EMP501 reconciliation checker

Why does an EMP501 reconciliation fail?

The common failures are mechanical: a certificate issued for an employee whose months were never declared, a declaration corrected without the certificate following, a payment allocated to the wrong period, or a February adjustment that reached the payroll but never the EMP201. Each one leaves two of the three totals disagreeing, and SARS reads that disagreement as either an understatement to query or a debt to collect. Checking the totals against each other before submission turns a correction cycle into a five-minute fix.

Rates verified against SARS on 27 September 2026, for the 2027 year of assessment. Estimate for review only. The checker tests totals; the reconciliation itself files per employee, so a balanced total can still hide offsetting certificate errors worth spot-checking.

• A guide to the employer reconciliation process, SARS EMP-GEN-02-G01
• SARS: PAYE reconciliations
• SARS: Pay As You Earn

EMP501 questions for the 2027 tax year

What must an EMP501 reconciliation balance?

Three totals for the period: the employees tax declared on the monthly EMP201s, the employees tax on the IRP5 and IT3(a) certificates issued to employees, and the payments actually made to SARS. The reconciliation passes when all three agree, and a difference in either direction comes back as a query, a correction cycle, or a debt.

When are the EMP501 reconciliations due?

For the 2027 tax year, the interim EMP501 for March to August 2026 is due by Friday 30 October 2026, because 31 October is a Saturday, and the annual EMP501 for March 2026 to February 2027 is due by Monday 31 May 2027. A closing day on a weekend or public holiday moves to the business day before.

What happens if the EMP501 is late?

A penalty of 1 percent of the year’s employees tax accrues for every month the reconciliation stays outstanding, up to 10 percent. Our SARS penalty calculator puts a rand figure on that exposure for any payroll size.

Does this checker store anything I type in?

No. Every figure is worked out in your browser, and the numbers you type are masked before anything leaves it, so they stay on your own device. There is no sign-up and no email field. Anonymised analytics and an anonymised session replay do run across the site so we can see which pages confuse people, and one click in the footer switches both off.

PAYE arithmetic for a single salary lives in our PAYE calculator, and the SARS penalty calculator puts a rand figure on a late reconciliation. Our company tax compliance calendar guide covers where the reconciliation windows sit in the year, and C-Suite Commercial tracks the EMP201 and EMP501 cycle for every employer client a practice looks after.

One employer reconciled, or every payroll client

This page checks one employer's totals. A practice running payroll for a book of clients faces the same three-way test on every one of them inside the same window, and C-Suite runs those checks across the whole book in a free one-week pilot on your own clients, so the reconciliations that will not balance surface weeks before the deadline.

See how the pilot works