Here is how it usually goes. You have a strong year trading crypto, you file your return, and a few months later a SARS assessment lands with penalties and interest attached, for tax you were apparently meant to pay in instalments during the year. Nobody mentioned that you had become a provisional taxpayer. That is how most crypto traders find out what provisional tax is, and it is the expensive way to find out.
It catches people who never thought of themselves as running a business, just someone who got good at trading, or who earned a bit of staking yield on the side. You do not have to learn it that way. If you trade crypto often, or you earn crypto as income, there is a good chance you are already a provisional taxpayer whether you have thought of yourself as one or not. Here is what that means, when the deadlines actually fall, and how to put a number on the IRP6 that you can stand behind.
Who counts as a provisional taxpayer
Provisional tax is not a separate tax. It is a way of paying your normal income tax during the year, in instalments, instead of in one lump after year-end. You fall into it when you earn income that has no PAYE withheld from it by an employer, above fairly small thresholds. Trading profits and business income are the usual triggers.
With crypto, it tends to come down to how you trade. Buy and sell often, chasing short-term profit, and SARS is likely to treat those profits as revenue in nature. Revenue income with no PAYE sitting behind it is exactly the thing that makes you provisional. Earning crypto as income points the same way, whether that is mining, staking rewards, airdrops, or getting paid in crypto for work, because that value counts as income at the rand price on the day it reaches you.
A salaried person who bought some Bitcoin years ago and is genuinely holding it for the long term sits in a different spot. If that holding is capital in nature and there is not much other untaxed income around it, the eventual gain is a capital gains question and does not, on its own, usually drag you into provisional tax. The catch is that capital versus revenue is not yours to simply pick. It turns on your intention when you bought, how often you trade, how long you hold, and how you run the whole thing. That classification decides almost everything downstream, and we go through the intent test properly in the crypto tax guide.
How the payment cycle works
Individuals run on a tax year that ends at the end of February. Provisional tax spreads your payments across that year through the IRP6 return, which is where you file your estimate and pay against it.
Two rounds are compulsory and a third is optional.
- The first IRP6 falls due by 31 August, halfway through the year. You estimate your taxable income for the full year, work out the tax, and pay half of it.
- The second IRP6 is due by the last day of February, the year-end itself. You revise your full-year estimate and pay the balance owing on it.
- A third, optional payment comes at the end of September after year-end. It lets you top up if your estimate turned out light, and paying it can reduce the interest SARS charges on the shortfall.
Between them, the two compulsory payments are meant to cover most of your tax for the year before you ever file the annual return. For the 2027 year of assessment (1 March 2026 to 28 February 2027), those dates land like this.
| IRP6 round | Due |
|---|---|
| First (mid-year) | 31 August 2026 |
| Second (year-end) | End of February 2027 |
| Third (optional top-up) | End of September 2027 |
What you are actually estimating
The figure on an IRP6 is an estimate of your full-year taxable income. Not only your crypto, all of it: salary, interest, any side income, rental, with your crypto results stacked on top.
For a trader, the crypto part is where it gets awkward. In August you are trying to call where your trading will finish by the end of February, while positions are still open and the market can swing hard inside a week. You could be nicely up on paper and hand it all back before year-end, or the reverse. Profits from trades you have already closed are real and countable. Moves on open positions are still guesses.
So estimate off what has genuinely happened so far, add a sober view of the rest of the year, and do not talk yourself into a low number. There is no rule that says you must nail it to the rand in August. There is a strong reason to be honest and diligent about it, though, because lowballing the estimate to keep the payment small feels clever at the time and rarely is. The second estimate and the final assessment both catch up with reality, and coming in short carries its own cost.
What getting it wrong costs
Pay a provisional amount late, or miss it, and SARS adds a late payment penalty of 10% of the unpaid amount. That is a flat charge, not something that eases off because you were only a bit late.
Underestimate by a wide margin and a second issue appears. If your final taxable income lands well above what you put on the IRP6, SARS can raise an underestimation penalty on the difference. Interest then runs on top of any shortfall until you have settled it, so a gap left sitting quietly keeps growing. None of this is here to talk you out of trading. It is the reason that optional third payment is worth knowing about. If you work out after year-end that your estimate was light, settling the balance by the end of September can take the edge off the interest before it compounds.
Provisional tax does not replace your ITR12
Paying during the year does not mean you are finished with SARS for that year. The IRP6 rounds are estimates and payments on account, nothing more. After year-end you still submit your annual return, the ITR12, and that is where the whole thing gets reconciled against what really happened. Your actual disposals, your realised gains and losses, the crypto you received as income, all of it goes onto the ITR12, and the tax you already paid through your IRP6s is credited against the final bill. Overpaid, and the difference comes back to you. Underpaid, and you settle it.
Being provisional does buy you more time to file that return. For Filing Season 2026, the provisional taxpayer deadline is 22 January 2027, a good stretch past the October deadline that most non-provisional individuals work to. For the mechanics of getting crypto onto the return itself, we walk through it in declaring crypto on your ITR12 via eFiling.
The hard part is getting a real number mid-year
All of this leans on one thing. To estimate well, you have to know your actual result so far, and in August that means a clean, current read on what your crypto has done since 1 March. Realised gains, income received, fees paid, the lot. When that history is scattered over a couple of exchanges and an old CSV or two, assembling it by hand in the middle of the year is grim, and a rushed guess is precisely how people end up underestimating.
This is the gap Coinfig is built to close. Connect Luno, VALR, or Kraken with read-only API keys, or import a CSV from anywhere else, and you get a running view of your gains and income as the year unfolds, not just a scramble at filing time. The completeness check flags missing history, unmatched transfers, and balance changes that do not add up, so your mid-year figure rests on something solid rather than a hunch. When the IRP6 is due, you or your practitioner can work straight from a report that lays out the year-to-date position and the assumptions behind it.
The free plan runs a full report for up to 100 transactions, which is enough for a lot of part-time traders to reach a real estimate instead of a finger in the air. One thing to be straight about: Coinfig does the calculations and produces the reports, and it leaves the tax advice to your practitioner. It will not decide for you whether your trading is revenue or capital, and it will not file on your behalf.
If you have just had a big crypto year, the cheapest move available to you is to find out whether you are provisional before a penalty tells you. That starts with getting your transaction history in order.
This article is general information, not tax advice. Crypto tax outcomes depend on your specific circumstances. For complex situations, consult a qualified tax practitioner.