What you should be paying your domestic worker in South Africa in 2025

The Department of Employment and Labour has gazetted the new National Minimum Wage, hiking the minimum pay for workers by

The new National Minimum Wage is set at R28.79 per hour, up 4.4% from R27.58 in 2024. The hike is in line with inflation.

The new rate applies to all workers, including domestic and farm workers, but those on the government’s extended public works programme will receive a truncated rate of R15.83 per hour.

Contract cleaners in major and select local municipalities will have a higher rate of R31.69 per hour.

The wage translates to a weekly minimum wage of R1,295.55 (45-hour work week) and a monthly minimum of R5,613.62 (4.3 weeks) in most jobs.

The new wage is effective 1 March 2025.

The National Minimum Wage hike will likely be a mixed bag for domestic workers in South Africa.

While they will benefit from the mandatory rise in pay, the sector is also under immense pressure as private households—the biggest employers of domestic workers—have still not recovered from the past five years of strain.

This is apparent in the national jobs data from the Quarterly Labour Force Survey, as well as various household surveys gauging the financial health of consumers.

The latest QLFS showed that, despite a slight uptick in domestic worker jobs in the third quarter of 2024, the sector as a whole was still down about 150,000 jobs since the Covid-19 pandemic.

The sector has not been able to fully recover to the over 1 million domestic worker jobs seen at the end of 2019.

Household surveys run by financial institutions showed that domestic help is one of the first things households cut out when they run into financial troubles—and the past few years of low growth, high inflation and high interest rates have kept that pressure up.

Other factors—like emigration—have also affected domestic workers, with industry surveys pointing to a significant number of households dropping their employees to move overseas.

According to SweepSouth’s 2024 Domestic Worker report, 21% of domestic workers report having lost their job between 2023 and 2024.

The percentage of those who lost their jobs because their employer could no longer afford to pay them remained stable from the previous annual surveys but still accounted for a quarter of jobs (25% in 2024 compared to 25% in 2023 and 24% in 2022).

SweepSouth noted a slight drop in the percentage of employees who lost their jobs because their employer moved home, although it remained significantly higher than the previous year (34% in 2024 compared to 40% in 2023 and 25% in 2022).

On the pay front, while domestic workers should be earning R28.79 per hour—or over R5,600 if they are working full time—SweepSouth’s data showed that the actual average monthly wage was only R3,349 per month for women and R3,059 for men.

As always, the potential risks for domestic workers in 2025 are that private households could instead opt to let their domestic workers go instead of paying higher rates—or continue to underpay them and risk action.

The gazette can be read below: