Filing season is the one time of year SARS is unavoidably on every taxpayer's calendar. Here are the 2026 dates worth pinning up, and a couple of things that catch people out every single year.
The key deadlines
- 23 October 2026 — non-provisional individual taxpayers (most employees).
- 22 January 2027 — provisional taxpayers and trusts.
- Companies — ITR14 within 12 months of financial year-end.
Auto-assessments: convenient, but check them
SARS auto-assesses a growing number of individual taxpayers using data from employers, banks and medical schemes. It's genuinely convenient — but it's only as complete as the third-party data SARS holds. If you have deductions SARS doesn't know about (home office, retirement annuity top-ups, medical costs not on the scheme's certificate, rental losses), accepting the auto-assessment as-is can mean overpaying. Always review before you accept.
Provisional taxpayers: filing season isn't your only deadline
If you're a provisional taxpayer, the October/January filing dates are separate from your provisional payments (end August and end February for February year-ends). It's easy to breathe out after filing and forget the next provisional payment is around the corner.
The cost of being late
Administrative penalties for late income tax returns are levied per month, per return outstanding, and they mount fast — especially where multiple years are late. If you're behind, the move is to file voluntarily and get current, not to hope it goes unnoticed. It doesn't.
Get ahead of it
The taxpayers who find filing season painless are the ones whose records are already current when it opens. That's the whole argument for keeping your books up to date all year — see our SA tax dates page for the full calendar.