We have entered the fourth quarter, and with it the beginning of the end of 2026. With just under three months remaining in what has been a busy year across the board, we take stock of the immigration landscape and look into the crystal ball to see what the new year may hold.
It is often said that the night is darkest just before the dawn. The closing months of this year will test applicants, employers and the Department of Home Affairs alike; yet there are signs that a new day for South Africa’s immigration system is breaking on the horizon.
The year-end rush, and why it will not work this year
As with every year, the fourth quarter is the busiest period for our industry. Most visas expire towards the end of the year, so practitioners are ordinarily in the throes of a flurry of submissions.
The pressure intensifies in the final weeks of December. Applicants compete for the few appointments still available at VFS Global before the year closes, and with those appointments goes any chance of a timely renewal.
This year is different. The Department is now strictly enforcing the 60 day rule in regulation 9(2) of the Immigration Regulations, 2014, which requires applications for the renewal of a visa, or for a change of conditions, to be submitted at least 60 days before the current visa expires. An application lodged inside that window is exposed to rejection, however strong it may otherwise be.
A last minute rush will therefore not solve the problem. If anything, it will produce a busy January filled with appeals that cannot succeed, because the defect lies in the timing of the application rather than in its contents.
Nor will Directive 7 of 2026 provide a safety net. Its protection extends only to applications that were already pending when it was signed on 30 March 2026; a renewal submitted this quarter falls outside it entirely.
Our advice is direct: if your visa expires in December, your application should be submitted in October. If it expires in January or February 2027, preparation should begin now.
The backlog: the same template, the same outcome
South Africa remains in the throes of a visa backlog. On 30 March 2026, the Minister signed Immigration Directive 7 of 2026, which took effect on 1 April 2026 and followed Directive 22 of 2025. It extends, until 30 June 2027, the current status of applicants whose waiver, long-term visa or appeal applications were pending at the date of signature, and allows them to depart and re-enter during that period without being declared undesirable.
The concession has important limits. It applies only to persons who were legally admitted, applied through VFS Global and can produce a verifiable receipt. Permanent residence applicants are excluded and must keep their status valid throughout. Appeals against the rejection of a visitor’s visa renewal pending for more than three months were also excluded, with those applicants required to depart by 30 April 2026. Applicants from countries that are not visa exempt must obtain a port of entry visa before returning. Most significantly, the concession falls away the moment an outcome is received, and the applicant must comply with that decision forthwith.
The scale of the problem is now on record. On 26 August 2026, the Department briefed Parliament’s Select Committee on Security and Justice, reporting 21 847 pending appeals as at 28 July 2026, of which 13 148, or 60,2%, were overdue. The Department puts its processing capacity at 13 000 to 15 000 applications a month and has set a target of clearing all overdue applications by 31 March 2027.
The decisions now emerging from the Department, however, are largely rejections. Under the Directive, a rejection ends the applicant’s protection on the day it is received, and a new appeal lodged now does not restore it, because the concession covers only appeals pending on 30 March 2026. Rather than clearing the backlog, this approach moves it from one workstream to another, from first instance adjudication to an appeals queue that is already more than 60% overdue.
We have seen this template before. When the war on the backlog was declared in 2024, a large volume of decisions was issued in a short space of time, many of them rejections without proper basis. The result was a fresh backlog of appeals. Victory was declared prematurely, and less than a year later the system was clogged once again.
The template does not work, and Parliament appears to agree. The Committee welcomed the Department’s progress, but cautioned that the objective must be genuine end-to-end resolution, “rather than simply moving applications from one queue to another”. The Department itself identified fragmented processes, poor data integration and capacity constraints among the causes of delay.
The backlog is not a capacity problem that can be cleared with a sprint; it is structural. It calls for a serious rethinking of the immigration process and of the objectives that process is meant to serve.
Changes on the horizon
The finalisation and publication of the White Paper on Citizenship, Immigration and Refugee Protection earlier this year signalled a real intent to change South Africa’s immigration law. In various corridors of power, we are keenly aware of the hard work under way to bring the new regime proposed in the White Paper into being.
The timeline for draft legislation and public participation is yet to be confirmed. Employers, investors and families should nonetheless plan on the basis that the rules will change, and should build that expectation into their mobility and relocation strategies for 2027 and beyond.
A new day
The year ahead may well be the year in which the structural reform our system needs finally takes shape. Until then, the fundamentals remain unchanged: submit early, submit completely, and do not leave your status to chance in the closing weeks of December.
If your visa, or that of an employee or family member, expires before the end of February 2027, contact Immigration Specialists today so that we can plan your submission well within the 60 day window.