SARS deadlines for filing season 2026, and what happens if you miss them

SARS opened the 2026 filing season on 1 July 2026. The dates below cover the 2026 year of assessment, which ran from 1 March 2025 to 28 February 2026.

Auto-assessments

SARS issued around six million auto-assessments in the first two weeks of July. If you received one and agree with it, there is nothing further to do.

Agreeing with it is a decision, not a default. An auto-assessment is built from third-party data — employers, medical schemes, retirement funds, banks. It will not include a deduction SARS has no record of. Home office expenses, travel claimed against a logbook, retirement annuity contributions made outside a fund that reported them, and donations to a section 18A organisation are all common omissions.

If any of those apply, file a return rather than accepting the assessment. The deadline for doing so is the same as the ordinary filing deadline for your category.

A change worth noting this year: for the first time SARS extended auto-assessments to some provisional taxpayers. If you are one and you need to amend, your deadline is 22 January 2027.

The recurring deadlines

Filing season gets the attention, but for a trading business the monthly and bi-monthly obligations cause more penalties.

• EMP201 — PAYE, UIF and SDL, by the 7th of the following month.
• VAT201 — by the 25th of the month following the tax period if you file manually, or the last business day of that month if you file and pay through eFiling.
• EMP501 interim reconciliation — covering 1 March to 31 August, due 31 October.
• EMP501 annual reconciliation — covering the full tax year, due 31 May.
• IRP6 first provisional payment — 31 August for a February year-end.
• IRP6 second provisional payment — last business day of February.

What late filing costs

Administrative non-compliance penalties for outstanding income tax returns are fixed monthly amounts scaled to taxable income, running from R250 to R16 000 per month. The penalty recurs every month the return remains outstanding, for up to 35 months.

That structure is the important part. The penalty is not a single charge for being late. A return left unfiled for a year attracts twelve of them.

Interest on unpaid tax runs separately, at the prescribed rate, and is not deductible.

Before you file

A few checks that prevent the most common delays:

• Confirm your banking details on eFiling are current. A closed account is the single most common reason a refund stalls.
• Check that no prior-year return is outstanding. SARS will withhold a refund against an unfiled year.
• Make sure your IRP5 and medical scheme certificates have actually been submitted by the third parties. If the data is missing, filing early simply means filing incomplete.
• Have your logbook ready if you are claiming travel. A claim without one will not survive verification.

If you are already behind

Outstanding returns from earlier years do not go away, and the monthly penalty keeps accruing while they sit. Bringing them up to date is almost always cheaper than waiting, and where the failure has a reasonable explanation there are remission processes available.

If you have returns outstanding and are not sure where you stand, we can pull your full compliance status from SARS and give you the position in writing.