SASSA to spend R290-billion on social grants this year

Grants make up 11% of government spending, the same as 20 years ago

Chart by The Outlier. Text by Marecia Damons.

23 October 2026

This is the latest in a short series looking back at 20 years of SASSA.

Finance minister Enoch Godongwana announced on Wednesday that the government will spend just under R290-billion on social grants this financial year.

20 years ago, when SASSA began operating, government spent R57-billion on social grants, which is the equivalent of R156-billion in today’s money. So when taking inflation into account, spending on social grants will have grown by about 86% between 2006/07 and 2026/27.

But as a percentage of total government spending, social grants expenditure has stayed the same at 11.2% since 2006. It was 2.8% of gross domestic product in 2006/07 and 3.6% in 2025/26.

The number of people receiving grants has doubled over the past twenty years, from 12-million in 2006/07 to about 26.2-million in 2026/27. A quarter of South Africans received a grant then; 40% do today.

One of the fastest periods of growth was between 2009 and 2012, when the child support grant was extended to older children. And the addition of the Covid Social Relief of Distress (SRD) grant, currently valued at R370 a month, added about 8-million people to the grant system.

The SRD grant was intended to provide temporary assistance to people without income during the pandemic. But it has been extended multiple times, most recently on Wednesday until March 2028. It is likely to be replaced by a grant that also helps connect people to job opportunities.

But government now expects beneficiary numbers to fall.

According to Treasury’s policy statement published on Wednesday, the number of grant beneficiaries (excluding the SRD grant) is projected to fall to 17.1-million in 2029/30 as verification is tightened, saving R6.2-billion.

Between April and September this year, 300,000 fewer children were receiving the child support grant than expected. The number of people who have been receiving the SRD grant this financial year is also about 300,000 less than was projected. Because of this, the government will spend about R3-billion less on social grants this financial year than was previously budgeted.

Grant values have mostly kept pace with inflation: