New tool: where to semigrate in South Africa

Travel & Tourism
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I have added another free tool to the site, a finder to help you work out where to semigrate in South Africa.

Semigration, moving somewhere better inside the country rather than emigrating, is one of the biggest quiet trends of the past decade, but most of the advice out there is either a glossy property listing or a gut feeling. I wanted something that puts the boring but important facts in front of you and lets you weigh them yourself.

So the finder works on your priorities, not mine. You set how much you care about a well run municipality, affordable housing, closeness to a big-city job market, good private healthcare, reliable water and a nearby airport, and it ranks a spread of popular semigration towns by how well each one fits. For every town it shows the evidence behind the ranking rather than a verdict.

A few choices I made on purpose.

Governance is real data, not opinion. Each town shows its municipality’s latest Auditor-General audit outcome for 2023/24, taken from National Treasury Municipal Money. A clean audit, an unqualified one with findings, or a qualified one tells you a lot about how a place is run. It applies to the whole municipality though, so a well run town can sit inside a struggling one.

Safety is linked, not invented. Crime is the thing people care about most, and it is also where a made-up score would do the most harm, so the tool does not publish one. Instead each town links you straight to the live police station crime data for that area, so the numbers stay authoritative and current.

Jobs are treated as a first-class factor. The trend has started to reverse, with people moving back to Gauteng for work, so you can weight closeness to a big-city job market heavily and watch a place near Johannesburg or Pretoria climb above a far-off coastal town.

It is honest about the catch. Every town carries a one-line note on its main trade-off, whether that is price, distance from a city, or water security.

It covers 24 towns across seven provinces for now, from the Garden Route and the Winelands to the KZN Midlands, the Karoo and a couple of the big metros. Think of it as a shortlist tool, so once a few rise to the top, dig deeper, read the police data for the exact suburb, and ideally rent for a season before you buy.

Try it here: Where to Semigrate in South Africa | Town Finder

If you have semigrated, or are thinking about it, I would love to know whether the factors feel right, and if there is a town you rate that I have not covered yet, tell me and I will look at adding it.

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Prefer one that is not about to undergo a name change :grinning_face:

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A quick update for anyone who has been using this.

The most common bit of feedback I got was from families, who pointed out that a tool meant to help you decide where to move is not much use if it says nothing about schools. Fair point. So I have added schools as a proper factor.

For every town the finder now shows two things you can weight separately, how far the nearest high school is, and how far the nearest private school is, along with how many schools sit within 20 km and how many of those are private. That way a family who needs a good public high school and a family set on a private school can each rank the towns on what actually matters to them.

The numbers come from the Department of Basic Education’s national school master list, so they are the official record rather than a guess. As with crime, I deliberately do not rate any school as good or bad, because that depends on your child and changes from year to year. The tool tells you what is nearby and how far, then points you to check each school’s own matric results and visit in person.

Building it turned up a couple of quiet data problems worth mentioning, since they would have made the tool lie. The national list stores every Eastern Cape school with its latitude and longitude swapped, which at first made Jeffreys Bay and St Francis Bay look like they had no schools at all. And Mpumalanga records its private schools under a slightly different label to every other province, which briefly made White River look like its nearest private school was 47 km away when it is actually around the corner. Both are fixed now, and there is an automatic yearly check that re-pulls the data and flags anything that has shifted.

The tool has also grown to 36 towns since launch.

Same link: Where to Semigrate in South Africa | Town Finder

If schools are part of your own move, I would be glad to hear whether the distances match what you see on the ground, and whether the high school and private school split is the right way to weigh it.

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A small update, this time on the climate side of the tool.

Someone asked a fair question about where the climate label for each town actually comes from, so I went back and checked every town against its Köppen-Geiger climate zone, which is the standard system geographers use. Mostly it held up, but the check surfaced two things worth fixing.

The first was that the old version only had four climate options, and that forced every dry inland town into one bucket I had labelled Karoo or Highveld. Those are really two different climates. The Highveld is high, cold in winter and rains in summer, while the Karoo and the dry West Coast are properly semi-arid, very low rainfall and big swings between day and night. So I split them. There is now a fifth option, “Dry and semi-arid”, and towns like Prince Albert, Montagu, Robertson, Langebaan and Paternoster have moved into it. The “Dry, big swings” option is now just the true Highveld towns.

The second was a plain mistake. Two of the Eastern Cape coast towns, Port Alfred and Kenton-on-Sea, were tagged Mediterranean, which is wrong. A Mediterranean climate has dry summers, but that stretch of coast gets rain right through the year, so they now sit with the milder, greener “Cool and green” towns.

One honest caveat I added on the page itself. A few low-rainfall winter-rainfall towns, with Swellendam and Mossel Bay the clearest cases, sit right on the line between Mediterranean and semi-arid, and some climate databases file them as semi-arid on the rainfall numbers alone. I have kept them under Mediterranean because the rain still falls mostly in winter and the towns stay relatively green, but the page now says so plainly so you can make your own call.

As always these climate labels are an editorial guide I review by hand, not a live feed. Same link: Where to Semigrate in South Africa | Town Finder

If you know one of these towns well and think a label still feels off, tell me and I will take another look.

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A small but genuinely useful change, off the back of a reader’s question.

Someone pointed out that the schools factor only looked at high schools, and asked why not primary schools, because if the high school is a fair drive away you can always send a teenager to a koshuis, but you cannot do that with a young child. That is exactly right, and it is the better way round. A boarding place can bridge a long trip to high school, while a young child needs a primary school close to home, so for a lot of families the primary school is the harder daily constraint, not the high school.

So the finder now has its own “Primary school close by” slider alongside the high school and private school ones, and you can weight each on its own. The numbers come from the same Department of Basic Education national master list, measuring how far the nearest primary school is for each town.

It changes the ranking for a few places in a way that matters. Paternoster, for instance, has a primary school about 300 m away, but its nearest high school is nearly 14 km off, and Stanford is much the same. When the tool only looked at high schools, those towns read as weak on schooling, when for a family with young children they are actually fine. Now you can see both and weigh whichever one fits your family.

I left the new slider switched off by default, so nobody’s existing results shift unless they choose to use it.

Same link: Where to Semigrate in South Africa | Town Finder

Thanks for the nudge, it is a better tool for it.

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Perhaps a feature that shows which climatic zone you are currently in so you can compare

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Good shout. I have add a “Detect my climate zone” button so you can see your own climate zone at a glance and immediately spot which towns are a big shift versus more of the same. Makes the comparison a lot more useful.