The Workplace Skills Plan and Annual Training Report

The levy you are already paying

If your annual payroll is above R500 000 you are paying the Skills Development Levy, and you are almost certainly paying it without looking at it. It is 1 percent of your total payroll, it goes to SARS every month on the EMP201 alongside PAYE, and from the inside it looks like one more line on a return your bookkeeper files. Employers with an annual payroll under R500 000 are exempt.

That money does not stay with SARS. It moves into the SETA system, and a defined slice of it is set aside to come back to the employer who paid it, as the mandatory grant. The mandatory grant is 20 percent of what you paid. Your SETA pays it, not SARS, and it is only payable to an employer who has submitted a Workplace Skills Plan and an Annual Training Report by the deadline.

That is the whole proposition, and it is why this is worth an afternoon of a contracts manager’s time. A firm with 180 people on the payroll has already handed over 1 percent of it. A fifth of that is sitting in the system with its name on it, waiting for a form.

What the WSP and the ATR actually are

They are two halves of one submission, and they point in opposite directions in time. The SETA financial year runs from 1 April to 31 March. The Annual Training Report looks backwards at the year that has just ended and says what training you actually delivered. The Workplace Skills Plan looks forward at the year about to start and says what you intend to deliver. You submit both together.

So the submission made by 30 April 2026 reported training delivered in the year to 31 March 2026 and planned training for the 2026/2027 year. The MQA, for example, worked to 30 April 2026 for the 2026/2027 financial year.

Two process requirements usually sit alongside the forms. A Skills Development Facilitator normally has to be appointed and registered with your SETA before anyone can submit on your behalf, and larger employers are generally expected to have a training committee that has been consulted on the plan. The detail of both varies between SETAs, so treat that as the shape of the requirement rather than the rule, and confirm the specifics with yours.

30 April, and what missing it costs

The date is 30 April every year. SETAs state it plainly: the MQA, the SETA for mining and minerals, gives 30 April as the deadline and takes submissions only through its online system at sims.mqa.org.za. Other SETAs use the same 30 April date through their own portals, which is worth knowing because it means you cannot email a spreadsheet to someone on 2 May and expect it to be processed.

Here is the part employers tend to find out the hard way. Missing the deadline does not delay the mandatory grant, it forfeits it. The money is not recoverable. It stays inside the SETA system and is redistributed. Meanwhile you keep paying 1 percent of payroll every month without interruption, which is what turns a missed submission from an administrative slip into a real cost you will never see an invoice for.

Which SETA you belong to

Your SETA is determined by your own main business activity, not by what your clients do. This trips up contractors constantly, because a firm doing mechanical maintenance on a mine feels like a mining business when it is standing on a mine. Depending on what its primary activity genuinely is, that firm may sit with the MQA or with merSETA.

If there is any genuine doubt, get it confirmed in writing before you register a Skills Development Facilitator. Registering with the wrong SETA wastes the only part of this process with a hard deadline, and the portals are not interchangeable.

What the ATR asks for, per person

This is where an afternoon turns into a week. The ATR is not a total spend figure. It asks, for each training intervention, a set of questions about the people who went on it:

• Who was trained, by name, with gender, population group and disability status
• The occupational category, or the OFO code for the role
• The type of intervention: short course, skills programme, learnership, apprenticeship, internship or bursary
• Whether the training provider is accredited
• The NQF level, where one applies
• The cost

Two things on that list cause most of the pain. The first is cost per course, which almost nobody holds per person, because the invoice was for a group and sat in the accounts system, not with the certificate. The second is the demographic detail, which is the same data the EEA2 needs and is normally collected on the EEA1 form, so a designated employer already has it. If you are one, see our guide to the employment equity report for how that data is gathered. Do not simply lift totals across, though: the employment equity reporting year and the SETA financial year cover different periods, so the same person’s training can fall into one report and not the other.

There is one exclusion worth getting right. Site inductions and client-specific access tickets are generally not regarded by SETAs as reportable training. They are access control, not skills development. Contractors include them because they are the most numerous training records in the business and the easiest to export, and the result is an ATR padded with hundreds of entries that earn nothing and make the real training harder to see.

The same records feed your B-BBEE scorecard

The grant is not the only reason to hold this data properly. The skills development element of a B-BBEE scorecard runs off the same information. It measures training spend as a percentage of leviable amount, and it counts learnerships, apprenticeships and internships, including whether learners were absorbed into employment afterwards.

The points available depend on verified spend measured against your leviable amount, and the allocations are set by the codes rather than by your SETA, so confirm the current scorecard weightings with your verification agency rather than assuming last year’s. The practical point stands regardless: a verification agency will ask for cost, provider, accreditation status and learner detail per intervention, which is the same list the ATR asks for. Build the record once and it serves both.

Why April is hard, and how to fix it

Almost every contractor already has the training records. Certificates are in a drawer or a shared folder, dates and names are on them, and the safety officer can produce them. What is missing is everything the form actually asks beyond the name and the date.

The records live in three places. The certificates are with HR or the safety officer. The costs are in the accounts system, as supplier invoices with no link to the person who sat in the room. The demographics are in payroll, or in nobody’s file at all. Every April somebody reassembles all three under time pressure, and the reassembly is the whole job. That is why submissions go in thin, go in late, or do not go in.

The fix is not a bigger April. It is capturing four extra fields at the moment a course is booked, while someone still knows the answers:

1. Cost per attendee. Take the invoice total and divide it at booking. Write it against each person, not against the course.
2. Provider and accreditation status. Ask the provider once and record it. In April nobody can remember and the provider may not answer.
3. Intervention type and NQF level. Short course, skills programme, learnership, apprenticeship, internship or bursary, plus the NQF level where one applies.
4. A reportable flag. Mark inductions and client access tickets as not reportable when you file them, so the April export excludes them automatically.

Do that and the ATR becomes an export rather than an investigation, the WSP becomes a conversation with your training committee about next year instead of a guess, and the 20 percent you have already paid for stops depending on whether anyone remembered the date.