Another Farming tool, this one for the diesel rebate, officially the diesel refund, that farmers, foresters and miners claim on VAT201.
The reason this needed its own tool rather than a quick sum on paper is 1 April 2026. Before that date, on-land claims were capped at 80 percent of eligible diesel. From that date it moved to 100 percent. If your VAT period covers both sides of that change, and plenty of farmers’ April returns do, you cannot just add March and April together. SARS’s own policy, SE-DSL-02, sets out a specific method, scale the March litres by a factor built from both the old and new rate and the old and new eligible share, add that to April’s litres, then apply the current rate once to the combined total. Get that wrong and you either under-claim or, worse, over-claim and have SARS query it later.
This tool does that exact calculation and shows every step, not just the final number. There is a one-click button that loads SARS’s own worked example straight from the policy document and reproduces its stated result, R52,751, to the rand, so you can check the tool against the source before you trust it with your own figures. A simpler tab covers a period that sits entirely on one side of a rate change, which is most claims most of the time.
It also carries a rate history table, since the on-land rate has genuinely moved five times in 2026 alone, a temporary fuel levy relief phased in and then unwound on top of the 1 April change. Every row in that table is sourced straight from its own Government Gazette notice.
Two things it deliberately does not do. It does not decide what counts as eligible versus non-eligible diesel, that judgement and your logbook stay yours. And it does not fill in or submit your VAT201, it just gives you the rand figure to check your own numbers against.
If you claim this rebate, I would value a sanity check, does the maths match what your accountant or fleet system gives you for a period spanning a rate change, and is the current rate showing correctly for whenever you read this. Happy to fix anything that looks off.