Pay

The number on a job advert is often not the number that reaches your bank account. It helps to know why before you accept an offer.

This shelf covers South African pay the way it is usually put together: cost to company, the employer's contributions that never reach your account, the pension and medical aid that are yours but that you cannot spend, and the tax on top of all of it. We write from the recruitment side. We are not tax practitioners. Every figure here carries the tax year or the Gazette it came from, because these numbers change with each February Budget, and a figure without a year is hard to rely on.

Start with what CTC means on a South African job advert. It works two R420 000 packages through to the bank at the 2027 tax year rates, and shows why one person takes home R3 778 a month more than the other on the same advert number. Read it before you compare two offers, and before you give anyone your current salary. If you quote a basic salary and are then offered a CTC, a raise on paper can turn out not to be one.

Then what to say when they ask your salary expectations. An employer or agency may ask for different reasons, whether it is part of a client's process or a way to compare packages, and the article says what your answer is used for. It also deals with payslips. No South African statute bans an employer asking for yours, but POPIA governs what happens to the information, and the article explains what that lets you ask. And it says what can happen in an agency process if you decline to answer, so you can decide with that in view.

It is worth knowing how agencies are paid. In the common agency model the hiring client pays the fee. It is often a percentage of your first-year package, so the fee rises with your salary. Arrangements vary, and you can ask a consultant how theirs works. Either way, the parts of an offer that are not money, like the manager, the commute and the hours, are yours to weigh.