Estimate your 13th cheque amount and see how it affects your tax for the year. Enter your monthly salary below to get started.
What Is a 13th Cheque?
A 13th cheque is an extra payment, typically equal to one month’s salary, paid to South African employees once a year, most commonly in December.
The name comes from the idea of receiving 13 months of pay across a 12-month year. It’s a long-standing feature of South African workplace culture, particularly common in retail, manufacturing, and unionised sectors, where it often functions as a year-end financial cushion for employees heading into the December holiday period.
Is a 13th Cheque a Legal Requirement?
A 13th cheque is not a statutory requirement under the Basic Conditions of Employment Act. Unlike leave pay or notice pay, there’s no law compelling South African employers to pay one.
Whether you receive a 13th cheque, and how much it’s worth, depends entirely on your employment contract, company policy, or an applicable collective bargaining agreement. If your contract or company policy specifies a 13th cheque, it becomes a contractual entitlement, but where no such agreement exists, employees have no automatic right to one.
This distinguishes a 13th cheque from a discretionary performance bonus, which is explicitly linked to individual or company performance and typically requires management approval each year, rather than being a fixed, recurring entitlement.
How to Calculate Your 13th Cheque
Step 1: Confirm whether your 13th cheque is based on your basic monthly salary or your full cost-to-company package, since employers apply this differently.
Step 2: If you’ve worked the full year, your 13th cheque is typically equal to one full month’s salary.
Step 3: If you started partway through the year, calculate a pro-rata amount based on the number of months actually worked.
Step 4: Remember that this is your gross 13th cheque amount, before PAYE and UIF deductions are applied.
13th Cheque Formula
Full Year: 13th Cheque = One Month’s Salary
Pro-Rata: 13th Cheque = (Monthly Salary × Months Worked) ÷ 12
How Your 13th Cheque Is Taxed
Your 13th cheque isn’t taxed separately at a flat rate. Instead, SARS adds it to your total annual taxable income, then works out your tax liability for the year as a whole.
Because your 13th cheque effectively pushes your annual income higher for that calculation, it’s often taxed at your marginal rate, which can be higher than the average tax rate you see reflected on your regular monthly payslip.
This is why a 13th cheque sometimes feels more heavily taxed than expected, even though you’re not actually being penalised, you’re simply seeing your higher marginal rate applied to that portion of your income.
Worked Example
Say your monthly salary is R30,000, giving you a normal annual salary of R360,000, and your 13th cheque is a full month’s salary of R30,000.
Without the 13th cheque, your annual taxable income is R360,000. Adding the 13th cheque brings your annual taxable income to R390,000 for that tax year.
Because South Africa uses a progressive tax system, this additional R30,000 is taxed at your marginal rate, which may be higher than the average rate applied to your regular monthly salary, particularly if the bonus pushes part of your income into a higher tax bracket.
The exact tax difference depends on which bracket you fall into and which rebates apply to you, so for a precise figure, use this alongside a full South African salary and tax calculator.
Pro-Rata 13th Cheque for Partial Years
If you joined your employer partway through the year, most 13th cheque policies calculate a pro-rata amount rather than a full month’s pay. For example, if your monthly salary is R25,000 and you’ve worked 8 of the 12 months in the qualifying period:
Pro-Rata 13th Cheque = (R25,000 × 8) ÷ 12 = R16,666.67
The same pro-rata approach commonly applies if your employment ends partway through the year, with the payout calculated from your last 13th cheque date up to your final day of service, depending on your specific employment contract or company policy.