The day your first employee starts work, you become an employer in the eyes of three separate authorities at once. Each one wants a different registration, on a different portal, within a different number of days. Nobody sends you a reminder, and the clocks start whether or not you know they have.
This is the part of hiring that catches small businesses out. Not the contract, not the salary negotiation, but the fortnight afterwards when three deadlines quietly run down at different speeds. Here is what each one is, when it falls, and what it costs to be late.
The short version: Compensation Fund within 7 days, UIF within 14 days, SARS within 21 business days. If your annual payroll will be more than R500,000, the Skills Development Levy goes on the same SARS registration. Your first monthly EMP201 return is due on the 7th of the month after your first pay month.
There is no size below which this stops applying
A common and expensive assumption is that one employee, or a part-time employee, or a domestic worker, is too small to count. None of that is true. UIF and COIDA apply from the first rand you pay, to anyone working more than 24 hours a month for you. A household that employs a domestic worker three days a week is an employer under both Acts.
PAYE is the only one of the three with a genuine threshold, and it is about the employee's earnings rather than your size: you are not required to register if none of your employees earn enough to be liable for normal tax. In practice most employers register anyway, because the obligation begins the moment one person crosses that line, and backdating it is worse than registering early.
1. The Compensation Fund (COIDA): 7 days
The tightest deadline belongs to the one people have usually never heard of. Under the Compensation for Occupational Injuries and Diseases Act you must register with the Compensation Fund within seven days of becoming an employer, using form W.As.2 on the CF-Filing portal.
What you are buying is cover for your staff if they are injured or become ill because of their work. What you are avoiding is paying those costs yourself. An unregistered employer whose employee is injured on the job can be held personally liable for the medical costs and lost earnings that the Fund would otherwise have carried, and can be prosecuted on top of that. For a serious injury this is the kind of number that ends a small business.
After registration you submit an annual Return of Earnings declaring what you paid your staff, and the Fund assesses your contribution based on payroll and the risk class of your industry. A low-risk office is assessed very differently from a construction site. Our COIDA calculator estimates the assessment for your industry class.
2. UIF with the Department of Employment and Labour: 14 days
Within fourteen days of becoming an employer you must register for the Unemployment Insurance Fund. This is done on uFiling, or at a labour centre, and most people do it on SARS eFiling at the same time as PAYE because the two are linked.
UIF is 2% of the employee's remuneration, split evenly: 1% deducted from the employee and 1% paid by you as the employer, both capped at the monthly earnings ceiling. It is what funds their claim if they lose the job, go on maternity leave, or cannot work through illness. Registering is what makes those claims possible; an employee whose employer never registered discovers this at the worst possible moment.
Two practical warnings. First, UIF has to appear on the payslip as its own line item. Folding it into a combined deductions figure does not satisfy the BCEA. Second, when an employee leaves you must complete a UI-19 declaring the termination, because without it they cannot claim. Our UIF calculator works out the monthly contribution including the ceiling.
A note on uFiling: the UIF's online systems have had a difficult few years, including a six-week outage in 2024 and, more recently, an old portal that stayed online and kept ranking in search results after it stopped being a valid route for claims. If you are registering or declaring online, check that you are on the current uFiling site rather than one you reached through an old bookmark or a search result.
3. SARS for PAYE: 21 business days
SARS gives you the longest run and applies the sharpest consequences. You must register as an employer within 21 business days of becoming one, using an EMP101 on eFiling. Business days exclude weekends and public holidays, so in calendar terms this is roughly a month, and a deadline that spans the December or Easter clusters lands later than you would guess.
Registering gives you a PAYE reference number, which is what every subsequent submission hangs off. Miss it and SARS does not waive the obligation, it backdates it: the PAYE, UIF and SDL you should have deducted from the day you became an employer, plus penalties and interest on the lot. Because employees' tax is money you were supposed to hold on SARS's behalf, the business owner can be held personally liable for it. This is the registration that turns an administrative slip into a personal debt.
The Skills Development Levy, if you are big enough
SDL is the fourth item and the only one that depends on your size. It applies at 1% of total payroll once your annual payroll exceeds R500,000, which is about R41,700 a month across all staff combined. Below that you do not register for it at all.
If you are above the threshold, SDL goes on the same EMP101 as PAYE and is paid on the same monthly return, so it adds no separate admin once it is set up. It funds skills development through the SETAs, and if you submit a Workplace Skills Plan and Annual Training Report by 30 April each year you can claim a portion of it back as a mandatory grant. Our SDL calculator checks whether you cross the threshold.
What happens after you are registered
Registration is the hard part. What follows is a rhythm, and it is the same every month.
- Monthly: an EMP201 return declaring and paying the PAYE, UIF and SDL for that pay month, due on the 7th of the following month, or the last business day before it when the 7th falls on a weekend.
- Monthly: a payslip for every employee, showing gross pay, each deduction as its own line, and net pay. This is a BCEA requirement, not a courtesy.
- Twice a year: an EMP501 reconciliation tying your monthly returns back to what you actually paid people. The interim return covers March to August and is due 31 October; the annual covers the full tax year and is due 31 May.
- Annually: an IRP5 certificate for each employee, and a Return of Earnings to the Compensation Fund.
- When someone leaves: a UI-19 so they can claim from UIF.
Work out your own dates
The three deadlines are easy to state and annoying to calculate, because one is in business days and two are in calendar days, and they all run from the same start date. Rather than counting on a calendar, put your employee's first day into our hiring your first employee tool and it will give you the four dates, tell you whether SDL applies to your payroll, and name the form for each registration.
Then, when the first pay day comes around, you still have to actually pay them properly. Our free payslip generator calculates PAYE, UIF and SDL on the current SARS tables and produces a BCEA-compliant payslip, so the first thing you hand your first employee is not something you assembled in a spreadsheet at midnight.
This is general guidance, not tax advice. Deadlines here are stated as the legislation and SARS express them, and business-day counts do not account for public holidays. If your circumstances are unusual, or you are already past a deadline, speak to a registered tax practitioner. Registering late is always cheaper than not registering.