Who Pays Conveyancing Fees in South Africa?

In South Africa, the buyer typically pays the transfer fees and the bond registration fees, while the seller pays the bond cancellation fees (where applicable), the rates clearance, and the electrical compliance certificate — but that split is a market convention, not a statutory rule, and any of it can be re-negotiated in the Offer to Purchase (OTP). Conveyancing fees themselves are charged on the published Law Society of South Africa (LSSA) tariff under the Legal Practice Act 28 of 2014, billed at the prescribed scale plus 15% VAT. The schedule applies uniformly across every deeds office — Pretoria, Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban, Bloemfontein. Transfer duty, often confused with “conveyancing fees,” is a separate South African Revenue Service (SARS) tax on the buyer.

The Short Answer: Who Pays What in a Standard Conveyancing Transaction

In a clean, unopposed property transaction with a single bond, the cost allocation runs as follows:

• Transfer fees (the attorney’s fee for transferring ownership into the buyer’s name) — buyer.
• Bond registration fees (the attorney’s fee for registering the buyer’s new bond with the bank) — buyer.
• Bond cancellation fees (the attorney’s fee for cancelling the seller’s existing bond) — seller, where applicable.
• Rates clearance figure (municipal confirmation that rates, water and electricity are paid up to the transfer date) — seller.
• Electrical, plumbing and beetle compliance certificates — seller.

That split is not a statutory allocation. It is a market practice embedded in standard Offer to Purchase agreements, and it can be varied by written agreement between the parties. It also assumes nothing unusual — no existing bond on the seller’s side, no auction terms, no court order.

Two items are routinely confused with conveyancing fees and should be kept separate in any quote:

• Transfer duty — a SARS tax on the buyer, calculated on a sliding scale based on the purchase price under the Transfer Duty Act 40 of 1949. Not a conveyancing fee.
• Deeds office registration fees — a statutory fee paid to the deeds office for each registration, again separate from the attorney’s professional fee.

Burger Huyser Attorneys runs conveyancing work through its Bedfordview branch, where a qualified Notary and Conveyancer is on staff — the cost split is mapped to the OTP in writing before any money changes hands.

The LSSA Tariff Is the Controlling Schedule

Conveyancing fees — meaning the attorney’s professional fee for transferring ownership and for registering or cancelling a bond — are charged on the LSSA’s published tariff scale under the Legal Practice Act 28 of 2014.

Three things every buyer and seller should understand about the tariff:

1. It is graduated. The fee scales up with the purchase price (for transfer fees) or the bond amount (for bond registration and cancellation fees).
2. It is national. The same schedule applies in every deeds office in South Africa — because the Legal Practice Act governs the profession uniformly, there is no separate provincial tariff.
3. It is exclusive of VAT. The LSSA tariff figures are quoted before VAT, and the standard 15% VAT under the Value-Added Tax Act 89 of 1991 is then added to each line item.

The tariff is updated from time to time, with periodic revisions published in the Government Gazette and rolled into the published schedule. Practical implication: any fee figure quoted as a rand amount should be cross-checked against the current schedule before being relied on — quoted per file, after a review of the actual purchase price and bond amount, is the safer rule of thumb. The conveyancing attorney should confirm in writing, before any work starts, whether a quotation is inclusive or exclusive of VAT and the figure used in the calculation.

Cost Categories and Who Usually Pays

The full set of cost categories a buyer and seller should expect at transfer time, with the conventional payer against each:

Cost category	What it covers	Who usually pays	Statutory basis
Transfer fees	Attorney’s fee for transferring ownership into the buyer’s name at the deeds office	Buyer	LSSA tariff, Legal Practice Act 28 of 2014
Bond registration fees	Attorney’s fee for registering the buyer’s new bond with the bank	Buyer	LSSA tariff, Legal Practice Act 28 of 2014
Bond cancellation fees	Attorney’s fee for cancelling the seller’s existing bond (if any)	Seller	LSSA tariff, Legal Practice Act 28 of 2014
Rates clearance	Municipal confirmation that rates, water and electricity are paid up to transfer date	Seller	Municipal bylaws (varies by municipality)
Electrical compliance certificate	Certificate confirming the electrical installation is safe	Seller	Electrical Installation Regulations under the Occupational Health and Safety Act
Plumbing compliance certificate	Certificate confirming plumbing is compliant (where required by the buyer or bank)	Seller	National Building Regulations
Beetle (wood-borer) certificate	Certificate confirming the property is free of wood-destroying insects (where required)	Seller	Practice varies by region
Transfer duty	SARS tax on the property transfer, calculated on a sliding scale	Buyer	Transfer Duty Act 40 of 1949
Conveyancing fees (VAT)	15% VAT added on top of each LSSA tariff fee	Same party as the underlying fee	Value-Added Tax Act 89 of 1991
Deeds office registration fees	Statutory fee paid to the deeds office for each registration	Buyer (transfer) / Seller (cancellation)	Schedule of fees of deeds registries
FICA compliance / admin	Identity-verification and source-of-funds work	Each party for their own verification	Financial Intelligence Centre Act 38 of 2001

Two items in this table are not conveyancing fees at all and should not be merged into a single quote: transfer duty (paid to SARS, not to the conveyancer) and the deeds office’s own registration fee (paid to the deeds office).

How the Convention Breaks Down in Common Variations

The split isn’t always the same. The most common real-world variations are:

• No existing bond on the seller’s side. The bond cancellation fee drops out entirely — there is nothing to cancel.
• Cash purchase on the buyer’s side. No new bond means the bond registration fee also drops out. Transfer fees and the other cost items still apply.
• The buyer already has a bond elsewhere. That adds nothing to the conveyancing fee split. Only the new-bond registration applies, on its own scale.
• Auction purchases. The auctioneer’s terms often shift the compliance certificates to the buyer; the OTP allocation must still be in writing and signed before transfer.
• Divorce or estate sales where the seller is bound by a court order. The conveyancing fee allocation follows whatever the order or the court-approved settlement says. Any cost not addressed by the order reverts to the conventional buyer/seller split.

Variations that look unusual are usually not new rules — they are the conventional split with one or two items removed because the underlying event (an existing bond, a new bond, a court order) isn’t present.

What Is Negotiable in the Offer to Purchase

Every line item in the table above is, in principle, negotiable between buyer and seller — the Offer to Purchase is a binding contract once signed, and the parties are free to allocate costs differently from the convention if they both agree in writing.

The negotiation points that come up most often in practice:

• Seller contributes to the buyer’s transfer and bond costs. Often used as an incentive to close a deal — usually expressed as a percentage of the purchase price or a fixed rand amount, written into the OTP as a reduction in the purchase price or a direct contribution to specified costs.
• Seller declines to pay one or more compliance certificates. The buyer agrees to take the property subject to that certificate being obtained separately (often at the buyer’s cost after transfer, or by the buyer via their own contractor before transfer).
• Buyer and seller split specific items differently. Items that aren’t statutorily fixed to one party — for example, the cost of obtaining a clearance certificate or a special condition in the deed — can be allocated either way by agreement.

Important caveats that hold even when the parties want to negotiate:

1. Transfer duty cannot be shifted to the seller. It is a statutory tax on the buyer under the Transfer Duty Act 40 of 1949, payable to SARS in the buyer’s name. No private agreement moves it to the seller.
2. Anything changed from the convention must be in writing. The clause must appear in the OTP, or in a written addendum signed before transfer. Verbal side-deals do not bind the conveyancing attorney, who allocates costs strictly on the OTP.
3. FICA verification is per party. Each party is responsible for their own identity-verification and source-of-funds work under the Financial Intelligence Centre Act 38 of 2001; this is not normally re-allocated between buyer and seller.

What a Conveyancing Attorney Actually Does (and Why One Side Often Pays More Than the Other)

A conveyancing attorney is appointed by the seller for the transfer — the seller’s attorney drafts the deed of transfer and lodges it at the deeds office on the seller’s behalf. That same attorney is also expected to act for both sides on the financial-flow side of the transaction (managing the flow of purchase price, the bond payout, and the various payments to SARS, the municipality, and the deeds office). This dual role is regulated under section 49 of the Legal Practice Act 28 of 2014.

For the bond, a separate attorney is appointed by the buyer’s bond (the bond attorney attends to the bond registration), and in practice both attorneys must cooperate. The seller’s attorney receives a correspondent’s fee from the bond attorney for that cooperation — it is part of why the bond registration cost lands on the buyer’s side of the table.

Most disputes about who pays what come down to which attorney explained the convention to which party — and at what point in the deal. A properly drafted OTP sets out the split before any work begins, which is exactly the point at which a firm running its own conveyancing department adds value: the cost split is written into the OTP at the same time as the suspensive conditions are negotiated, before either party has spent anything on the file.

When the Allocation Becomes a Dispute

If the OTP is silent on a particular cost and the parties simply assumed the convention, the administering conveyancing attorney typically defaults the cost to its conventional payer — not to the party disputing it. That default holds until the parties agree otherwise in writing, or a complaint is otherwise resolved.

A buyer or seller who believes they were wrongly charged has a formal remedy through the Legal Practice Council (LPC) complaints process under the Legal Practice Act 28 of 2014. The LPC considers, among other things, whether the attorney adequately explained the cost split before work started, and whether the fee charged was reasonable for the work done.

Where the Transfer Is Registered in Gauteng

The fee responsibility rules are national — the same schedule applies at every deeds office — but a Gauteng property transfer is actually registered through either the Pretoria deeds office or the Johannesburg deeds office, depending on which regional registry the property falls within. Conveyancing work for Burger Huyser Attorneys is run through the firm’s Bedfordview branch, where the Notary and Conveyancer on staff handles transfers, bond registrations, and bond cancellations across Gauteng. The firm’s eight other Gauteng branches keep the administrative side of the file on the same matter.

For the current published fee schedule and any updates to the tariff, the Legal Practice Council (lpc.org.za) and the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development (justice.gov.za) are the authoritative reference points, alongside the Government Gazette where amendments to the tariff are published. The firm’s conveyancing team confirms the precise cost split in writing as part of the Offer to Purchase process, before any work begins.

Buying or selling property in Gauteng? If you want to confirm in writing who is paying which conveyancing cost before you sign the Offer to Purchase, contact Burger Huyser Attorneys’ conveyancing team at the Bedfordview branch on 011 201 7190 (after-hours 061 536 3223) or at the Linden head office on 011 888 0246 (after-hours 061 516 6878). The firm’s Notary and Conveyancer handles transfers, bond registrations, and bond cancellations, and will map the full cost split to your OTP before any work begins. The firm carries a 4.8/5 average across 250+ Google reviews (Trustindex verified — “Top Rated Law Firm in South Africa”) and runs conveyancing work across all Gauteng branches.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who pays the conveyancing fees when buying a house in South Africa?

By convention, the buyer pays the transfer fees and the bond registration fees, while the seller pays the bond cancellation fees (where applicable), the rates clearance, and the electrical or beetle compliance certificates. The split is set out in the Offer to Purchase and can be varied by agreement, but if the OTP is silent the convention applies.

Can the seller pay the buyer’s transfer fees in South Africa?

Yes — the seller may agree, in writing in the Offer to Purchase, to contribute to the buyer’s transfer and bond costs as an incentive to close the deal. The contribution is usually a fixed amount or a percentage of the purchase price, and is not a statutory entitlement — it is a commercial point the parties negotiate.

Is transfer duty the same as conveyancing fees?

No — transfer duty is a SARS tax calculated on a sliding scale based on the purchase price, payable by the buyer before transfer. Conveyancing fees are the attorney’s separate professional fees for handling the transfer and bond registration, billed on the published tariff and subject to 15% VAT. Both appear at transfer time but are different items with different payees.

How much are conveyancing fees in South Africa?

Conveyancing fees are charged on the published national tariff schedule, graduated by purchase price (transfer fees) or bond amount (bond registration and cancellation fees), with 15% VAT added on top. The schedule is updated periodically — cross-check current figures against the Legal Practice Council or the Government Gazette before quoting a specific number.

Do conveyancing fees include VAT?

No — attorney fees are quoted on the tariff scale exclusive of VAT, and the standard 15% VAT is added to each fee line. Buyers and sellers should confirm with the conveyancing attorney in advance whether a fee quote is inclusive or exclusive of VAT.

Who pays for the electrical compliance certificate when selling a house?

By convention the seller pays for the electrical compliance certificate. The certificate confirms the electrical installation is safe at the point of transfer and is required by most bond originators before they will register the bond. The cost is one of the items most frequently re-allocated by agreement in the Offer to Purchase.