Voting day is 4 November
The local government elections 2026 will be held on Wednesday 4 November. Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs Minister Velenkosini Hlabisa proclaimed the date on Friday 7 August 2026, which started the 89-day statutory timetable the Electoral Commission now has to run to.
The Commission briefed the media on 2 September on the outcome of candidate nominations and the milestones still ahead. The verification stage is under way as you read this.
| Date | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 26 August 2026 | Final voters’ roll certified |
| 28 August 2026, 17:00 | Candidate nominations closed |
| 4 to 16 September 2026 | Candidate verification and finalisation |
| 16 September 2026 | Final list of candidates published |
| 21 September 2026 | Special vote applications open |
| 25 September 2026 | Certificates of candidacy issued |
| 12 October 2026 | Special vote applications close |
| 4 November 2026 | Voting day |
Registration has already closed
This is the part that catches people. The voters’ roll closed at midnight on the day of proclamation, and the Chief Electoral Officer certified the final roll on 26 August 2026. No new registrations and no changes to registration details are accepted for this election.
If you did not register, or you moved and did not update your address, there is no remedy left for 4 November. Your ward is determined by the address on the roll, and the local government ballot is a ward ballot, so voting elsewhere is not an option the way it can be in a national election.
Check your registration status and your voting station now rather than on the day. The Commission’s registration drive logged more than two million voter-related transactions, including over 14 000 registrations through a new WhatsApp service in its first few days, so a great many records changed in a short period.
The 2 274 candidates who did not make it
The nomination deadline produced a dispute worth understanding, because it will shape the ballot you see.
Electoral Commission chairperson Mosotho Moepya told the 2 September briefing that more than 2 200 candidates from 45 political parties had been captured on the Commission’s online nomination platform but were never formally submitted by the 17:00 cut-off on 28 August. The breakdown was 480 proportional representation candidates and 1 794 ward candidates.
Entered is not the same as submitted. The Commission’s position is that the system remained available throughout, including on the final day, and that it opened the online nomination system on 21 June, well before the formal nomination period began on 7 August.
The African National Congress issued a statement on 31 August about its own submissions. The Commission responded that no party or independent candidate has been given, or will be given, additional time to capture nominations, and that the mechanics of the process would be taken up through the National Political Liaison Committee, the forum of parties represented in the National Assembly.
The practical effect is that some wards will have fewer names on the ballot than the parties intended. The final list on 16 September is where that becomes visible.
Special votes
Applications for special votes open on 21 September and close on 12 October. A special vote is for a registered voter who cannot get to their voting station on election day because of illness, disability, pregnancy or other qualifying circumstances, and it covers both home visits and voting at the station on the designated special voting days.
The window is three weeks and it does not reopen. If you know now that you will be in hospital, immobile or away, put the application in during that period rather than hoping to sort it out in the last week of October.
What you are actually voting for
Local government ballots are not like national ones. In a metropolitan municipality you receive two ballots: one for a ward councillor and one for a party list. In a local municipality that sits inside a district, you receive three: a ward ballot, a local party list ballot and a district council ballot.
That structure is why the ward candidate matters as much as the party. The person whose name is on the first ballot is the one you phone about a burst pipe.
Why this one is worth turning up for
Municipal government is where most of the daily failures of the state actually happen, and the numbers are grim.
The National Treasury withheld funds from dozens of councils this year over non-compliance, which we covered in our piece on the freeze on municipal transfers. Municipal debt owed to Eskom and the water boards is measured in the hundreds of billions, and the parties are campaigning on it, as set out in our reporting on the R161 billion municipal debt pledge. What councils charge you flows directly from all of this, which we tracked in municipal tariff increases for 2026.
Those are council decisions, taken by councillors elected on 4 November, for a five-year term.
Where to check
The Electoral Commission publishes the election timetable, the candidate lists, the voting station finder and the registration status checker at elections.org.za. Its contact centre and its WhatsApp service handle registration status queries. Treat the timetable on that site as the authority, because the statutory dates cannot be moved or negotiated once proclamation has happened.
