South Africa's Remote Work Visitor Visa

President Cyril Ramaphosa first flagged a "digital nomad visa" in his February 2022 State of the Nation Address. After repeated delays, criticised by opposition parties for the lack of progress, the remote-work provisions were gazetted into South Africa's Immigration Regulations on 20 May 2024, allowing foreign nationals employed by or contracted to a company based outside South Africa to obtain a long-stay visa to work remotely from the country for up to three years.

The visa requires proof of foreign-sourced income. In a Third Amendment to the Immigration Regulations under Minister Leon Schreiber, published in October 2024, Home Affairs lowered that threshold from the equivalent of roughly ZAR 1,000,000/year to ZAR 650,976/year, in an attempt to widen take-up.

In response to a parliamentary question from Rise Mzansi leader Songezo Zibi, recorded by the Parliamentary Monitoring Group (PMG), Minister Schreiber disclosed that only 24 remote-work visas had been issued as of 27 March 2025 — roughly ten months after the visa's implementation — with the largest shares going to applicants from the United Kingdom (6), the United States and Russia (4 each), and Germany and Kenya (2 each). Daily Maverick, which first reported the figure on 24 April 2025, noted LinkedIn-based estimates that around 10,000 international remote workers were already living in South Africa without the official visa, often extending their stay through repeated tourist-visa "border runs" instead. The PMG record of the department's own reply also shows that Home Affairs collects applicants' addresses only on paper and cannot currently retrieve data on where remote-work visa holders actually reside in the country.

South Africa illustrates a common failure mode for this class of policy: a two-year gap between political announcement and legal implementation, an income threshold and application process that made the formal route unattractive relative to informal alternatives, and no published data on why take-up is low or how many applicants abandoned the process. It is included here as an honest example of a remote-worker visa that has not yet achieved its stated aim, alongside more successful cases in this catalogue.

Read the full analysis: https://pmg.org.za/committee-question/28967/