The employment equity report, explained

Who has to report now

The Employment Equity Amendment Act 2022 took effect on 1 January 2025, and it changed the one thing that decides whether the rest of this page applies to you: the definition of a designated employer. Before that date you were designated if you had 50 or more employees, or if you were smaller but your annual turnover crossed a figure set for your sector. The turnover test is gone. If you employ 50 or more people, you are a designated employer, and turnover no longer rescues anybody or catches anybody.

For a contractor this cuts both ways. A civils firm with heavy revenue and 30 people on the books may have been designated on turnover before and is not designated now. A labour-heavy outfit with 60 or 200 people and thin margins was often outside the net on the old turnover test and is now squarely inside it. Most of the employers who have quietly never filed an EEA2 are in that second group, and the first they hear about it is when a client asks for a compliance certificate.

Below 50 employees you do not prepare an EE Plan and you do not submit annual reports. That is the whole of the exemption. The Act's anti-discrimination provisions and its equal pay for work of equal value provisions apply to every employer in the country, so a nine-person firm can still be taken to the CCMA for unfair discrimination. Organs of state are designated regardless of headcount.

If your headcount sits near 50 and moves with the contract book, have the count checked against the Act's definition of an employee rather than against whatever your payroll report shows on the day. Fixed-term crew, seasonal labour and people placed through a third party are where the argument happens, so ask your advisor before you decide you are exempt.

The forms, and what each one is for

Four documents carry the whole system. Three are familiar. The fourth, the EEA1, is the one employers skip, which is why their EEA2 never balances.

The EEA1 is the foundation and it is the cheapest thing on this list to get right. Population group and disability status are special personal information under section 26 of POPIA. You are allowed to process them because section 27(1)(b) permits processing that a law requires, and the Employment Equity Act requires it. What you are not allowed to do is decide for the employee. The declaration is theirs to make on the EEA1, and inferring it from a surname, an ID number, a photograph or an accent is both a POPIA problem and a data quality problem, because you will be wrong often enough to make your profile meaningless.

The deadlines, and why manual filers start in September

There is one reporting window with two very different closing dates, and the gap between them is where small employers lose a year.

Manual filers get one month. Online filers get four and a half. If you intend to submit on paper, your preparation has to be finished before the window opens, because 1 October arrives three and a half months earlier than the date everybody quotes. For the cycle that opened on 1 September 2026, the online deadline is 15 January 2027. Register for the online system if you have the choice, and do it early rather than in December, because a login problem in the first week of January is not something a weekend of work will fix.

The reporting year for workforce movements, meaning recruits, promotions and terminations, runs from 1 September to 31 August. That is not your financial year and it is not your SETA year either. The Workplace Skills Plan and Annual Training Report cover a different period with their own 30 April deadline, so you cannot fill in one report from the extract you pulled for the other. Employers who try end up with movement figures that do not reconcile to either report.

What the workforce profile actually asks for

The workforce profile on the EEA2 is a matrix, and once you see it as a grid the work becomes clerical rather than mysterious. The rows are occupational levels:

• Top management
• Senior management
• Professionally qualified and experienced specialists and mid-management
• Skilled technical and academically qualified workers, including junior management and supervisors
• Semi-skilled and discretionary decision making
• Unskilled and defined decision making

The columns are population group, African, Coloured, Indian and White, each split into male and female. Foreign nationals are counted in their own separate male and female columns rather than inside the population group columns. Every employee has to land in exactly one cell, which means every employee needs a declared population group and gender and an assigned occupational level. A site foreman who has never been slotted into a level is not a rounding error on this form, he is a person the matrix cannot place.

Occupational level is where contractors struggle most, because trade titles do not map cleanly onto the Act's six levels and nobody in the business has ever had to make the call. Make it once, write it down against each role rather than each person, and keep it stable between years, otherwise your progress figures will move for reasons that have nothing to do with hiring. Download the current EEA2 from labour.gov.za each cycle rather than reusing last year's spreadsheet, because the form's layout and the detail it asks for do change between versions.

Sectoral targets and what progress means now

This is the second big change and it reframes what the report is for. The Department of Employment and Labour set five-year sector-specific numerical targets, published in the Government Gazette on 15 April 2025 and running from 1 September 2025 to 31 August 2030. They replace the previous arrangement where each employer set its own targets in its own EE Plan. You no longer get to choose a number you are comfortable with and report against it.

The targets vary by sector and by occupational level, so there is no single figure to quote and anyone who gives you one without asking what sector you are in is guessing. Find the gazetted targets for your sector on labour.gov.za and read the rows for your own occupational levels. The one change that applies across every sector is disability: the employment target for people with disabilities rose from 2 percent to 3 percent.

Progress now means movement toward the targets set for your sector, or a justifiable reason for not getting there. That second half is real and it is worth using honestly. A genuine skills shortage in your region, a workforce that barely turned over because you lost a contract, or a plant mothballed for seven months are reasons, provided your records show them. A blank box is not a reason, and neither is a paragraph written in January about a year you did nothing to plan for.

The compliance certificate and state contracts

The EE compliance certificate is the part of this that has teeth, and it is the reason employers who ignored employment equity for a decade are suddenly asking about it. The Department of Employment and Labour has issued these certificates since 1 September 2025 and each one is valid for 12 months. For a contractor the practical point is simple: a state contract requires this certificate. No certificate, no state work, whatever your price looks like.

To qualify, an employer must:

• have submitted the annual EE report on time;
• show progress toward the sectoral targets, or give justifiable reasons for not doing so;
• have complied with the National Minimum Wage Act for the previous 12 months;
• have no CCMA rulings against it for unfair discrimination in the last year.

Both designated and non-designated employers may apply, so a 20-person subcontractor chasing public sector work is not shut out by being too small. Look hard at the first condition: on time means on time, so a late EEA2 does not simply attract a rebuke, it costs you the certificate and with it a year of tender eligibility. That single line is the strongest argument for filing online in September rather than scrambling in January.

What trips employers up

The failures are boringly consistent, and almost none of them are about discrimination. They are about record keeping.

• Declarations never collected. No EEA1 on file for half the crew, so the profile is built from guesswork or from whatever the payroll system happens to hold.
• Employees with no occupational level. People hired against a job title that was never mapped to one of the six levels, who then cannot be placed in the matrix at all.
• Foreign nationals in the wrong column. Counted inside a population group instead of in their own separate male and female columns, which quietly misstates both the profile and the progress figures.
• Employers guessing special personal information. Inferring population group or disability from a name or an appearance, which is a POPIA breach and bad data at the same time.
• The manual deadline missed. Working to 15 January while intending to file on paper, and arriving to find the channel closed on 1 October.
• An EE Plan that exists only as a file. A five-year plan with numerical goals that nobody monitored, consulted on or used to make a single hiring decision, which makes the progress section of the EEA2 impossible to write truthfully.
• National Minimum Wage compliance treated as separate. It is one of the four certificate conditions, so a wage problem twelve months old can sink an otherwise clean application.

None of this is difficult work. It is twelve months of small, timely record keeping compressed into a form, and the employers who find January painful are the ones who started in January. Collect the EEA1s when people are inducted, assign an occupational level when a role is created, and keep your movements register current through the year, and the EEA2 becomes a transcription job rather than an investigation.