South Africa's New ETA Just Launched — Here's What We Actually Know

On 12 August 2026, South Africa's Department of Home Affairs confirmed that an Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) is now live. If you're used to checking South Africa off your list as a simple visa-free stamp-on-arrival, that's worth pausing on.

What we know for certain

The DHA's own press release confirms the ETA exists and is operational as of that date. That's it. That's the part we can cite.

What we don't know yet — and won't guess

Here's what isn't published anywhere we can find, on any official page:

• Who actually needs it. Is it required for nationalities that were previously fully visa-exempt, or only for a subset? No eligibility list has been posted.
• What it costs. No fee schedule.
• How long it's valid, or how long a stay it grants. No terms published.

We checked the DHA's ETA portal directly. It's a client-rendered application that returns no usable content to an automated check — which isn't unusual for a brand-new system still being rolled out, but it does mean there's nothing there yet for us to verify against.

Why we're not publishing a guess

Every other travel-advice site is going to run some version of "South Africa now requires an ETA — here's what to expect," filled in with what's true of other countries' ETAs, or last year's visa-exemption list, or a plausible guess. We're not going to do that. Our entry-requirement data for South Africa still reflects the visa-exemption list confirmed on 2026-08-11 — the day before this announcement — because that's the last thing we could actually verify.

What to do if you're travelling to South Africa soon

Go directly to the Department of Home Affairs' own site before you book anything, and don't rely on secondary sources repeating each other's guesses in the meantime. We're watching for the eligibility list and fee schedule to appear, and we'll update our data — cited, dated — the moment they do.

This is exactly the kind of gap our changelog exists to make visible: not a static "verified" badge, but a running record of what we actually know and when we last checked it.