Johannesburg – The Department of Home Affairs has hiked the price of its verification service.
Announcing the service price hike on Monday, 23 June 2025, the department said: “After initiating substantial upgrades to the service, Home Affairs today gazetted a new price structure”.
The department said a cost-reflective price for real-time verifications during peak hours was set at R10, while introducing an off-peak, low-cost alternative for batch transactions that will cost only R1.
Explaining the rationale for the price hikes, the department said that it was correcting the “unsustainable under-pricing” of its verification service.
The department said that for more than a decade, banks and financial service providers have only paid R0.15 for real-time verifications against the National Population Register (NPR).
“This is below market-related rates charged by the private sector for comparable services and far below the cost to the State of providing the online verification service (OVS), which deprived Home Affairs of the resources required to maintain the NPR,” the department said.
“Extreme under-pricing has led to profiteering and abuses by some users that overwhelm the NPR and cause failure rates in excess of 50%, contributing to ‘system offline’ failures at Home Affairs offices and threatening national security.”‘
Home Affairs Minister Dr. Leon Schreiber called upon users to rise above narrow profiteering and put South Africa’s national security interests first.
Minister Schreiber announced that, following an initial pilot that yielded promising results and further enhancements, Home Affairs will, on 1 July 2025, begin the rollout of an upgraded NPR verification service to all companies and government users to verify identities with first-class speed and reliability.
This vastly enhanced service, which will boost service delivery from government departments and enhance financial inclusion in the private sector, will be accompanied by appropriate tariff increases implemented after widespread public consultation and after concurrence was obtained from the Minister of Finance.
Since 2013, Home Affairs has provided the service, known as the Online Verification System (OVS), to third parties that connect them to the NPR.
This allows these registered users to check the identities and other biographical information of their clients against the Home Affairs database.
“However, since its rollout more than a decade ago at an inappropriately low cost to users, the demands on the OVS have far outstripped the capacity at which it was originally designed,” stated the department.
“Since then, there has been no substantive upgrade to the system, while demand and the costs of maintaining the infrastructure increased year-on-year.
“Due to the upgrade stasis and the increased demands placed on the OVS by institutions – and exorbitant over-use by some institutions owing to unsustainably low prices – users now experience a staggering failure rate in excess of 50% on verification checks against the NPR.”
The department said even in the case of successful verifications, response times often take hours, thereby defeating the purpose of real-time verification.
“Both of these factors are directly undermining services that require such verifications, including through the OVS and at Home Affairs offices,” noted the department.
“In fact, the under-investment and overloading of the OVS is one key factor behind the challenge of ‘system offline’ at frontline offices.
“Additionally, an unreliable NPR poses a direct threat to national security as it undermines the ability of the State to verify identities.
“The under-pricing of this service, with fees as staggeringly low as R0.15 per verification, has deprived the State of the resources required to maintain and enhance the NPR.”
The department said in turn, certain private sector users of the OVS have relied on this artificially low price to inflate their corporate profits at the expense of the quality of services received by the public, while also overwhelming the NPR with queries to such an extent that the failure rate now routinely exceeds 50%.
“Some users then went on to exploit the unreliability of the system created by their excessive use, to create third-party verification services that charge prices vastly in excess of those paid to Home Affairs,” stated the department.
“This vicious cycle is unsustainable.
“The artificially low pricing structure has led to such severe under-investment in the NPR that it now poses a direct threat to financial inclusion, to the ability of the government to combat identity and financial crime, and to national security.
“Home Affairs is bringing an end to this vicious cycle.”
The department said beginning next month, 1 July 2025, the new OVS will be rolled out to all users.
The upgraded OVS functions as a sleek, modern system that delivers what it was designed to do.
It now performs in real-time, and the failure rate has been reduced to below 1%.
“For the first time, the new system will also introduce an option for users to do ‘non-live batch verifications’ during off-peak hours at a significantly lower fee than real-time verifications,” the department said.
“This will offer both a cost-effective alternative to real-time verifications and incentivise users to stop overloading the OVS’ live queue, reducing the problem of ‘system offline’ at frontline Home Affairs offices.
“As a result, and for the first time in more than a decade, Home Affairs has increased the fees for a single real-time verification check to R10 per transaction.”
The department said that for non-live batch verifications, where a user wishes to verify multiple records simultaneously during off-peak periods, the cost will be R1 per verification field request.
There will continue to be no charge for the use of this service by other government departments.
Minister Leon Schreiber said, “This is a matter of national security, plain and simple.
“Every responsible State on earth must take the necessary steps to ensure a functional population register.”
The minister said this upgrade also advances financial inclusion and makes a significant contribution to South Africa’s attempts to get off the Financial Action Task Force’s grey list.
“I thank the many stakeholders who expressed support for this vital reform in the interest both of national security and of South Africa Inc during our public consultations, and call upon all users of the OVS to rise above narrow profiteering to support the safeguarding of national security,” said Minister Schreiber.
“A healthy NPR is also a prerequisite for a functional Digital ID, as the NPR must become the central database against which identities are verified as Home Affairs becomes a digital-first department.
“This investment in the NPR is an investment in national security, in financial inclusion, and in the value of our cherished South African identity that will pay off handsomely for our country.”
*Organisations that would like to be connected to the new OVS must send an email to: Verifications@dha.gov.za.
A copy of the gazette containing the new fee schedule can be accessed here.
