matter though. It only applies on light work, generally under about 65 percent of full power, so it does nothing for you while ploughing. And it cannot be used on anything driven off the power take off, a baler, a mower conditioner, a silage chopper, because those need the engine held at 540 or 1000 PTO rpm and slowing them down damages the job and the driveline. The calculator above works out the saving where it applies and tells you why it does not where it does not.

Soil, tillage system, implement matching and the operator, roughly in that order. The tillage system is the biggest lever a farmer actually controls: a South African trial at Cedara measured 53.4 litres a hectare to establish maize conventionally with a disc, plough and disc, against 20.3 litres a hectare under no-till, which is a two and a half times difference on the same crop. Read the rest of that trial before you reach for the ripper though. The no-till treatment needed a glyphosate spray and an extra 40 kg of nitrogen a hectare, and once those were counted its total establishment cost came out much the same. Diesel is one line in the budget, not the budget.

No, deliberately. It costs diesel and nothing else. A full machinery cost takes in ownership and depreciation, repairs and maintenance, tyres, oil and labour, and on a typical machinery budget fuel is only somewhere around a sixth of the total. Keeping fuel on its own makes it possible to answer fuel questions cleanly, what a pass costs, what a price rise costs, what the refund is worth, without those answers being swallowed by assumptions about the tractor's purchase price and your hours a year. For a full machinery cost, the Department of Agriculture publishes a Guide for Machinery Costs.

No, and this trips people up because a lot of what you read online is written for other countries. In the United Kingdom and the United States there is a physically different, dyed fuel, red diesel or off road diesel, sold at a lower price at the point of sale for agricultural use, and putting it in a road vehicle is an offence you can be caught for with a dipstick. South Africa does not work that way. You buy ordinary diesel at the ordinary price, the same fuel a truck buys, and you claim the fuel levy and Road Accident Fund levy portions back afterwards through Part C of your VAT201 return. That is why SARS policy SE-DSL-02 requires you to be the buyer and the user and to keep purchase, storage and usage logbooks: the whole scheme is a claim back on fuel you have already paid full price for, so the paperwork is what proves the diesel went into a tractor rather than a bakkie on the N1. If a page tells you to ask your supplier for dyed rebate diesel in South Africa, it is describing a system this country does not have.

For diesel alone, mouldboard ploughing runs near 21 litres a hectare on loam, which at the current inland price is roughly R553 a hectare before the SARS refund and about R473 after it. On clay or clay loam add 35 to 45 percent, which is most of the Highveld. Two warnings about that number though. It is fuel only, so it excludes labour, repairs, tyres and the tractor itself, and on a typical machinery budget fuel is only around a sixth of the total cost of the pass. And a contractor quoting you a rate per hectare is quoting all of it plus margin, so their figure will be several times the diesel line. Use the second tab above to build your own pass by pass and the answer comes out for your soil, your hectares and your diesel price. For a full machinery cost including ownership, the Department of Agriculture publishes a Guide for Machinery Costs.

Partly, and the page is explicit about which is which. The tillage system comparison is South African, measured at Cedara in KwaZulu-Natal and published by the provincial Department of Agriculture and Rural Development. The power demand bands, the field capacity formula and the Highveld altitude note come from the national Department of Agriculture guide to machinery costs. The per-operation litres a hectare table is published in a South African machinery management text but the underlying survey is a two year study of farmers in Nebraska, so it is indicative rather than local, and it is labelled that way. The soil adjustment exists precisely so those figures can be pulled toward your own conditions, and your own fuel records beat all of them.