Company compliance calendar for South African businesses
Register a company in South Africa and you join a schedule. CIPC (the Companies and Intellectual Property Commission, the body you registered the company with), SARS (the South African Revenue Service) and the Department of Employment and Labour each want certain forms by certain dates, every year, for as long as the company exists. Nobody hands you that schedule on registration day. Most first-time owners meet it the way you meet a pothole: when something has already gone wrong.
The cost of finding out late is real. CIPC deregisters companies that miss two annual returns in a row, and a deregistered company loses its bank account, its contracts and its legal right to trade. SARS charges admin penalties by the month for late returns. None of it is hard once you can see the whole year at once. That is what this page is.
Below is every filing a registered company in South Africa can owe, grouped by how often it comes around: monthly, twice a year, once a year, and once-off filings triggered by an event. Not every company owes all of them. If you have no employees and you are not registered for VAT (Value-Added Tax), your year is short. Hire one person or cross the VAT threshold and the calendar fills up fast.
Govchain Filings keeps this calendar for the companies on its books, sends a reminder before each due date, and files what is on the plan. This guide is the plain-language version of that calendar, so you can see exactly what your own business owes.
How to read this calendar
Two companies registered on the same day can have completely different deadlines. Most filing dates are tied to your own company's dates, the day it was incorporated and the last day of its financial year, not to a fixed national date. There is no single "tax day" for companies. So the useful question is never "when is the deadline" in the abstract. It is "when is the deadline for my company".
Each filing below lists four things: what it is, when it is due, who actually has to file it, and what missing it costs. Work down the list, cross off the ones that do not apply to you, and what is left is your calendar.
Every month: filings for employers and VAT vendors
Monthly filings only start once you have staff on a payroll or you are registered for VAT. A solo company with neither can skip this whole section.
EMP201, the monthly employer declaration
EMP201 is the form that tells SARS how much PAYE (pay-as-you-earn, the income tax you withhold from employees' salaries), UIF (Unemployment Insurance Fund contributions) and skills development levy you collected for the month. It is due by the 7th of the following month. If the 7th falls on a weekend or public holiday, file by the last business day before it.
Who files it: any company with at least one person on the payroll, including a director who pays themselves a salary. If you are getting to this point for the first time, the steps to register as an employer with SARS come first.
Miss it and SARS adds 10% of the amount due, plus interest running from the day after the due date.
VAT201, your VAT return
VAT201 reports the VAT you charged customers against the VAT you paid suppliers, and settles the difference with SARS. The deadline depends on your VAT category, but for most small companies filing on SARS eFiling it is the 25th of the month after the period, or the last business day of that month.
Who files it: VAT-registered companies only.
A late VAT201 carries a 10% penalty plus monthly interest. SARS treats repeat VAT offences seriously, and persistent non-payment can move from penalties into criminal prosecution.
Twice a year: provisional tax
Provisional tax is not a separate tax. It is income tax paid in advance, in two instalments, so SARS is not waiting twelve months for a company's full-year bill. Every company registered for income tax is a provisional taxpayer, even a small or quiet one.
IRP6, the first provisional return
The first IRP6 is an estimate of the company's taxable income for the first half of its financial year. It is due six months into that year. You estimate the profit, the form works out the tax, and you pay half of it now. Get the estimate badly wrong on the low side and SARS can add a 20% under-estimation penalty, plus interest.
IRP6, the second provisional return
The second IRP6 is due on the last day of the financial year. By now you have a much clearer picture, so this estimate should be close to the real number. The same 20% under-estimation penalty applies if it is materially low, and filing the return itself late triggers a 10% admin penalty on top. Provisional tax is the filing that quietly turns from an admin task into a business threat when an owner keeps putting it off, mostly because there is no customer chasing it.
Once a year: the filings that get companies deregistered
These are the dangerous ones. Not because they are hard, but because they are annual, easy to forget, and the penalty for ignoring them can be the company itself.
The CIPC annual return
The CIPC annual return is how CIPC confirms the company is still active. It updates CIPC on your directors, address and turnover, and it carries a filing fee. It is due within 30 business days of your incorporation anniversary, the date the company was first registered.
This is not your tax return. It is a common and expensive mix-up: the CIPC annual return and the SARS company income tax return are two different filings, to two different bodies, on two different dates. Doing one does nothing for the other.
The late fee runs from R150 to R4,000 depending on turnover and how late you are. CIPC has adjusted these fee bands before, so check the current fee on the CIPC site before you pay. The fee is the smaller problem. Miss two annual returns and CIPC begins deregistration. A deregistered company is, legally, no longer a company.
The beneficial ownership filing
Who files it: every company registered with CIPC. There is no exemption for small or dormant ones. If the rules are new to you, Govchain has a fuller guide to beneficial ownership.
The penalty has teeth. CIPC can impose administrative fines of up to 10% of turnover or R1 million, and a company without a beneficial ownership filing can have its annual return rejected and slide toward deregistration.
ITR14, the company income tax return
ITR14 is the company's annual income tax return. It reports the full year's income and expenses, and reconciles the actual tax owed against the two provisional payments already made. It is due within 12 months of the company's financial year-end. For a closer look at how the income tax return and the provisional payments fit together, see which company tax returns fall due, and when.
Skip it and SARS charges an admin penalty between R250 and R16,000 for every month the return is outstanding, scaled to the company's taxable income, with interest running until it is filed.
EMP501, the annual employer reconciliation
EMP501 reconciles a full year of monthly EMP201 filings against the IRP5 and IT3(a) tax certificates issued to employees. It is the filing that lets your staff do their own tax returns. The deadline is 31 May each year, one of the few fixed national dates on this calendar.
Who files it: any company that had employees during the year.
A late EMP501 costs 1% of the total PAYE withheld for the year, charged for each month it is late, up to a 10% ceiling.
Triggered by an event: filings with no fixed date
The last group has no annual rhythm. Each one is set off by something happening: registering the company, hiring someone, crossing a turnover line. The deadline is short and counts from the trigger, which is exactly why these get missed.
Appointing your SARS registered representative
Within 30 days of registering the company, a director has to be appointed as its SARS registered representative, the person SARS recognises as speaking for the company. Until that is done, nobody can access the company on SARS eFiling and SARS correspondence goes nowhere. There is no rand penalty here. The penalty is being locked out of every other filing on this list.
Registering for VAT
VAT registration becomes compulsory once a company's taxable turnover passes R2.3 million in any rolling 12-month period, and it must be done within 21 days of crossing that line. You can register voluntarily from R50,000 of turnover. Trade above the threshold without registering and SARS can claim up to 200% of the VAT you should have charged, plus interest, with prosecution on the table.
Registering as an employer
Before the first employee is paid, a company has to register as an employer for PAYE and UIF with SARS, file UIF declarations with the Department of Employment and Labour, and register with the Compensation Fund under COIDA (the Compensation for Occupational Injuries and Diseases Act, which covers workers injured on the job). Skip the COIDA registration and the fines reach R10,000, and directors can be held personally liable for an injured worker's compensation claim.
CIPC amendments
Any change to the company's registered details, whether directors, registered address, share structure or the company name, has to be filed with CIPC within 30 business days of the change. Stale CIPC records cause real problems: other filings get rejected because the details do not match, and an out-of-date company is harder to bank, audit and contract with.
What does a compliant year actually look like?
It depends entirely on the company. Two examples.
A consulting company with one director, no other staff and turnover under the VAT threshold owes very little: one CIPC annual return, one beneficial ownership filing, two IRP6 provisional returns and one ITR14. Five filings in a year, none of them monthly. If the director draws a salary, add a monthly EMP201 and an annual EMP501.
Now take a company with three employees and VAT registration. It still owes all of the above, and on top of it files an EMP201 and a VAT201 every single month. That is 24 extra filings a year before you count the annual ones. Same Companies Act, very different calendars. The point of seeing them grouped like this is that you can work out which company is yours.
Where business owners trip up
A few mistakes do most of the damage.
The most common is treating the CIPC annual return as optional because the company is dormant. It is not. A company with no income and no activity still owes its annual return, its beneficial ownership filing and, usually, a nil income tax return. Dormancy is not the same as being closed, which is why owners who are genuinely finished with a company are often better off deregistering it on purpose than letting it lapse.
The second is the anniversary problem. The annual return is due on the company's own incorporation date, so there is no national reminder and no shared deadline in the news. It is not a small effect. Of the roughly 125,000 companies in Govchain's records with an incorporation date on file, those dates land in every month of the year, from about 5,800 in December to 12,600 in May. A March-registered company and a September-registered one are on entirely different clocks, and a busy owner simply forgets the date.
Then there is the registered representative gap. New owners spend a day registering the company, feel finished, and never appoint the SARS representative. Months later they try to file something and find they cannot log in.
And there is ignored post. CIPC and SARS still send notices, and a notice about a missed filing or a pending deregistration is easy to scroll past in a full inbox until the next stage arrives. If a deregistration has already started, do not assume it is too late. Companies can often be reinstated, though that is slower and more expensive than simply filing on time.
A few common questions
Does a dormant company really have to file? Yes. As long as the company is registered, CIPC and SARS expect its annual return, beneficial ownership filing and income tax return. The returns may be nil, but they still have to be submitted.
What happens the first time I miss a deadline? Usually a penalty and interest, not a catastrophe. One late EMP201 or one late annual return is recoverable. The damage comes from the pattern: repeated misses, two skipped annual returns, a VAT registration years overdue. Fix the first miss quickly and it stays small.
Can someone else handle all of this for me? Yes, and that is the point of the next section.
Stop keeping this calendar in your head
You can run this yourself. Plenty of owners do, with a wall planner, a set of phone reminders tied to the incorporation date and financial year-end, and the discipline to act on every CIPC and SARS email.
Or you can hand it over. Govchain Filings connects to CIPC and SARS, tracks every deadline on this page against your company's own dates, sends a reminder before each one, prepares the filing for you to approve, and submits it. Annual returns, beneficial ownership, provisional and income tax, employer reconciliations and company amendments, in one place with one clear view of what your business owes and when.
If you already have a registered company, you can move it onto Govchain Filings and it picks up the calendar from there. Govchain has registered more than 80,000 South African companies and tracks filing calendars for many more.