Every free VAT tool in South Africa answers a question nobody is really asking. Threshold checkers tell you whether you are allowed to register. Add-or-remove-15% calculators do arithmetic you could do on your phone. Neither tells you whether registering would leave you better or worse off, which below R2.3 million a year is a genuine business decision rather than a legal duty. So I built one that does.
Who your customers are matters more than your turnover. This is the part that actually settles it. If your customers are VAT-registered businesses, they claim back every rand you charge them, so your price with 15% added costs them exactly what it costs them today. You pass it on in full, keep your revenue intact, and still reclaim the VAT on your own costs. If your customers are private consumers, they cannot claim a cent, so you either raise prices about 15% or hold your price and give up roughly 13% of your revenue on those sales. Same turnover, opposite answer.
You get back 15/115 of your costs, not 15%. This trips up nearly everyone, including a lot of published guides. Because you are not registered, the prices you already pay include VAT, so the VAT is inside the price rather than on top of it. R115,000 of VATable costs returns R15,000, not R17,250. Treating it as 15% overstates the case for registering by 15% every single time.
And not all costs carry VAT at all. Salaries and wages carry none, and neither do interest, petrol and diesel, municipal rates or residential rent. A consultancy whose costs are mostly people recovers almost nothing. A retailer buying stock recovers a great deal. The tool asks for that share separately instead of pretending every rand of expenses is claimable.
The payments basis is closed to companies, and almost nobody mentions this. On the default invoice basis you owe SARS the VAT as soon as you invoice, whether or not you have been paid, so a slow-paying debtor book means you finance SARS as well as your customer. The payments basis removes that, but SARS restricts it to sole proprietors and partnerships of individuals under R2.5 million. The VAT 404 guide puts it plainly: juristic persons and trust funds do not qualify. If you trade through a Pty Ltd, the invoice basis is your only option at any turnover.
It also runs the decision backwards. When the threshold rose from R1 million to R2.3 million on 1 April 2026, a lot of vendors became free to deregister. The catch is section 8(2): on your last day as a vendor, every asset you still hold is deemed to have been supplied back to you, valued at the lower of cost or market value, and you account for output VAT of 15/115 on it. On R230,000 of stock and equipment that is a R30,000 bill on the way out. Switch the tool to deregistration mode and it works out both the annual saving and how many months that exit bill takes to earn back.
Try it here: Should I Register for VAT? Free SA Calculator
It is general information, not tax advice, and it does not model apportionment for mixed taxable and exempt supplies, second-hand goods notional input tax, imports, or the once-off input claim on stock held at registration. I would be interested to hear from anyone who registered voluntarily and regretted it, or who has been through a deregistration since April and hit the exit VAT, whether the numbers here match what actually happened.