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South Africa has NOT raised its retirement age to 70, news from Zimbabwe shared out of context
IN SHORT: New Zimbabwean legislation raised the retirement age for some civil servants in 2025. This doesn’t apply in South Africa, as some social media posts suggest.
A document circulating on Facebook in South Africa suggests that the official retirement age has been raised from 65 to 70 years as of 1 January 2025. The document, sometimes overlaid with a South African flag, has also been shared on WhatsApp, where it was forwarded to Africa Check.
It is a photo of a genuine legislative document raising the retirement age of some public servants, but it isn’t relevant to South Africa.
Here’s the real context.
Legislation shown not applicable to South Africa
The document has a header reading “Statutory Instrument 197 of 2024”, and the legislation it contains is titled “Public Service (Amendment) Regulations, 2024 (No. 3)”. Official legal document names can be intimidating and difficult to decipher, but these titles are all the proof needed to show that this document is unrelated to South Africa.
An internet search for either of those titles returns Zimbabwean news articles about the legislation, which tie it to Zimbabwe and not South Africa. The search also returns the original document. However, there are other clues.
South African legislation is published in numbered government gazettes. These are legal notices published by the government announcing legislative changes. Acts and amendments are also numbered. However, South Africa does not publish numbered “statutory instruments”. For example, see this South African government gazette, number 51831. It details an act amending previous legislation – Act Number 48 of 2024: Division of Revenue Amendment, Act 2024.
In a similar vein, Zimbabwean legislation refers to the “Public Service Regulations, 1992”. The equivalent in South Africa was published in 2001.
Two ministerial positions mentioned in the document – the minister of finance, economic development and investment promotion, and the minister of public service, labour and social welfare – do not exist in South Africa. The country does have similar ministerial positions, like a minister of finance, but none with those specific titles.
Maximum retirement age increased for some professions
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The new Zimbabwean legislation increases the maximum age at which some government employees, including civil servants and soldiers, may retire. The same professions may still retire at 65 and be eligible for a pension. There is no single retirement age across the country, and different rules apply to different professions.
This is much the same in South Africa, where different rules apply to retirement depending on a person’s profession. South African civil servants, for instance, may retire from the age of 60, or 55 if they accept some reductions to their pension. A South African civil servant only has to retire at the age of 65.
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