KwaZulu-Natal province achieved the highest pass rate for the 2025National Senior Certificateexamination at 90.6%, the department of basic education said on Monday, helping nudge the national pass rate to a record 88%. The Eastern Cape ranked lowest out of the country’s nine provinces, with a pass rate of 84.17%, below Limpopo which came in eighth place with 86.15% and Mpumalanga which was seventh with 86.55%. The Northern Cape recorded the biggest improvement, ranking sixth with a pass rate of 87.79%.
The Western Cape placed fifth with 88.2%, North West was fourth with 88.49% and Gauteng third with 89.0%. The Free State ranked second with a pass rate of 89.33%. “Nationally, the NSC pass rate is 88% — an increase of around 0.7% from 2024.
88% is the highest pass rate in our country’s history,” Basic Education MinisterSiviwe Gwarubesaid in a speech to announce the results. She however urged South Africans to look beyond headline matric pass rates and reflect on what the results said about the overall health of the education system, including areas of progress and those requiring urgent intervention to strengthen equity. The accounting pass rate declined from 81% to 78%, while that for mathematics fell from 69% to 64%.
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Gwarube noted. Physical sciences, however, improved from 76% to 78%. “The 2025 results show that excellence is spreading into communities that have carried the heaviest burdens,” Gwarube said.
She noted that the 2025 National Senior Certificate (NSC) results were the second to be released under the government of national unity — led by the ANC and Gwarube’s Democratic Alliance — which she described as a national project that chose responsibility and unity over blame. “Our system serves approximately 13.5 million learners supported by more than 460 000 educators across nearly 25 000 schools,” Gwarube said. This included hundreds of circuit officers, 75 education districts and nine provincial education departments.
“We are not in the business of quick wins or grabbing headlines, we are in transforming lives and ensuring South African children have the best future ahead of them,” she said, describing the NSC as one of the largest and most complex operations in the country, second only to national elections. More than 900 000 candidates wrote the 2025 examinations across about 6 000 centres, with millions of scripts set, printed, written, marked, checked and quality assured.
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