First: How Bad Is It?
If your first 2026/27 provisional payment wasn't made — or was made but only cleared after 31 August — two costs are already in motion, and both are mechanical rather than discretionary:
- The 10% late payment penalty. Paragraph 27 of the Fourth Schedule applies a flat 10% of the unpaid amount the moment the deadline passes. Pay one day late on R80,000 and the penalty is R8,000. It does not scale with how late you are.
- Interest. The outstanding tax accrues interest at the prescribed rate from the due date until paid. Unlike the penalty, this one does grow with time.
What is not in motion: criminal exposure, immediate collection steps, or the paragraph 20 underestimation penalty (that one belongs to the February estimate). A missed first payment is a costly administrative failure, not a catastrophe — provided you act now.
The Next 48 Hours
1. Submit the return if you haven't
If the IRP6 itself was never submitted, do that first, today, with an honest full-year estimate. An outstanding return blocks everything that follows and marks your profile non-compliant.
2. Pay — as much as clears fastest
Every day of delay adds interest, and a fast, full payment is the single strongest fact in any later remission request. If full payment is impossible, pay what you can immediately.
3. If you can't settle: arrange, don't avoid
SARS offers deferred payment arrangements for taxpayers who genuinely cannot pay in full. Applying signals compliance; silence signals the opposite and eventually draws collection steps. An instalment arrangement doesn't stop interest, but it stabilises the situation and keeps your tax clearance intact — which matters if clients or tenders require a compliant status.
The Remission Request: When It's Worth Making
Once the penalty shows on your statement of account, you can file a Request for Remission through eFiling. SARS may remit the paragraph 27 penalty where the failure resulted from circumstances reasonably outside your control. In practice, requests succeed most often when the story looks like this:
- A specific, verifiable cause — a medical event, a banking failure on the payment date, an eFiling outage you can document, a death in the family. "Cash flow was tight" is not an external circumstance; it's the situation provisional tax exists to price.
- Prompt correction — the payment was made days after the deadline, not months.
- A clean history — prior periods paid on time. First-time failures are viewed very differently from patterns.
Attach evidence: screenshots, bank letters, medical records — whatever substantiates the cause. If the request is declined, a formal dispute route (notice of objection) exists, but be realistic about the merits before spending months there.
One nuance worth knowing: where a payment was initiated in good time but cleared late due to a demonstrable bank processing failure, that documentation belongs front and centre in the request. This scenario is common and often remittable.
Don't Let September's Problem Eat February
The 2026/27 second period payment is due by the end of February 2027 — and since 28 February falls on a Sunday, treat Friday 26 February as the working deadline. The February obligation is unaffected by the August arrears, which means both amounts converge on you in summer if the arrears linger.
The sequencing that protects you:
- Clear the first period shortfall (or get the arrangement in place) this month.
- Keep the remission request moving in parallel — it doesn't suspend the debt, so don't wait for its outcome to pay.
- Start tracking income monthly now. The February estimate carries the underestimation penalty risk, and it demands near-actual accuracy — especially above the R1.8 million threshold, where the basic amount safe harbour no longer applies.
The Structural Fix
A missed provisional deadline is almost never about the deadline — it's about the money not being there, or the date not being watched. Both have the same solution: transfer a fixed percentage of every payment received into a separate tax account the day it lands, and diarise both IRP6 dates with reminders a month and a week out. Freelancers who automate the set-aside never experience deadline week as a crisis, because the payment is a transfer between their own accounts, not a scramble for funds.
The 10% penalty stings precisely once for most people. Let this be the once.