According to Statistics South Africa, the food poverty line stands at R868 per person per month, which is equivalent to approximately R28.55 per day. This amount is only sufficient to meet the minimum daily intake of 2100 calories and does not imply a healthy or recommended diet.
Statistics South Africa calculated this amount as the minimum necessary to provide the basic energy requirement of 2100 calories. Furthermore, there are two other national poverty lines: the lower limit is set at R1,457 per person per month, and the upper limit is at R2,962.
The lower limit reflects the extremely difficult situation of households that have to sacrifice some nutritional needs to pay for essential non-food items such as housing, clothing, healthcare, and transport. The upper limit, in turn, denotes the level at which people can satisfy both minimum food and non-food needs without compromising nutrition.
Less than R29 a day for food
The methodology for calculating the food poverty line has its peculiarities. Statistics South Africa uses consumption models of poorer households to create a reference food basket. The poorest 10% are deliberately excluded, as their diet may indicate acute deficiency and atypical survival strategies; instead, households from the tenth expenditure groups two through six are used.
This basket includes 46 types of food commonly consumed by these households, including maize meal, bread, rice, chicken, chicken heads and feet, offal, sausage, canned fish, beans, potatoes, cabbage, vegetable oil, sugar, and tea. However, there is an important nuance: actual food expenditures among these reference households provided only 1211 calories per person per day, which is significantly below the target of 2100 calories set by Statistics South Africa.
Consequently, Statistics South Africa scales these expenditures up to determine the theoretical cost of obtaining 2100 calories, which led to the formation of the food poverty line at R777 based on 2023 prices, later adjusted to R868 for 2026. Thus, even the consumption patterns used to build this line showed that people were eating substantially less than the minimum required energy norm.
Surviving is not eating well
There is also a significant difference between providing sufficient calories and receiving adequate nutrition. The Pietermaritzburg Economic Justice and Dignity Group (PMBEJD) accessibility index for August shows that the average cost of a basic nutritional diet for a child is R961.96 per month, which already exceeds the entire food poverty line set by Statistics South Africa (R868) by almost R100.
PMBEJD draws an important distinction between its nutritional basket and what low-income households actually purchase. Their household food basket, based on items that low-income women try to buy monthly, cost R5,479.80 for a family of seven in August, and PMBEJD warns that this basket is not nutritionally complete. A nutritionally complete basket for the same family would cost R6,597.25, which is R1,100 more.
South Africans can find extremely cheap food. However, the question raised by the poverty line is not whether it is technically possible to gather cheap calories, but what happens when food has to compete with everything else a person needs to maintain housing, hygiene, connectivity, and the ability to work.
The OpenUp Living Wage calculator attempts to reflect this fuller picture, including 11 categories of household expenses—food, transport, housing, utilities, healthcare, hygiene, education, and communication—to estimate what a household truly needs just to live, not just survive.
Now pay for the rest of your life
Consider an illustrative example from Johannesburg. A small apartment in Yeoville can be rented for approximately R1,114 per month. The actual purchase of prepaid electricity amounting to R1,000 provides about 283 kWh at a price of around R3.53 per kWh. PMBEJD estimated in January that two daily taxi trips in Pietermaritzburg cost a worker about R1,680 per month, although transport is usually more expensive in Johannesburg.
If these three expenses—rent of R1,114, electricity of R1,000, and transport of R1,680—are added together, the total amounts to R3,794 per month. And the person has not eaten yet. Adding the food poverty grant from Statistics South Africa of R868 brings the most modest estimated monthly cost to R4,662, which exceeds the upper poverty line of Statistics South Africa at R2,962 by R1,700. This sum does not include hygiene products, sanitary items, clothing, medicine, internet or call time, household goods, debt repayment, insurance, education costs, or unforeseen expenses.
These examples are not representative budgets, but they illustrate the problem of translating an individual poverty threshold into daily life. Many real expenses are not conveniently distributed by the number of people in the household.
Every rand already has a job
This is where poverty stops being a matter of a single figure and becomes a matter of choosing between necessities. Transport competes with food, but a worker cannot simply stop commuting to work. Electricity competes with food, yet cheap staples like maize meal still require water and energy for preparation. Buying in bulk can make food cheaper per kilogram, but it requires having enough money available beforehand.
Shopping at a cheaper supermarket only saves money if the journey there does not absorb those savings. Soap, toothpaste, and hygiene products are not luxuries. Nor is a place to sleep. PMBEJD's modeling for a four-person minimum wage worker demonstrates this pressure. After paying only for transport and electricity, the calculation shows that the worker has R1,653.35 left for everything else.
Key measurements
The latest measurement of poverty by Statistics South Africa showed that about 10.8 million South Africans lived below the food poverty line in 2023. Meanwhile, the World Bank describes income distribution in South Africa as having a relatively small middle class and a large low-income group, with the bottom 40% of the population receiving only 11.5% of the total income.
Poverty lines serve an important function—they allow statisticians to consistently measure poverty, track its improvement, and compare changes over time. Statistics South Africa itself warns that its national poverty lines were not designed to determine minimum wages, social benefits, or other policy thresholds. However, a statistical threshold should not be confused with a household's working budget. R868 may indicate the point below which a South African cannot afford minimum food energy, but it does not mean that life becomes affordable at R869.