Statistics South Africa (StatsSA) has adjusted the minimum financial thresholds that citizens need to meet for basic survival. StatsSA has been tracking the national poverty lines since 2006 and, on Thursday, released its revised measurements for the first half of 2026. Its latest release detailed three bands based on an internationally accepted cost-of-goods metric and the minimum consumption required for individual welfare.
The amounts are per person per month and are based on the same basket of goods used to gauge the consumer price index. StatsSA stated that the poverty lines were set based on the cost of basic needs and their relationship to welfare and the consumption expenditure for food and non-food components. The extreme poverty line “refers to the amount of money that an individual will need to afford the minimum required daily energy intake”.
StatsSA states that this daily energy intake for an adult performing light physical activity should be a minimum of 2 100 kilocalories (kcal). “This estimation required three essential data inputs, namely the quantity of each food item consumed, the caloric value of each item per 100 grams, and its price per 100 grams,” StatsSA explained. StatsSA believes that 2 100 kcal can be achieved by spending at least R855 per person per month.
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The second and third thresholds include non-food items, calculated from the average estimated expenditures of “households whose consumption behaviour will anchor the cost of basic needs”. “The averaged median non-food consumption expenditure of each reference group of households was added to the food line to produce the lower bound poverty line (LBPL) and the upper bound poverty line (UBPL),” stated StatsSA’s report.
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