COIDA Registration and the Return of Earnings: what small employers must do in 2026

COIDA registration is compulsory for every employer carrying on business in South Africa, including households that employ domestic workers. You register with the Compensation Fund, keep earnings records, and file an annual Return of Earnings. Since 23 January 2026, most employer failures under the Act are administrative penalties calculated on earnings rather than criminal offences.

That last change is the one worth your attention. For thirty years the enforcement model in this Act was prosecution, which in practice meant very little happened. The Compensation for Occupational Injuries and Diseases Amendment Act 10 of 2022 came into force on 23 January 2026 and rewrote that model. The Commissioner can now impose penalties directly, and in several places the words "not exceeding" were deleted, so what used to be a ceiling is now a fixed amount.

This guide works from the Act as gazetted, the Amendment Act as gazetted, the Fund's own notices, and the April 2026 gazette that sets this year's numbers. It also flags a scheduling problem that sits in plain sight and that no amount of good intent on your side can fix.

Who has to register for COIDA?

Section 80(1) of COIDA puts it broadly: "An employer carrying on business in the Republic shall within the prescribed period and in the prescribed manner register with the commissioner, and shall furnish the commissioner with the prescribed particulars of his business".

There is no small business exemption. There is no threshold number of employees. If you employ one person, you are an employer for this purpose. Households employing domestic workers, gardeners, drivers and caregivers are included, which followed the Constitutional Court's ruling that excluding domestic workers was unconstitutional.

The exemptions in section 84(1) are narrow and will not apply to an ordinary small business. They cover employees of the State and certain local authorities, and employers who hold an approved mutual association policy covering the full extent of their liability under the Act.

Two obligations sit alongside registration and are easy to miss:

• Section 80(2): if you carry on more than one business, the particulars must be furnished separately for each one.
• Section 80(3): you have seven days to notify the Commissioner of any change in the particulars you furnished. Not thirty days, and not at your next return.

Section 80(6) makes failure to comply with section 80 an offence. Note that the Amendment Act touched section 80 only to change its heading and subsection (5), so unlike most of the employer duties in this Act, registration failure remains a criminal offence rather than an administrative penalty.

What is the Return of Earnings, and when is it actually due?

The Return of Earnings is the annual declaration of what you paid your people. Section 82(1) requires an employer to furnish the Commissioner with a certified return "before the thirty-first day of March in each year", showing the earnings paid "with effect from the first day of March of the immediately preceding year up to and including the last day of February of the following year".

So the Act sets a filing window that closes on 31 March, reporting on a period that ended on the last day of February. One month.

The problem with that date

The Compensation Fund does not operate that window, and in 2026 it could not have.

On 16 March 2026 the Fund published a notice signed by Julian Soupen, Chief Director: COID Services, announcing that the ROE Online System and the internal SAP module for employer registration and assessment would shut down from 19 March 2026 at midnight until midnight on 31 March 2026. The notice states the effect in its own words: "Employers will not be able to declare any Return of Earnings, online or manually."

The stated reason was preparation for the season that "will open for the period 1 April 2026 to 30 June 2026".

Read those two documents together. The Act requires the return before 31 March. The only filing channel was closed for the final thirteen days of that window, with no manual alternative, and the season opened on 1 April, the day after the statutory deadline expired. On the face of the Act, compliance with section 82(1) was not available to anyone in 2026.

Section 82 was not amended by the Amendment Act 10 of 2022. The Amendment Act reaches sections 80, 81, 83, 85, 87, 88, 90, 91 and 97 among many others, but it leaves section 82 and its 31 March date exactly as they were in 1993.

The practical position is that the Fund's administrative season governs, and it ran 1 April to 30 June 2026. The legal position is that the Act says something else. If you are reading this after 30 June, you are late against the Fund's calendar, and you were technically late against the Act before the season even opened.

A naming quirk worth knowing

The Fund's notice calls the season opening on 1 April 2026 the "2025 ROE Season", and the CF-2A form gazetted in April 2026 is headed 2025. The season is named for the earnings year it reports on, not the year you file it. If you have ever been convinced you downloaded the wrong form, this is usually why.

What are the penalties, and what changed on 23 January 2026?

Proclamation 306 of 2026, published in Government Gazette 53990 on 23 January 2026, brought most of the Amendment Act into force, with named provisions following on 1 February and 1 April 2026.

The pattern across the employer duties is consistent and it is worth seeing directly. In the gazetted Amendment Act, deletions appear in square brackets. Section 39(6) reads: an employer who fails to comply "shall be [guilty of an offence] liable to a penalty of 10 per cent of the actual or estimated annual earnings of that particular year". The same substitution of "guilty of an offence" for a penalty appears in sections 40(4), 64(1), 72(3) and 87(3).

Two further changes matter more than the headline.

A ceiling became a fixed amount. Section 83(6)(b) previously allowed the Commissioner to "impose upon and recover from the employer a fine not exceeding 10 per cent of the amount so assessed". The amendment deletes "not exceeding". It now reads "a penalty of 10 per cent of the amount so assessed". The same deletion happens in section 87(2)(a), where a "fine not exceeding" the full compensation payable became "a penalty of the full amount of the compensation payable".

The base is not the same in every provision, and this is where most summaries go wrong. There is no single "10 percent COIDA penalty". There are several, calculated on different things:

What went wrong	Provision	Penalty, and what it is 10 percent of
You did not file the return	s83(6)(b)	10 percent of the amount assessed
You filed, but did not pay the assessment	s87(1)	10 percent of actual or estimated earnings for that year, or of the outstanding amount
You understated earnings in the return	s82(3)	a fine not exceeding 10 percent of the difference between what you declared and what you paid
You did not report an accident	s39(6)	10 percent of actual or estimated annual earnings
You did not keep the records	s81(3)	an offence, and a penalty not exceeding 10 percent of annual assessments

An assessment is itself a percentage of your earnings, set by the tariff for your industry class. So a penalty calculated on earnings and a penalty calculated on the assessment are not the same size, and they are not close. When a summary tells you the penalty is ten percent and does not say ten percent of what, it has not told you anything you can plan around.

Note also the drafting inconsistency in that table. Section 83(6)(b) had its ceiling removed, while section 81(3), inserted by the same Amendment Act, keeps "not exceeding" and also keeps the offence. Section 87(1) gives the Commissioner a choice between two bases without stating which applies when.

The one that is genuinely dangerous

Section 87(2)(a) is the provision to take seriously. If an employer has not complied with section 80(1), meaning it never registered, and an employee then has an accident, the Commissioner may impose a penalty of the full amount of the compensation payable for that accident, in addition to any other penalty. That is not ten percent of anything. That is the entire claim, and the amendment removed the words that previously capped it.

There is a related consequence in section 83(6)(a): if you do not file, the Commissioner may assess you on estimated earnings, and "such an assessment shall not be subject to adjustment". Filing late is recoverable. Not filing at all can leave you with a number you cannot argue down.

A cross reference that does not resolve

One small thing, for anyone who goes to the Act itself. Section 83(6)(a) directs the Commissioner to assess "on the basis of the earnings estimated in accordance with section 82(4)". Section 82(4) is not the estimation power. It reads: "The commissioner may reduce any fine referred to in subsection (3)." The estimation power is in section 82(5), and the definition of "earnings" in section 1 correctly points to section 82(5) for "the estimated amount".

The Amendment Act reopened section 83 and rewrote subsections (5), (6)(b) and (6)(c). It left (6)(a) alone, so the wrong cross reference is still there in the version that came into force on 23 January 2026. It is unlikely to change any outcome, but if you are reconciling the Act against a summary and the numbering will not line up, that is why.

What is a Letter of Good Standing, and why do contractors keep asking for it?

A Letter of Good Standing is the Fund's confirmation that your registration and assessments are current. Main contractors, municipalities and most procurement processes ask for one, and the reason sits in section 89, which the Amendment Act rewrote completely.

The old section spoke of "mandators" and "contractors". The new one speaks of contractors and sub-contractors, and the mechanism is this: a sub-contractor must register as an employer and pay the necessary assessments. If the sub-contractor fails to register or pay, "the said employees of the sub-contractor shall be deemed to be the employees of the contractor, and the contractor shall pay the assessments in respect of those employees".

So when a main contractor asks for your Letter of Good Standing, it is not paperwork theatre. If you are not registered, your people become their liability by operation of the Act. Section 89(2) lets them recover from you afterwards, which is a legal right worth exactly as much as your ability to pay.

One useful detail from the March 2026 shutdown notice: generating a Letter of Good Standing was not affected by the shutdown, and neither was making payments against a correct CF registration number. Registration and declaration were the services that stopped.

The numbers that apply from 1 March 2026

Government Gazette 54577, General Notice 3910 of 2026, published 24 April 2026 and signed by the Minister of Employment and Labour on 21 April 2026 under sections 83(8) and 83(2)(b), prescribes the following with effect from 1 March 2026:

• Maximum earnings on which an assessment is calculated: R668 000 per employee per annum (Gazette 54577, Notice 3910 of 2026)
• Minimum assessment for employers: R1 621 (same notice)
• Minimum assessment for domestic employers: R560 (same notice)

The maximum matters because earnings above it are not assessed. The minimum matters because it is what you pay even if your assessed figure comes out lower, which is the usual position for a very small employer. The separate, lower minimum for domestic employers is the Fund's acknowledgement that a household is not a business.

How this work stops being manual

Nearly all of the pain in COIDA is not legal difficulty. It is that the inputs live in four places and get re-keyed once a year under time pressure. Here is what actually changes when the process is built properly, and none of it requires new software categories.

1. The return is a report, not a data entry exercise. Section 82(1) asks for monthly earnings from 1 March to the last day of February. Your payroll already holds every one of those figures. If the annual return involves anyone opening a spreadsheet and typing, the number being submitted is a transcription of a number you already have, and transcription is where the understatement in section 82(3) comes from.
2. Capture the earnings cap at source. The R668 000 ceiling applies per employee per annum. Applying it by hand across twelve months and two categories, employees and directors, is exactly the kind of arithmetic that produces a variance the Fund later queries. It is a rule, so it belongs in the calculation, not in someone's memory.
3. Keep the record for five years, because it is now five. The Amendment Act substituted section 81 and changed the retention period from four years to five years after the date of the last entry. It also expressly allows the register to be produced in "a manual or electronic form". If your retention rule still says four years, it is out of date, and the fix is a setting rather than a project.
4. Make the seven day change rule automatic. Section 80(3) gives you seven days to report a change in particulars. Nobody remembers this. The trigger is a change of address, banking details, business activity or entity details, and those changes already happen somewhere in your admin. The notification should be raised by that event, not by an annual review.
5. Put the assessment on the payment calendar the day the notice arrives. Section 86 requires payment within 30 days of the date of the notice of assessment. That clock starts on the notice, not on the day someone opens the envelope. This is the single highest value reminder in the whole process, because section 87(1) is the penalty with the largest possible base.
6. Track Letters of Good Standing as expiring documents. If you subcontract, you need your suppliers' letters, and section 89 explains what happens if one of them lapses quietly. Treat them the way you treat an insurance renewal, with an owner and an expiry date, not as an email attachment somebody once forwarded.
7. Reconcile the return against payroll before submitting, not after being audited. The variance between declared and actual earnings is the trigger for section 82(3). A comparison you run yourself takes minutes when the data is already structured.

What you should not automate

Some of this needs a person, and pretending otherwise is how compliance projects fail.

• Deciding who is an employee. Contractor versus employee is a judgement with consequences well beyond COIDA. No rule engine should make that call for you.
• Classifying your industry for the tariff. Getting the class wrong changes every assessment you will ever receive.
• Reporting an accident. The duty is on you, the facts matter, and section 39(6) now attaches a penalty calculated on earnings. A person who understands what happened should write it.
• Anything you have never done manually. If nobody in the business has completed the return end to end at least once, automating it produces a fast, confident, wrong submission.

The pattern worth taking from this: COIDA is not one deadline. It is a registration that must stay current, a record that must survive five years, a return built from payroll, an assessment with a 30 day clock, and a letter other people rely on. Those are five different rhythms, and treating them as one annual scramble in June is what turns a routine obligation into a penalty calculated on your entire wage bill.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need to register for COIDA if I only have one employee?

Yes. Section 80(1) applies to any employer carrying on business in South Africa and sets no minimum headcount. The narrow exemptions in section 84(1) cover the State, certain local authorities and employers with an approved mutual association policy.

When is the COIDA Return of Earnings due?

Section 82(1) says before 31 March each year. In practice the Compensation Fund runs the filing season on its own calendar, and for 2026 that season ran from 1 April to 30 June 2026. The Fund's window is the one you can actually file in.

What is the penalty for submitting the Return of Earnings late?

Section 83(6)(b) allows a penalty of 10 percent of the amount assessed where you fail to furnish the return. That is separate from section 87(1), which applies when you fail to pay and can be calculated on earnings rather than on the assessment.

Do I need to register a domestic worker for COIDA?

Yes. Households employing domestic workers are covered. The April 2026 gazette sets a separate, lower minimum assessment of R560 for domestic employers, compared with R1 621 for other employers, both effective from 1 March 2026.

Can I get a Letter of Good Standing if I have not filed my return?

A Letter of Good Standing confirms your registration and assessments are current, so an outstanding return or unpaid assessment will normally block it. The Fund did keep letter generation available during the March 2026 system shutdown.

Sources

• Compensation for Occupational Injuries and Diseases Act 130 of 1993, Government Gazette 15158 of 6 October 1993. Sections 1, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 86, 87 and 89 as originally enacted.
• Compensation for Occupational Injuries and Diseases Amendment Act 10 of 2022, Government Gazette 48431 of 17 April 2023. Sections 49, 50, 51, 54 and 56 amending sections 80, 81, 83, 87 and 89 of the principal Act.
• Proclamation 306 of 2026, Government Gazette 53990, 23 January 2026, bringing the Amendment Act into operation with staggered dates of 1 February 2026 and 1 April 2026 for named provisions.
• Government Gazette 54577, General Notice 3910 of 2026, 24 April 2026, prescribing maximum earnings and minimum assessments under sections 83(8) and 83(2)(b), effective 1 March 2026.
• Compensation Fund, "ROE Online System Temporary Shut-Down Alert", signed by Julian Soupen, Chief Director: COID Services, 16 March 2026.

This is a general guide to published legislation and public notices, not legal advice. COIDA interacts with the BCEA, the UIF and the Occupational Health and Safety Act, and your industry classification affects your assessment. Check your own position against the Act and the Fund's current notices, or take advice, before acting on it.

Where this fits

COIDA is one link in a chain of employer obligations that share the same underlying data. The earnings figure in your Return of Earnings is the same figure your payroll produces, the same one your time and attendance records support, and the same one that has to survive a five year retention rule. Registration sits next to your CIPC annual returns, and the Fund's own shutdown notice confirms that COIDA registration runs partly through CIPC BizPortal, so the two are connected in practice as well as on paper. Expense and payroll records feed what you track for SARS. The full picture, in dependency order, is in our South African small business compliance checklist.

If the honest answer to "when is our Return of Earnings due and who owns it" is that nobody is certain, that is not a COIDA problem. It is an operations problem that COIDA happens to expose. A business autopsy maps where your compliance data actually lives and what it would take to stop rebuilding it once a year. You can also book a discovery call and talk it through first.