Every rating municipality in South Africa keeps a valuation roll. It is a public record, it is compelled by statute, and in most municipalities the whole file is available free. It is also one of the most frequently misread documents in the property market.

This page sets out what a roll is, what it contains, how long it lasts, how it changes between general valuations, and — the part that matters most in practice — what a figure on a roll may and may not be used for. Where every roll lives, and which objection windows are currently open, is set out on a companion page, General Valuation Rolls — Search.

A note on scope: this page describes the South African statutory position under the Local Government: Municipal Property Rates Act 6 of 2004 (“the MPRA”). Other African jurisdictions operate their own rating statutes on different principles, and we have not yet mapped them. Where we extend this work beyond South Africa, we will say so on this page.

---

1. What a valuation roll is

A valuation roll is the list of every rateable property in a municipality, together with the municipality’s opinion of each property’s market value, prepared so that rates may lawfully be levied.

A municipality that intends to levy a rate must cause a general valuation to be made of all properties in the municipality, and a valuation roll to be prepared (s 30). The roll is not an internal working document. Once certified, the municipal manager must publish notice of it in the Provincial Gazette, and where the municipality has a website, the notice and the roll itself must both be published on that website (s 49). That subsection answers most municipalities that maintain their roll is not public.

Within the period stated in the s 49 notice, any person — not only the owner — may inspect the roll during office hours, request the municipality to make extracts from it on payment of a reasonable fee, and lodge an objection against any matter reflected in or omitted from it (s 50(1)). An objection must relate to a specific property, not to the roll as a whole (s 50(2)).

Two qualifications on that, both of which are routinely missed.

The fee is for the clerk’s labour, not for the record. Section 50(1)(b) permits a charge for the municipality making extracts for you at a counter. It does not permit a charge for access. The roll itself must be published free on the municipal website under s 49(2), and in practice most municipalities put the entire file up for download. Nobody may charge you to look at a valuation roll.

All three rights run on the same clock. Inspection, extracts and objection are all confined to the advertised period. When that window closes they lapse together, and a request under the Promotion of Access to Information Act becomes the only route to the roll — and no route at all to an objection.

2. What is on a roll

The statute prescribes the contents, which is why rolls across the country converge on much the same shape. Section 48(2) requires the roll to reflect, in respect of each property and as at the date of valuation, to the extent that the information is reasonably determinable:

• the registered or other description of the property;
• the category in which the property falls, determined under s 8;
• the physical address;
• the extent;
• the market value, if the property was valued;
• the name of the owner; and
• any other prescribed particulars.

Two consequences follow, and both are routinely missed.

A blank field is lawful, not an error. The qualifier “to the extent that such information is reasonably determinable” is doing real work. An empty cell is not, on its own, a ground of objection and should not be treated as a defect in the roll.

Owner names are increasingly absent by design. A growing number of recently published rolls are issued owner-redacted, and the filenames say so plainly — NO_OWNERS-NAMES, withoutOwners, POPIA_V2, Redacted-Owners. For valuation evidence this loses nothing: description, extent, category and value all survive. For ownership tracing it loses everything. Expect the trend to continue. In several municipalities the owner’s name appears on the provisional roll and is absent from the final roll, so the two versions are not interchangeable.

3. What a valuation roll is not

This is the heart of it.

A municipal value is a mass-appraisal statutory opinion of value, pegged to a historical date. It is not evidence that anything was bought or sold.

It is produced at scale, by model, for the single purpose of apportioning a rates burden. It has not been negotiated between a willing buyer and a willing seller; no money has changed hands against it; and it speaks as at a date that may be years in the past. A roll figure therefore has no place in a comparable-sales pool, and it does not belong on a source-reliability scale built to rank transactions, because it is not one.

Give it its own label — a statutory opinion of value — and it has three entirely legitimate uses:

1. As the thing being objected against. This is what the objection machinery exists for.
2. As the denominator in a municipal-to-market ratio, once the roll is joined to deeds transfers on erf number. That ratio is a real analytical instrument. The roll figure alone is not.
3. As a source of facts — category, extent, description, physical address. These are as good as any other official record, and often better than what is on a listing.

Everything else it is asked to do, it does badly.

4. Carry three dates, never one

A roll entry has three distinct dates attached to it, and conflating them is the commonest way a roll dataset goes quietly wrong.

Date	What it is	What it governs
Date of valuation	The date as at which market conditions are reflected (s 31). Set by the municipality, and not more than 12 months before the start of the financial year in which the roll is first implemented.	Analysis. This is the only date that speaks to the market.
Date of publication	When the roll or supplementary roll was published under s 49.	Administration. It tells you when the clock started, and nothing about value.
Rates-effective date	When liability actually commences. For supplementary valuations this is governed by s 78(4) and varies with the trigger.	Billing.

The trap is this: a supplementary valuation published in 2026 may carry a 2023 date of valuation. Section 78(3) requires a supplementary valuation to reflect market conditions as at the date of the last general valuation. File that entry under 2026 and it will silently corrupt every time series it touches.

If you take one discipline from this page, take this one. Record all three.

5. How long a roll lasts — and why “published” does not mean “current”

A valuation roll takes effect at the start of the financial year following completion of the public inspection period, and remains valid for a limited number of financial years — as a general rule four for a metropolitan municipality and five for a local municipality, extendable by the provincial MEC in defined circumstances (s 32). Section 32 was substituted by the Municipal Property Rates Amendment Act 29 of 2014; check the current text before relying on the extension provisions in advice.

The practical point is separate from the statutory one, and sharper:

A roll being downloadable does not mean it is in force.

Superseded rolls sit on municipal websites for years. Kopanong and Phumelela both publish rolls dating from 2009; Tokologo’s dates from about 2012; Naledi’s and Ratlou’s from 2014. King Sabata Dalindyebo has run on a 2013 base roll, maintained since then by supplementary valuation alone. In each case the file downloads perfectly and tells you almost nothing about today.

Before using any roll, read the date of valuation off the roll itself — not the file’s date, not the page it sits on, and not the year in the filename.

6. How a roll changes between general valuations

Three mechanisms alter a roll, and they are not interchangeable.

Mechanism	Section	Frequency	Effect
Supplementary valuation	s 78	At least annually	Adds, corrects or re-values individual entries within the live cycle
Amendment after objection, review or appeal	s 79	Continuous	Gives effect to a decision on an objection, a review or an appeal-board determination
Next general valuation	ss 30 and 32	Every four or five financial years	Replaces the roll entirely and resets the cycle

A supplementary roll amends; it does not replace. The correct way to hold roll data is append-only: every entry is its own immutable record, and a supplementary entry is a new record linked to the general-valuation entry for the same property, never an overwrite of it. The current position for a property is then a derived view — the latest supplementary entry within the cycle, failing which the general-valuation entry. Overwrite instead, and you destroy the history that makes the data worth holding.

Supplementary rolls, not general valuations, are the recurring flow. Across 213 rating municipalities on four- and five-year cycles, roughly forty-five general valuations fall due in any given year. Supplementary rolls are required at least annually from all 213, and many municipalities publish two or more. The supplementary flow is therefore several times the general-valuation flow, and it is spread evenly through the year rather than arriving in a spike.

A supplementary entry also re-opens a route that had closed. Under s 78(5) the valuer serves the result on the owner and the owner may lodge a request for review with the municipal manager within 30 days of posting — served individually, and easy to miss. Under s 78(6) the published supplementary roll is then open for inspection and objection in the manner provided by s 49, which carries the ordinary objection and appeal rights with it. Some municipalities assert that a supplementary valuation cannot be appealed. That is wrong.

7. The eight grounds — which movements are signal, and which are noise

Section 78(1) lists the grounds on which a supplementary valuation must be made. Store the ground. A change in value between a general-valuation entry and a supplementary entry means completely different things depending on why the supplementary valuation was made, and an analyst who ignores the ground will read subdivisions and typing errors as market movement.

Ground	s 78(1)	How to treat it
Incorrectly omitted from the roll	(a)	A new entry, not a value change. Exclude from deltas.
Included in the municipality after the last general valuation	(b)	Boundary change. Exclude.
Subdivided or consolidated	(c)	The property itself has changed. Record the parent and child lineage; never compute a like-for-like delta across it.
Market value substantially changed	(d)	The only ground genuinely about value movement — and still pegged to the general-valuation date.
Substantially incorrectly valued at the general valuation	(e)	Correction of valuer error. This is signal about the accuracy of the general valuation, not about the market — and analytically valuable in its own right.
Other exceptional reason	(f)	Inspect individually.
Category changed	(g)	See below. The highest-value flag in the dataset.
Clerical or typing error	(h)	Pure noise. Exclude from every series.

Many municipalities do not state the ground on the published roll. Where it has to be inferred, mark it as inferred rather than stated. The distinction matters a great deal if the figure is ever put before an appeal board.

8. A category change outruns a value change

Category determines the tariff ratio, so ground (g) will often move a rates bill further than a re-valuation does.

Take a municipality whose commercial tariff stands at roughly 1.67 times its residential tariff — a common enough spread. A property reclassified from residential to commercial sees its rates bill rise by about 67 per cent on an entirely unchanged value. No valuation has moved. Nothing has been re-measured. The category changed.

Tariff ratios are set annually by each municipality and vary widely, so the arithmetic must be done on the municipality’s own gazetted tariffs. But the principle holds everywhere: check the category before you check the value. In any screening exercise, category changes should be flagged before the value engine runs at all.

9. Reading a roll entry properly — a short checklist

1. Which roll is this? General or supplementary; which cycle; which sequence number.
2. What is the date of valuation? Read it off the roll, not the filename.
3. Is this roll still in force, or has it been superseded?
4. What is the category, and has it changed since the last entry for this property?
5. If this is a supplementary entry, on what ground was it made — and is that ground stated or inferred?
6. Is the extent consistent with the description and with any other record you hold?
7. What is this figure for? If the answer is “a comparable”, stop.

10. Where the record lives

Rolls are published by each municipality separately, in five broadly different ways, and the quality of access has very little to do with the size of the municipality. The directory below records, for every rating municipality in South Africa, where the roll is published, what form it takes, which cycle it is in, what its date of valuation is, and when it was last verified.

One finding is worth stating plainly, because it is the single most useful thing to know before you start: not one South African rating municipality charges for its valuation roll. Where a roll is hard to obtain, it is because it was never published — not because it is being sold. That is a materially different position from deeds data or commercial property databases, and it means the correct response to a missing roll is a request under the Promotion of Access to Information Act, not a purchase.

---

Looking for a particular municipality? General Valuation Rolls — Search records where each South African municipality publishes its roll, how obtainable it is, and which objection windows are open right now.

---

The boundary with objections

This page is about the record: what a roll is, what it says, and where to find it. The process for challenging an entry — the objection form, the grounds, the deadlines, the appeal board, and what to do when the window has already closed — is set out separately under Municipal Objections.

If you are here because you think a figure is wrong, start there.

---

Sources and limits

This page describes the position under the Local Government: Municipal Property Rates Act 6 of 2004, as amended (notably by the Local Government: Municipal Property Rates Amendment Act 29 of 2014). Section references are to that Act.

Municipal valuers must also comply with the South African Standard: Municipal Valuations for Property Rating (sMVPR, SAVS 02), adopted by SACPVP. It sets the standards for the property register, data, mass valuation models, objections and roll updates.

VDH is not the authority for any of this. Every statutory proposition here should be checked against the current text of the Act, and every roll figure against the roll published by the municipality concerned. Where this page describes practice rather than statute, it says so.

Last reviewed: 19 August 2026. Prepared for general guidance. It is not legal advice, and it is not a substitute for reading the roll.