SARS has made changes to the 2025 tax return to help taxpayers who ceased South African tax residency during the tax year. If this applies to you, your tax return will now include two parts:

Part 1: While you were still a South African tax resident
In this section, you must declare all your local and worldwide income – both from South Africa and from overseas.

Part 2: After you ceased to be a South African tax resident
From the date you ceased residency, you must only declare your South African income. You do not need to include any foreign income earned after that date.

Don’t Forget: Exit Tax

When you cease tax residency, SARS sees this as if you've sold all your worldwide assets (except for South African fixed property). This means you need to declare capital gains tax (CGT) on these assets – this is called the "exit tax". Be sure to include this in your tax return. In the Capital Gains section, you will see a little block which you must tick if the sale is a "deemed disposal" which would apply in the case you have ceased residency and therefore treated for tax as though you have sold your assets.

Dual-Status Filing Help from TaxTim

To make this easier, TaxTim has created a special Dual Resident package for taxpayers in this situation which will guide you through both the resident and non-resident sections step by step.

You’ll notice that the TaxTim menu now includes separate sections for your resident and non-resident periods — for example, “Interest and Investments IT3b” and “Interest and Investments IT3b Non-Res.”

The first section applies to the time before you ceased South African tax residency. Here, you need to declare all your investment income, both local and foreign, earned up to the date your residency ended.

The second section applies to the period after you ceased residency. In this part, you should only declare your South African (local) investment income earned from the date you ceased residency to the end of the tax year. This is because once you are a non-tax resident, you are no longer taxed on your offshore income in South Africa.