Government not paying your invoice? Know the 30-day rule

Under section 38(1)(f) of the Public Finance Management Act and Treasury Regulation 8.2.3, national and provincial departments must settle a valid invoice within 30 days of receiving it. The regulation's wording is blunt: "Unless determined otherwise in a contract or other agreement, all payments due to creditors must be settled within 30 days from receipt of an invoice or, in the case of civil claims, the date of settlement or court judgement."

Two things in that sentence do most of the work. "Unless determined otherwise in a contract" means your contract can set different terms, so read it before you rely on the 30 days. And "from receipt of an invoice" means a valid invoice — if yours is incomplete or sent to the wrong place, the clock never started and you are counting days that don't exist.

Where the deadline is missed and your contract sets no interest rate, the Prescribed Rate of Interest Act gives you a statutory rate to claim at. That rate is 10.25% a year as at March 2026.

This is general guidance, not legal advice. For a large or contested debt, speak to an attorney.

It's worth knowing you are not an unlucky exception. National Treasury publishes its own quarterly report on departments that miss the 30-day rule, and the numbers are not subtle.

At the end of the third quarter of the 2025/26 financial year, 90,856 invoices were older than 30 days and still unpaid by national and provincial departments, with a rand value of R15.5 billion. A further 89,499 invoices worth R10.8 billion were paid late during that quarter alone. Provincial departments accounted for 98% of both the unpaid invoice count and the R15.5 billion.

Two practical implications. First, the person not paying you is very probably not singling you out, which means a polite, procedural, unemotional follow-up is more likely to work than an angry one. Second, because the problem is this well documented, escalating inside the department is a normal thing to do rather than a nuclear option.

These figures move every quarter. Treasury publishes the current ones on its own site under "Compliance on Payment of Suppliers"; check there before quoting a number at anyone.

This is where most 30-day claims quietly die. The clock starts when the department receives a valid invoice. If your invoice is missing something, or arrived somewhere that isn't the official receiving point, the department's position is that the 30 days never began — and on that specific point they are usually right.

So treat validity as the whole ball game. Match the invoice to the order it belongs to, quote the reference numbers the department gave you, address it exactly as the contract or purchase order specifies, and send it to the invoice address in the contract rather than to your friendly contact's inbox. If you are VAT registered, it must also satisfy SARS as a tax invoice — that's a separate set of required fields, covered in our guide to invoicing with VAT in South Africa.

The single highest-value habit here is proving the date of receipt. Your 30 days are worth nothing if you cannot show when the invoice landed. Ask for an acknowledgement of receipt, keep the delivery confirmation, and file it with the invoice. If it ever becomes a dispute, that timestamp is the case.

When a debt is overdue and no interest rate was agreed in your contract, the Prescribed Rate of Interest Act 55 of 1975 supplies one. This is what lawyers call mora interest — interest for the delay itself.

The prescribed rate is the South African Reserve Bank's repo rate plus 3.5%. It is 10.25% a year as at March 2026. It doesn't change the moment the repo rate does: a repo change only feeds through on the first day of the second month after it.

Two details matter more than the headline number, and most people get both wrong. First, the rate is fixed at the moment the debt fell into default and then stays put — you don't recalculate every time the repo rate moves. Second, it is simple interest on the capital amount, not compound. It does not snowball, and a claim that says it does is a claim that gets rejected.

Be clear-eyed about what this is. Being entitled to interest and being paid interest are different things: the entitlement is real, but nothing pays out automatically, and pursuing it against a department that is already late is its own project. Its practical value is usually as a calm, specific, documented escalation — an invoice that quantifies what the delay is costing is much harder to leave in a pile than one more email asking for an update.

Say you invoice a provincial department R50,000. They receive a valid invoice on 1 March, so payment is due by 31 March. They pay you on 30 May — 60 days past the due date.

At 10.25% a year, the interest is R50,000 × 10.25% × 60/365, which is R842.47. That is simple interest on the R50,000 capital for 60 days, at the rate that applied when the debt fell into default.

R842 on a R50,000 invoice will not save your year, and that is precisely the point worth internalising: statutory interest is not compensation for what late payment actually does to a small business. The real cost was the two months you spent without R50,000 of your own money. Interest is a lever for getting attention and a signal that you know the rules — the actual win is being paid on day 30.

If you want to run your own numbers, our free late payment interest calculator does this arithmetic for any amount, rate, and number of days.

Work through this in order. Each step is deliberately more formal than the last, and most invoices come loose long before the end of the list.

Treasury Regulation 8.2.3 binds national and provincial departments. It does not bind a private company that owes you money, and municipalities and state-owned entities sit under their own legislation rather than this regulation — so check which rules apply before quoting 8.2.3 at anyone.

With private clients, your contract is the law. Whatever payment terms you agreed are the terms, which is exactly why your own terms are worth being deliberate about: Net 14 instead of a reflexive Net 30, a due date printed as a real calendar date, and a stated late-payment position agreed up front rather than invented in anger afterwards.

The Prescribed Rate of Interest Act still does useful work here. Where a private debt is overdue and your contract sets no rate, the same prescribed rate is the default for mora interest. But the same realism applies: entitlement isn't payment, and for ordinary small debts a firm, consistent follow-up routine collects far more money than a legal position ever will. Our guide to chasing late payments covers that routine.

Every rule above is a remedy — machinery you only touch once something has already gone wrong. The suppliers who get paid on time are rarely the ones with the best grasp of Treasury Regulation 8.2.3. They are the ones whose invoices are valid first time, dated, referenced, delivered to the right address, and followed up on a schedule instead of when frustration boils over.

That is mostly a systems problem, not a legal one. Invoice the day the work is done, not at month end. Put the purchase order number on it every single time. Log the date of receipt. Send a reminder on a fixed cadence — a few days before due, on the due date, and at fixed intervals after — so following up is never a decision you have to psych yourself into.

This is what invoicing software is genuinely for: it numbers invoices sequentially, prints real due dates, and sends the overdue reminders on schedule without you having to be the kind of person who enjoys sending them. Platybooks does this in rand, with 15% VAT and a pay-by-card link, and its automated reminders go out at fixed intervals after the due date. But the habit is what matters, and a disciplined spreadsheet beats undisciplined software every time.