If my SASSA card expires, can I still receive money but not be able to withdraw? Or will the money not be paid at all?

The long answer

SASSA will not stop paying your grant money, but if you do not draw your grant for three months, the grant will lapse.

The date on which the SASSA gold cards will stop working has now been extended from 28 February to 20 March 2025, to allow more time to swap the gold card for the new Postbank black card.  

This is still a very tight deadline, as every day there are thousands of people queueing at the various Postbank retail outlets. Many people are turned away each day after standing in queues for hours. 

Marecia Damons reported in a GroundUp article on 14 February that the Minister of Communications and Digital Technologies, Solly Malatsi, and the Minister of Social Development, Nokuzola Tolashe, said that although 20 March is the final date that the SASSA Gold Cards will work, beneficiaries could still apply for and receive the Black Cards after this date.

The Ministers also said that grant payments would continue after this date, but that beneficiaries “will need to visit their nearest Post office branch to access their funds”.

While the extension is good news, I don’t think it is necessarily true that people will be able to access their funds at their nearest Post Office branch. Postbank separated from the Post Office on 27 September 2023, and while the Postbank CEO, Nikki Mbengashe, reassured grant beneficiaries that they could get their Postbank black card at the Post Office, this was not possible at the Maitland Post Office, for example. 

People wanting to swap their gold SASSA cards for the black Postbank cards there were told that there was no Postbank operating in the Post Office anymore, since Postbank had separated from the Post Office, and had become a state-owned bank. 

The people were directed to go to Shoprite in China Town, Parow, instead. There they stood outside in the parking lot, waiting for hours in a long queue. Three SASSA officials came after 11 am, but it seemed that there may have been problems with the system, as the queue moved very slowly, and most people were told to come back the next day.  

Although there are probably some Post Offices where Postbank is located, even these Post Offices may not be able to process the gold card swap, due to a lack of staff, besides problems with the system. The other problem is that Postbank has not announced which Post Offices are actually designated to do this card swap, so you could waste your time and money travelling to a Post Office which is not able to do the swap.   

In a Daily Maverick article by Bheki Simelane on 13 February 2025, he quoted the Postbank CEO as saying that beneficiaries could access their grants through alternative methods, including Post Office branches, until 30 June 2025.

Again, this may not be the case unless a particular Post Office branch has been designated as a place where beneficiaries can draw their grants.

On 14 February, the DA said that Post Offices were closing down all over the country and many people in rural areas had no Post Office anymore. What were those people to do? 

The DA said that SASSA had been through this card crisis before and seemed to have learned nothing from it: they did not seem able to effectively plan, set up and execute the transition from the gold cards to the black cards. The same problems were happening again, with “grant beneficiaries being shuffled around, struggling to make sense of the confusion and inefficiency of the process”. 

The DA called on SASSA to extend all SASSA gold cards until every social grant beneficiary had got their Postbank black card. It was the only way to ensure that social grant beneficiaries would be able to reliably access their grants, said the DA.

So where does this leave grant beneficiaries now? If SASSA does not take the DA’s advice to extend the SASSA cards until all beneficiaries have got their Postbank cards, it may well be that SASSA cannot meet the 20 March deadline either, and may have to extend it again. But as no one can predict what SASSA will do, we might have to accept that the long queues to swap the cards and the endless frustration and anxiety will continue until SASSA gets its act together and comes up with a workable rollout plan.   

For example, why doesn’t SASSA use the civic halls as collection points, where people who live in a particular area can go and sit inside on chairs, rather than stand in the sun and wind outside? Why aren’t there different days for different grants so that numbers can be planned for more accurately?  

Wishing you the best,
Athalie