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, the remote-work provisions were gazetted into South Africa's Immigration Regulations on 20 May 2024.

To allow 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; a Third Amendment to the Immigration Regulations, published in October 2024, lowered that threshold from roughly ZAR1,000,000/year to ZAR650,976/year to widen take-up.

In response to a parliamentary question, Minister Leon Schreiber disclosed that only 24 remote-work visas had been issued as of 27 March 2025 — roughly ten months after implementation — with the largest shares to applicants from the UK (6), the US and Russia (4 each), and Germany and Kenya (2 each). Daily Maverick, reporting on 24 April 2025, cited LinkedIn-based estimates that around 10,000 international remote workers were already living in South Africa without the official visa, often via repeated tourist-visa 'border runs.'

The PMG record shows Home Affairs collects applicants' addresses only on paper and cannot currently retrieve data on where remote-work visa holders actually reside. 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.