CURRENT STATUS, AS AT JUNE 2026
The Zimbabwe Exemption Permit is valid and lawful. On 7 October 2025, Home Affairs Minister Dr Leon Schreiber extended all existing ZEPs by 18 months, to 28 May 2027, under Minister's Immigration Directive No. 21 of 2025. In April 2026, after a Deputy Minister's television comments caused public confusion about whether ZEP holders could move to permanent residence, the Department of Home Affairs formally corrected the record: there has been no change to ZEP status, and the permit remains valid on its existing terms while a broader policy review continues. A bank or employer assessing a ZEP holder today is assessing someone with a current, lawfully extended, government-issued permit.
Why This History Matters for a Home Loan Application
Banks price risk partly on permanence. A visa that looks unstable on paper, regardless of the applicant's actual employment record, income, or years in the country, can read as a red flag to a credit committee that does not have time to research the policy background. That is the core problem this document addresses: the ZEP's legal status has been stable in substance for years, even though its public narrative has been repeatedly disrupted by political statements that were later walked back or overturned in court. Understanding that pattern is essential to making the case that ZEP holders are bankable.
Origins of the Permit, 2009 to 2017
The dispensation that became the ZEP did not begin as an immigration favour. It began as a practical response to a humanitarian and economic emergency on South Africa's doorstep.
Zimbabwe's economic and political crisis in the mid-to-late 2000s drove an exceptional wave of migration into South Africa, much of it informal and undocumented.
In 2009, the South African government introduced the Dispensation for Zimbabwe Permit, a special permit allowing qualifying Zimbabwean nationals already in the country to regularise their status, work, and study legally rather than remain undocumented or attempt asylum claims the system was never designed to process at that scale.
The permit was renamed and renewed twice: the Zimbabwean Special Permit in 2014, and the Zimbabwean Exemption Permit in 2017. Roughly 178,000 to 180,000 people have held this status continuously, in various forms, for close to two decades. These are not new arrivals chancing an opportunity. Many ZEP holders have lived, worked, paid tax, and raised children in South Africa for fifteen years or more.
The 2021 to 2025 Cycle: Cancelled, Then Not Cancelled, Repeatedly
This is the part of the story that matters most for present-day risk perception, because it has happened so many times that it has become a pattern in its own right.
November 2021 The Department of Home Affairs announced, after Cabinet consultation, that the ZEP programme would be terminated. Holders were given until 31 December 2022 to transition to a mainstream visa category or face the prospect of deportation.
2022 to 2023, repeated grace periods The December 2022 deadline came and went without termination. The Minister extended the grace period to June 2023, then again, at the last moment, to 31 December 2023, citing the volume of waiver applications still being processed and the practical impossibility of processing roughly 180,000 individual transitions in time.
2023 court challenge The Helen Suzman Foundation challenged the termination decision in the Pretoria High Court. In 2023, a full bench ruled that the Minister's decision to terminate the ZEP programme was unlawful, unconstitutional, and invalid, and ordered Home Affairs to redo the process in a manner compliant with the Promotion of Administrative Justice Act. As temporary relief, the court kept the ZEP valid for a further twelve months.
2024, an appeal and a last-minute reprieve The Minister sought leave to appeal the High Court ruling, which would have suspended the order in his favour. On 29 November 2024, with the permit due to lapse that same day, the Minister instead extended the ZEP to 28 November 2025, after long queues and a strained VFS booking system left many holders unable to complete waiver applications in time.
June 2024, the Constitutional Court The Constitutional Court dismissed the Minister's appeal, leaving the High Court's finding of unlawfulness intact and requiring the Department to complete a proper consultation process before any future termination.
October 2025, the current extension With the November 2025 deadline approaching, Minister Schreiber extended all ZEPs by eighteen months to 28 May 2027, pending the outcome of Immigration Advisory Board deliberations and a wider stakeholder consultation process.
April 2026, a fresh scare and a fast correction Deputy Minister Njabulo Nzuza, speaking on television about the Revised White Paper on Citizenship, Immigration and Refugee Protection, said ZEP holders should look at other legal pathways, including permanent residence. Within two days, the Department issued a formal correction: there had been no change to ZEP status, ZEP holders do not in fact qualify for permanent residence under current rules, and the permit's existing validity stands unaffected. A detailed policy report is due to Cabinet by the end of the 2026/27 financial year, but until then the legal position is unchanged.
Read as a whole, this is not a record of a permit collapsing. It is a record of the same permit being threatened, in public, on roughly an annual cycle, and surviving every time, twice by direct court order. That distinction matters enormously when explaining ZEP risk to a lender: the legal substance has been remarkably durable, even though the headlines have not.
The Humanitarian Case
Whatever one's view of immigration policy generally, the ZEP cohort sits in a category that deserves particular care.
These are people who fled a genuine economic and political collapse in Zimbabwe, not opportunistic migration in ordinary times. Many arrived as the only viable escape from hyperinflation, food insecurity, and political violence.
They came through a programme South Africa itself created and has renewed, in some form, for close to two decades. The instability has come from the renewal process, not from any finding that the holders themselves did anything wrong.
South Africa's own courts, twice, found the attempt to end the programme unlawful. That is not a minor technicality. It means the country's judiciary has formally affirmed that these residents are entitled to the protection the permit provides, against the executive's own attempt to remove it.
A person who has lived in South Africa for ten or fifteen years, raised children here, worked here, and paid tax here is not, in any meaningful sense, a recent arrival. Treating their right to settle, to buy property, and to build equity as perpetually provisional does not match the reality of their lives.
None of this requires denying that South Africa has its own serious unemployment and housing pressures, or that immigration policy is a legitimate and contested political question. It simply means that punishing a stable, court-protected, long-resident population for the unresolved politics around their permit is not a fair basis on which to deny them a home loan.
What This Means for Lending Decisions
When assessing a ZEP holder for a home loan, the relevant facts are these:
- The ZEP is currently valid, gazetted, and extended to 28 May 2027;
- Two separate court findings, including a Constitutional Court dismissal of the government's own appeal, have held that the permit cannot simply be cancelled at the Minister's discretion without a lawful process;
- Every threatened expiry date since 2021 has been followed by an extension, a court order, or a formal correction. None has resulted in mass loss of status; and
- Length of residence, employment history, and conduct in South Africa are at least as relevant to a realistic risk assessment as the permit category itself, particularly for holders who have been here for a decade or more.
A ZEP today is not a weaker document than it was three years ago. If anything, it now carries judicial backing that an ordinary visa category does not.
Our Commitment at Phoenix Bonds
We do everything we can to get temporary residents approved for home finance, regardless of visa type. The history of a person's visa, and their time spent living and working in South Africa, can matter just as much as the current visa category sitting in front of a credit assessor. That is the standard we apply to every application we bring to a lender, and it is the standard we are asking banks to apply to ZEP holders.
Sources
1. Department of Home Affairs, Minister's Immigration Directive No. 21 of 2025, Government Gazette No. 53484, 7 October 2025.
2. South African Government News Agency, “Home Affairs clarifies policy position on Zimbabwe Exemption Permit holders,” gov.za, 15 April 2026.
3. Fragomen, “South Africa: Zimbabwe Exemption Permit Update,” 20 June 2024 (Constitutional Court dismissal of Minister's appeal).
4. AllAfrica / GroundUp, “South Africa: Last Minute Reprieve for Zimbabwe Exemption Permit Holders,” 29 November 2024.
5. AllAfrica, “South Africa: Home Affairs Gears Up to Fight Zimbabwe Permit Decision,” 19 March 2024 (background on 2009/2014/2017 permit history and Pretoria High Court ruling).
6. EY Global, “South Africa announces extension of Zimbabwean Exemption Permits (ZEPs) and Lesotho Exemption Permits (LEPs),” 1 December 2023.
7. AllAfrica, “South African Govt Extends Zimbabwe Exemption Permits Again,” 8 June 2023 (Minister's Immigration Directive No. 2 of 2023).
8. VisaVerge, “Home Affairs Clarifies ZEP Status as Permanent Residency Claims Spark Confusion,” 16 April 2026.