Where was it issued?

Which system applies

AARTO applies in the municipalities named in the 2026 proclamations and nowhere else. Pick the one printed on your notice; if it is not listed, you are on the Criminal Procedure Act route.

Issuing municipality

62 municipalities · type to narrow

Until you choose, treat every AARTO figure on this page as conditional. It is wrong for most of the country.

Guides

Some questions need more room than a section. These are the ones readers ask most often, written in the same way as the rest of the site: from the instrument, with the citation beside the claim, and with the gaps left visible.

The set

In these guides

Three long answers that do not fit on any of the four pillar pages, and the list of shorter ones underneath them.

Guide

The escalation ladder, rung by rung — and the ten clocks that run it

An AARTO matter escalates through three documents. What is not obvious from any of them is that the periods governing those documents are ten separate statutory periods that happen to hold the same number today.

The chain starts with an infringement notice. If nothing is done inside its window, a courtesy letter follows, and it adds R100 to what is owed. If the courtesy letter is not answered, an enforcement order follows, and it adds R100 more. Each of those documents is served, each is deemed served on a day that is often not the day printed on it, and each starts a period of its own that runs from that deemed date.

Readers usually describe this as “the 32-day rule”, and that description is what causes the mistakes. There is no single rule. The discount window and the window for choosing an option are two different periods attached to the same document; the courtesy letter has one of its own; the enforcement order has both a precondition period that runs against the authority and a payment period that runs against you. The table below is those periods laid out separately, each beside the provision that creates it. They hold the same number today. Nothing requires them to hold it tomorrow, and a reader who has internalised one number will not notice the day one of them moves.

← swipe to see the whole table →

The statutory periods, one row each
Period	Runs from	What it governs	Provision
32 days	Deemed service of the infringement notice	How long the discounted amount stays available	s.17(1)(d); reg 17(2)
32 days	Deemed service of the infringement notice	How long you have to choose an option — including making a representation	s.17(1)(f)
32 days	Deemed service of the courtesy letter	How long the courtesy letter gives you before the next step	s.19(2)(b)
32 days	Service of the notice or the courtesy letter	The minimum that must have passed before an enforcement order may issue at all	s.20(2)(b)
32 days	Service of the enforcement order	How long you have to satisfy the order	s.20(3)(a), as substituted
32 days	Deemed service of the representation result	The REVIVED discount window after a representation is rejected	reg 17(3)
32 days	Deemed service of the appeal or review outcome	The discount window that opens again after an appeal or review	reg 17(4)
32 days	The payment failing or being dishonoured	How long you have to put a failed payment right	s.19B(1)(a)
32 days	The disqualification arising	When a disqualification takes effect — and the wording of this one is unsettled	s.25(1) — see the open questions
32 days	The notice of disqualification or cancellation	How long you have to surrender the affected document	s.25(3)(a), as substituted

Applies in 62 municipalities and nowhere else · the AARTO Act 46 of 1998 as amended by Act 4 of 2019, and the AARTO Regulations, 2026, both from 1 July 2026. Ten rows because there are ten provisions, not because there are ten different numbers. Two further periods in the same family are not payment clocks at all and are on the infringement-notice page: the time the authority has to serve a notice, and the time it has to serve one again.

The part almost nobody carries

The discount can come back twice

Most descriptions of AARTO treat the discount as a single opportunity that is spent the moment the first window closes. The regulations do not.

The first window, from deemed serviceIt runs 32 days and it is the cheapest exit from the matter. It is also the same period in which a representation may be made, which is why paying and objecting are, in practice, a choice rather than a sequence. s.17(1)(d); reg 17(2)
It reopens if a representation is rejectedA fresh window of 32 days runs from the day the result is deemed served. A rejection therefore costs the representations fee of R100 — and does not cost the discount. reg 17(3)
And again after an appeal or reviewA further 32 days runs from the outcome. The application itself carries a fee of R200, which is a different fee from the representations fee and is charged for a different thing. reg 17(4)
Instalments forfeit it outrightThis is the one that catches people. An arrangement to pay in instalments forfeits the discount: the full penalty and the applicable fees become payable. A reader who takes instalments to make the amount manageable ends up owing the undiscounted figure. reg 17(5)

At the bottom of the ladder

An unsatisfied enforcement order does not expire and does not fade

While the order stands, no driving licence, professional driving permit, road-traffic or transport permit, or licence disc may be issued to you or for a vehicle registered in your name, until the order is complied with or revoked. And under AARTO the laws on prescription do not apply to penalties and fees at all — they may be collected at any time. Those two rules read together are why an ignored AARTO matter tends to surface at a licence renewal years later rather than going away.

Sections 20(5)(a)–(c) and (bA), and 31(2)

Guide

How demerit points work in the two places they actually operate

Everywhere else in the country the mechanism is fully written down and attaches nothing. This guide is about the exception, because a reader in one of those two metros has a live question that the national answer does not reach.

The demerit-points system is fully prescribed — the threshold, the reduction rules and the disqualification arithmetic are all written into the regulations. In the areas proclaimed in 2026 it is nevertheless not operative: the sections of the Act that attach a consequence to a demerit point were not brought into operation there. Two metros are the exception, and have run the system since the 2008-series commencements. So a points figure quoted for the rest of the country describes a rule that exists on paper and imposes nothing.

The areas where the consequence chain is operative are City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality and City of Tshwane Metropolitan Municipality. Their position rests on the 2008-series commencements, and the underlying proclamations for those are not held here — what is held is a publisher’s consolidation note recording them. That is a weaker source than the gazettes behind the current position, and it is marked as one wherever it is relied on.

15Points that must be EXCEEDED before a disqualification followsregulation 20(6); section 29(d)
3Months of disqualification for each point above the thresholdsection 25(2)(a) — the Act’s own default
3Months of a clear record that take one point off againregulation 20(7)(a); section 28

Two things about that arithmetic are worth stating plainly. The threshold is a figure to be exceeded rather than reached, so a record sitting exactly on it carries no disqualification. And the multiplier is the Act’s own default rather than a prescribed figure: the Act empowers the Minister to prescribe a different number, and to prescribe different numbers for a driver, a learner driver, an operator and a juristic person. The regulations were read end to end for such a prescription and none was found, which is why the default governs — an absence with the search named, not a default left unexamined.

Points come off in two ways, and they are not added together. One point comes off for every clear period of 3 months. 4 points come off on successful completion of a rehabilitation programme — and whether that limb can operate at all is one of the open questions this site does not settle, because the one provision the commencement proclamation declined to bring into operation is the function the rehabilitation rules sit downstream of.

Points are recorded against the driver and against the operator separately, so an operator’s position is not a sum of its drivers’. Where the driver of a vehicle is not nominated, the regulations attach the consequence to the owner — against the owner’s own driver record, operator card or vehicle licence disc as the case may be. For a company car or a vehicle lent out, that is the provision that decides who carries the result, and nominating the driver is what moves it.

You are entitled to ask for your own position rather than waiting to discover it. That is a prescribed procedure with a prescribed form, a prescribed response time of 5 days and a prescribed fee, and the fee scale is on the page about checking what you owe. Where a disqualification does arise, the notice of it must be issued within 10 days of the points being exceeded, on the prescribed form.

Regulations 20 to 23 of the AARTO Regulations, 2026, and sections 24 to 29 of the AARTO Act 46 of 1998. The points an individual offence carries sit in a column of a schedule this site does not hold, so no points figure for any offence appears anywhere here.

Guide

Four kinds of driver the older rules treat differently

Live only for a matter that began in one of the two metros before the current regulations took effect — and wrong everywhere else, which is why it is here rather than inline on a page a national reader lands on.

A matter that had already begun in either of those two metros before the 2026 regulations took effect is concluded under the repealed 2008 regulations, not the new ones. Their disqualification threshold is a different number, their schedule of offences is a different document, and several classes of infringer were excluded from the discount entirely under them. Reading such a matter with the 2026 rules gives the wrong answer at almost every step.

The current regulations state no equivalent of any of the four rules below. In the provisions read in this pass they carry no foreign-licence exclusion, no unlicensed-driver exclusion and no multiplied basis for a juristic person or a permit holder. So these are not “the rules for companies” or “the rules for foreign drivers” in general: they are the rules for a specific class of matter, in two municipalities, begun before a specific date.

A driver on a foreign licence or an international driving permitUnder the older regulations this infringer was entitled to no discount at all and was liable for the full scheduled amount. A reader in this position who was told “pay half within the window” was told something that did not apply to them. reg 11(1)(b) of the 2008 regulations
A driver holding no licence at allThe same exclusion applied to an infringer who was not the holder of a licence and who operated a vehicle on a public road. The discount was not available to them either. reg 11(1)(c) of the 2008 regulations
A juristic personWhere the infringer was a company or other juristic person, the penalty was calculated on a multiplied basis rather than on the ordinary one. For a fleet, that changes the arithmetic of every transitional matter at once. reg 10(3) of the 2008 regulations
The holder of a cross-border road transport permitThe same multiplied basis applied. This is the class most likely to be reading a notice at a distance and least likely to be told about the difference by the channel they pay through. reg 10(4) of the 2008 regulations
And a fifth difference, which is a clock rather than a classThe window that reopens after a representation is decided was materially shorter under the older regulations than the 32 days the current ones allow. Counting a transitional matter on the current period overstates the time available. reg 11(4) of the 2008 regulations

One more trap in the same place

The columns of the older schedule do not mean what the current ones mean

The two schedules of offences are laid out differently, and they differ at every money column. Reading a transitional matter with the current column semantics returns the demerit-points column where the penalty-units column was meant. A column index is not an identifier, which is why this site publishes the map of what each column holds and nothing that depends on the rows — neither schedule’s rows are held here, and neither will be filled in from a third party’s transcription.

Schedule 3 to the AARTO Regulations, 2008 (“Key to columns in Schedule”), read against the column map of the 2026 regulations

If you are reading this because a matter of yours is in that transitional window, the useful move is not to work the amount out from either instrument. It is to establish two dates — when the infringement was committed, and when the document was served — and to take the figure from the document itself, because that figure is the binding one and everything on this page is about which rules produced it.

The set

Seven more questions, in the order this market asks them

No thumbnails, on purpose — a grid where only some rows have art is worse than a grid with none. Each row is already answered in part on the page named beside it, and each becomes a link to its own guide as that guide is written.

Verification status

Nobody has signed these figures off

Every value on this site is recorded as research: transcribed from the cited instrument, and not yet checked by the reviewer who is accountable for it. That is a statement about this site, not about the instruments. Where a figure decides something for you, read it against the citation printed beside it.