Two-Pot Withdrawal Calculator South Africa
See the real tax cost of withdrawing from your two-pot savings pot, taxed at your marginal rate, plus what your money would be worth if you left it invested instead.
Your savings pot withdrawal is added to your annual taxable income and taxed at your marginal rate, the same progressive brackets as your salary, not a separate lump sum table. There's no special tax-free threshold: the more you withdraw and the more you already earn, the higher the rate on that withdrawal. Minimum withdrawal is R2,000, once per tax year (2026/2027 SARS rules).
Since 1 September 2024, part of your retirement fund contributions sits in a savings pot you can access once a tax year while still employed, whether you're using this two pot calculator to plan a 2 pot withdrawal or simply checking the numbers before you tap it. It helps to know the actual numbers: what tax you'll pay, what lands in your account, and how the cost differs between withdrawing 25% and 100% of your balance. Enter your salary, savings pot balance and how much you want to withdraw below to see all three, plus what staying invested would be worth instead.
🪙 Withdrawal Details
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How to Use This Calculator
Enter your monthly gross salary
Your withdrawal is taxed on top of this income, at your marginal tax rate, so the calculator needs your normal earnings first.
Select your age group
This determines your primary, secondary or tertiary tax rebate.
Enter your savings pot balance
Check your latest retirement fund benefit statement or member portal for the amount available in your savings pot.
Enter how much you want to withdraw
The calculator checks this against the R2,000 minimum withdrawal rule and your available balance.
See your tax, net payout and scenario comparison
The calculator shows the extra tax this withdrawal adds to your year, your net payout and a side-by-side table of what withdrawing 25%, 50%, 75% or 100% of your balance would cost instead.
What is the two-pot retirement system?
Since 1 September 2024, every rand going into your pension, provident or retirement annuity fund splits automatically into two pots. One-third goes into a savings pot you can access once per tax year while you're still working. Two-thirds goes into a retirement pot that stays locked until you actually retire. On the day the system launched, a once-off seed capital transfer also moved the lesser of 10% of your existing vested savings or R30,000 into your new savings pot, so most members had something to withdraw immediately rather than waiting to build a balance from scratch. Any contributions made before 1 September 2024 sit in a separate vested pot under the old pre-reform rules and aren't part of this split.
The rules apply identically whether you're in a pension fund, a provident fund or a retirement annuity: same one-third and two-thirds split, same seed capital mechanism. Two groups sit outside the system entirely. Members of older "legacy" retirement annuity policies from before 1 September 2024, typically structured as universal-life products with a built-in death benefit, remain under the old locked-until-55 rules. Provident fund members who were 55 or older on 1 March 2021 and chose not to opt in are also excluded. If you're unsure which applies to you, your fund administrator can confirm it from your policy documents.
How your savings pot withdrawal is actually taxed
This is the part most people get wrong: a savings pot withdrawal does not use a lump sum tax table at all, and there's no R27,500 or R550,000 tax-free portion like the withdrawal or retirement lump sum tables. Instead, SARS adds your withdrawal to your ordinary annual taxable income and taxes the combined total under the same progressive brackets that already apply to your salary. The tax attributable to the withdrawal is the difference between what you'd owe on your income plus the withdrawal, and what you'd owe on your income alone.
In practice, that means the same R20,000 withdrawal costs two people very different amounts of tax. Someone earning little enough that their salary alone falls below the tax threshold might pay nothing at all, because their combined tax is still fully absorbed by their rebate. Someone already earning close to a bracket ceiling could see the withdrawal taxed at 31% or 36%, because it's the portion sitting right at the top of their income that gets pushed into the next bracket. This calculator applies the exact same marginal-rate method SARS uses, including the rebate interaction at low incomes, so the number you see reflects your own tax position, not a generic average.
Withdrawal rules: minimum, frequency and what's off-limits
You can withdraw a minimum of R2,000 per tax year, unless your entire savings pot balance is smaller than that, in which case you can take the full balance as a once-off. You're limited to one withdrawal per tax year (1 March to the end of February) while you remain an active, employed member of the fund; if you skip a year, the balance simply keeps growing rather than expiring. The retirement pot, the locked two-thirds, is completely off-limits until actual retirement, and at that point it must generally be converted into an annuity providing you a monthly income for life, rather than paid out as cash.
The R240,000 de minimis exception
There's one situation where the locked retirement pot can still come out as cash: if your combined retirement component, the retirement pot plus any remaining vested component, is worth R240,000 or less at the point you retire, SARS allows you to take the whole amount as a lump sum instead of being forced to buy an annuity with it. This threshold was raised from R165,000 effective 1 March 2026. It's easy to confuse with the savings pot withdrawal this calculator handles, but the two are unrelated: the de minimis rule only applies once, at actual retirement, to the locked retirement component, not to an early savings pot withdrawal made while you're still working.
Worked example: two salaries, one withdrawal amount
Consider two employees, both withdrawing R20,000 from their savings pot, both under 65, no other deductions.
| Item | Salary R8,000/month | Salary R45,000/month |
|---|---|---|
| Annual salary | R 96,000 | R 540,000 |
| Tax on salary alone (after rebate) | R 0 | R 111,307 |
| Tax on salary + R20,000 withdrawal | R 3,060 | R 118,507 |
| Extra tax caused by the withdrawal | R 3,060 | R 7,200 |
| Net payout from the R20,000 withdrawal | R 16,940 | R 12,800 |
The lower earner's annual income alone (R96,000) sits close enough to the tax threshold that only R17,000 of the R20,000 crosses into taxable territory, once income past that point stops being fully offset by their rebate, costing R3,060 in tax. The higher earner is already deep into the 36% bracket, so the withdrawal is taxed at that top rate throughout, more than double the tax cost for the identical withdrawal amount. This is exactly why a flat percentage assumption ("you'll lose about 25%") is unreliable; your own income level changes the answer substantially. Use the calculator above with your real salary to see your own figure, not an average.
Should you withdraw or leave it invested?
Every rand taken out of your savings pot now stops compounding for the rest of your working life, on top of the immediate tax cost. A R20,000 withdrawal left invested at 8% for 15 years would grow to roughly R66,140, more than three times its current value, entirely tax-deferred until you eventually retire. That's not a reason to never withdraw; a genuine short-term need, like clearing high-interest debt or an emergency expense, can still make a withdrawal the right call. It's a reason to run the numbers first rather than withdrawing on impulse. The calculator above shows this exact comparison for your own amount and timeframe.