According to Stats SA, R868 per person per month (roughly R28.55 daily) is the food poverty line—the minimum required just to reach 2,100 calories a day.
Image: Gemini
Could you feed yourself on R28.55 a day?
That is roughly what Statistics South Africa's new food poverty line of R868 per person per month translates into in 2026 – and it is not intended to represent a healthy or recommended diet. It is the amount Statistics South Africa calculates a person needs to secure the minimum daily energy requirement of 2,100 calories.
The other two national poverty lines are R1,457 per person per month at the lower bound and R2,962 at the upper bound. The lower-bound line describes a particularly stark reality: households at this level have to sacrifice some of their food requirements to pay for essential non-food items such as shelter, clothing, healthcare and transport.
The upper-bound line is intended to reflect the point at which people can meet minimum food and non-food needs without sacrificing the food requirement.
But what does living at those levels actually look like?
The methodology behind the food poverty line is revealing.
Statistics South Africa uses the consumption patterns of poorer households to construct a reference food basket, deliberately excluding the poorest 10% because their consumption may reflect acute deprivation and atypical coping strategies, instead using households in expenditure deciles two to six.
The resulting basket contains 46 foods commonly consumed by these households, including maize meal, bread, rice, chicken, chicken heads and feet, offal, polony, canned fish, beans, potatoes, cabbage, cooking oil, sugar and tea.
There is an important catch. The actual food expenditure observed among the reference households provided only 1,211 calories per person a day, well short of Statistics South Africa’s 2,100-calorie benchmark.
Statistics South Africa therefore scales that expenditure upwards to calculate what it would theoretically cost to obtain 2,100 calories – producing a food poverty line of R777 in 2023 prices, subsequently adjusted to R868 for 2026.
In other words, even the consumption patterns used to construct the line reflected people eating substantially less than the minimum energy requirement.
The total basic cost someone needs to get by in South Africa.
Image: ChatGPT
There is also a significant difference between securing sufficient calories and securing adequate nutrition.
The Pietermaritzburg Economic Justice and Dignity Group's (PMBEJD’s) August Household Affordability Index puts the average cost of a basic nutritious diet for a child at R961.96 a month – already almost R100 more than Statistics South Africa’s entire R868 food poverty line.
PMBEJD makes an important distinction between its nutritional basket and the food low-income households actually buy. Its household food basket, based on foods women living on low incomes say they try to secure each month, cost R5,479.80 for a seven-person household in August and it explicitly warns that this basket is not nutritionally complete.
A nutritionally complete basket for the same household would cost R6,597.25, more than R1,100 extra.
South Africans can find extraordinarily cheap food. But the question raised by the poverty line is not whether it is technically possible to assemble cheap calories. It is what happens when food has to compete with everything else a person needs to remain housed, clean, connected and able to get to work.
The OpenUp Living Wage calculator attempts to capture that fuller reality by including 11 categories of household expenditure — food, transport, housing, utilities, healthcare, hygiene, education and communications — to estimate what a household actually needs to get by, not just survive.
Take an illustrative Johannesburg example.
A small flat in Yeoville can currently be advertised for about R1,114 a month. A real prepaid electricity purchase of R1,000 buys about 283kWh at around R3.53/kWh. PMBEJD estimated in January that two daily taxi journeys in Pietermaritzburg cost a worker about R1,680 a month, with transport in Johannesburg typically higher.
Put those three expenses together — rent at R1,114, electricity at R1,000 and transport at R1,680 — and the total is R3,794 a month. The person has not eaten yet.
Add Statistics South Africa’s R868 food poverty allowance and the most stripped-down illustrative monthly cost becomes R4,662 — R1,700 more than Statistics South Africa’s R2,962 upper-bound poverty line. And it still contains no toiletries, sanitary products, clothing, medicine, data or airtime, household goods, debt repayments, insurance, education costs or emergencies.
These are examples, not representative budgets — but they illustrate the problem with translating a per-person poverty threshold into daily life. Many real-world expenses do not arrive conveniently divided by the number of people in a household.
What South Africa's poverty lines mean.
Image: ChatGPT
This is where poverty becomes less about a single number and more about choices between things that are all necessities.
Transport competes with food, but a worker cannot necessarily stop travelling to work. Electricity competes with food, but cheap staples such as maize meal still require water and energy to cook. Buying in bulk may make food cheaper per kilogram, but requires having enough cash upfront.
Shopping at a cheaper supermarket only saves money if getting there does not consume the saving. Soap, toothpaste and sanitary products are not luxuries. Neither is somewhere to sleep.
PMBEJD's modelling of a minimum-wage worker supporting four people demonstrates the squeeze. After paying only transport and electricity, it calculates that the worker has R1,653.35 left for everything else.
Statistics South Africa’s latest poverty measurement found that about 10.8 million South Africans were living below the food poverty line in 2023. The World Bank, meanwhile, describes South Africa's income distribution as having a relatively small middle class and a large low-earnings group, with the bottom 40% of the population receiving just 11.5% of total income.
Poverty lines serve an important purpose — they allow statisticians to measure poverty consistently, monitor whether it is improving and compare changes over time. Statistics South Africa itself cautions that its national poverty lines were not designed to determine minimum wages, social grants or other policy thresholds.
But a statistical threshold should not be mistaken for a workable household budget. R868 may mark the point below which a South African cannot afford the minimum food energy they need. It does not mean that life becomes affordable at R869.
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