You Own Your Home, But For How Long Can You Afford It?
Property ownership represents one of the most significant means by which ordinary households build and transmit wealth across generations.
Written By: Mukundi Budeli
Consider a homeowner in Wonderboom South, Pretoria, who has lived in the same house since 1992; no significant improvements, a solidly middle-class neighbourhood. Then in 2025 he receives a notice from the City of Tshwane. His property, previously valued at R930,000, has been revalued at R11 million. His neighbour’s comparable home came in at R1.1 million. He believes, reasonably, that someone added a zero by mistake.
He is not alone, and the problem is not unique to Tshwane. From Pretoria to Johannesburg to Cape Town, municipalities are conducting valuation roll updates that are landing on homeowners like a tax they never agreed to and cannot easily contest. The mechanism varies by city. The consequence is consistent: people who own property outright, who have paid off their bonds, who believed their homes represented security, are discovering that the state has found a way to make that security conditional.
According to Statistics South Africa, property rates across 39 municipalities grew at an average annual rate of 6.8% between 2009 to 2024, against consumer price inflation averaging 5.1% over the same period. Rates have more than doubled in fifteen years. In Johannesburg, rates have outpaced both property price growth and inflation over the past five years. In Cape Town, homeowners in areas like the Atlantic Seaboard and Oranjezicht face monthly bill increases of 25 to 35% following the 2025 valuation roll, driven by a new tariff structure linking fixed charges for water and sanitation to property value rather than actual consumption. In Tshwane, the valuation roll effective July 2025 has seen many properties double in assessed value.
The Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse documented that in 2021 thousands of Ekurhuleni property owners faced rate increases of up to 2,000% following that municipality’s valuation roll update, attributed to poor valuation practices and calculation errors. The objection process exists on paper. In practice, missing the window means paying the inflated rate for up to four years. Many homeowners, particularly retirees not closely monitoring municipal notices, simply miss it.
Municipalities point to genuine pressures: ageing infrastructure, rising Eskom tariffs, salary obligations, and a declining revenue base from poor collection rates. These pressures are real. What is less openly acknowledged is the extent to which municipalities are compensating for their own fiscal mismanagement by leaning harder on the one constituency that cannot easily escape: homeowners.
Property rates are a reliably captive revenue stream. Unlike business ratepayers who can relocate, or service consumers who can reduce consumption, a homeowner with a fixed address has limited options. The state knows where you live, knows what you own, and has legal authority to attach that asset if rates go unpaid. Research from the South African Property Owners Association confirms that property rates are fulfilling an increasingly important role in municipal revenue precisely because other sources, including government transfers and service charge collections, are declining. The costs of municipal dysfunction are being quietly transferred onto those who happen to own property.
Rates do not arrive alone; they compound with above-inflation electricity tariffs, water and sanitation charges, and in some cities newly introduced cleaning levies. In Cape Town, the 2025 tariff structure introduced fixed water and sanitation charges linked to property value, meaning the higher your home is worth, the more you pay for the same tap. This is not a user charge - it is a wealth tax wearing the administrative clothing of a service fee.
Many homeowners have responded by funding their own alternatives: boreholes, solar installations, private security, in some estates private road maintenance. They are paying twice, once to the municipality for services that do not arrive, and again to private providers for services that do. The municipal bill grows; the service does not.
Property ownership represents one of the most significant means by which ordinary households build and transmit wealth across generations. When the state uses that asset as a revenue instrument calibrated not to services rendered but to budgetary need, it undermines the security that ownership is supposed to provide. A home whose rates bill doubles every few years, stacked on top of double-digit electricity tariff increases, is not simply more expensive. It is an asset being slowly hollowed out beneath its owner by a state that has found it easier to extract from those who have something than to fix the conditions preventing others from having anything at all.
The conversation South Africa needs is not only about whether individual valuations are accurate, though many demonstrably are not. It is about what municipalities owe the people who fund them, and whether this trajectory is one the country has chosen or simply drifted into.
Mukundi Budeli is a law graduate from the University of Witwatersrand and an Associate of the Free Market Foundation.