Lifestyle

What you should be paying your domestic worker in 2026

Staff Writer

 ·14 Dec 2025

The National Minimum Wage Commission has recommended that South Africa’s national minimum pay for domestic workers be increased by CPI+1.5% in 2026.

If accepted by the Department of Employment and Labour for implementation, this would see the national minimum hourly rate increase by around 5%.

The current legislated minimum wage is set to R28.79 per hour, which affects approximately 5.5 million workers.

With CPI on track to average around 3.5% in 2025, the National Minimum Wage could increase by about 5% to reach R30.23 in 2026.

The final CPI adjustment will be based on the CPI reading the six weeks before the effective date of the hike—1 March 2026—but economic forecasts see the rate sticking around these averages.

The projections remain an estimate with the final announcement still to come.

However, at a projected R30.23 an hour, a person working a typical 38-hour week should receive a minimum salary of ~R1,149 per week. The minimum salary for a person working a 45-hour week would increase to ~R1,360 per week.

Looking at a typical work month of 160 hours, the national minimum pay should be ~R4,840 per month, up R240 from R4,600 in 2025.

This means that South African households employing a domestic worker will have to adjust their budgets to accommodate the hikes and bring their pay in line with the coming changes.

Notably, under South Africa’s NMW laws, employers are required to pay at least a minimum for four hours of work a day, regardless of how many hours under that number they have worked.

So the true minimum wage will be around R121 per day, up from R115 in 2025.

Domestic worker pay under pressure

While domestic workers have been brought under the full National Minimum Wage laws since 2022, pay data from various sources indicate that the reality on the ground has not quite matched up.

On the bottom end of the scale, Stats SA’s data on median salaries in South Africa recorded the mid-point of domestic worker salaries at R2,350 a month, or R14.69 in a 160-hour work month.

The Stats SA data shows that many domestic workers earn almost half of what is currently set as the national minimum.

Further pointing to the fluctuations in the data, self-reporting salary aggregator MyWage.co.za shows a wide range of salaries, depending on years worked.

Those starting out report earnings just under R2,600 a month—in line with Stat’s SA’s median—while an experienced cleaner working for higher-paying households could see earnings over R7,300 a month.

One of the most comprehensive datasets available on domestic worker pay comes from SweepSouth.

The group’s 2025 domestic worker survey revealed that domestic workers in the country earn a median wage of R3,932 per month. This is lower than the R4,600 minimum set in law.

Domestic workers on the Sweepsouth platform fare much better, earning a median salary of R5,545 per month, exceeding the minimum.

The picture shifts on a per-hour basis, given the often informal and “gig” nature of domestic work.

Here, Sweepsouth’s data showed that domestic workers are earning above this, with the average paid at about R33.71 per hour, but this was lower than 2024’s rate.

On a monthly basis, the data shows that wages fall short by some margin, meaning the NMW is not having the real-world impact that it aims for.