What the 2026/27 SARS tax tables change for your payroll

SARS published the 2026/27 personal income tax tables in March. For most payroll teams the headline reads: no bracket changes, small rebate bump, threshold adjustments. That’s the calm version. The longer version has a few wrinkles worth knowing.

What actually moved

The headline numbers:

• Primary rebate rose from R 17 235 to R 18 110.
• Secondary rebate (age 65+) is now R 9 750.
• Tertiary rebate (age 75+) is now R 3 250.
• Tax thresholds moved up correspondingly — R 100 611 for under-65s, R 156 027 for 65+, R 174 547 for 75+.

The marginal rate brackets did not move. So if your salary band hasn’t changed, your marginal rate hasn’t either.

The wrinkle: medical scheme tax credits

Medical scheme fees tax credits (MTC) ticked up slightly:

• Main member: R 372 / month (was R 364)
• First dependant: R 372 / month
• Each additional dependant: R 251 / month

If you have employees on company medical aid where the company contributes, your fringe-benefit calculation will shift by a few cents per employee. Small per-person, real at the org level.

What payloop has already done

If you’re a payloop customer you don’t need to do anything. Our tax engine pulls from a single source of truth and:

• The new rebates and thresholds went live on 1 March 2026.
• The MTC adjustments are applied automatically for any employee with a medical-aid record.
• Your prior-month diff view will flag any unexpected movements so you can sanity-check the first run of the new tax year.

Sense-check your March payroll

A quick checklist for the first run of the year:

1. Compare each employee’s March net pay to February. The change should be small and consistent.
2. Confirm that employees who crossed an age threshold (turning 65 or 75 in the tax year) have the right rebate applied from the first run after their birthday.
3. If you offer salary sacrifice for retirement, the cap is now 27.5% of remuneration up to R 350 000 / year — no change, but a good year-start sanity check.

A note on EMP201

The EMP201 schema is unchanged for 2026/27 — same fields, same submission format. The values you submit will shift slightly because of the rebate movement, but the form is identical.

If you generate EMP201 from payloop, the new values are baked in. If you do it yourself, the numbers should now match what your payroll system calculates — if they don’t, the most common cause is a stale rebate value somewhere in your formula.