How South Africans Really Split: Many Consider Leaving, Versus Just 6% Who Actually Emigrate

Take a hundred South Africans at a braai and, statistically, twenty-seven of them have seriously thought about leaving the country at some point. Now the real question: how many south africans actually emigrate versus just consider it, once you look past the thinking-about-it stage? The gap between those two numbers is enormous, and it’s the part most casual conversation about “everyone leaving” gets wrong.

The source worth trusting here

The afrobarometer emigration survey south africa published as Dispatch AD914 in December 2024 is a nationally representative survey — a meaningfully more solid foundation than the self-selected online polls that dominate this topic elsewhere. It found that 27% of South Africans have considered emigrating, including 10% who say they’ve thought about it “a lot.” Because respondents were sampled to represent the country as a whole, rather than recruited from people who’d already decided to leave, the follow-through numbers below carry more weight than most of what circulates on this topic.

What happens to that 27%, in practice

This is where thinking about emigrating versus taking action splits the group apart. Of the South Africans who said they’d considered leaving:

• 66% are not currently making any concrete plans at all.
• 20% intend to move within the next year or two but haven’t started preparing.
• Only 6% have already taken concrete steps — the survey specifically names obtaining a visa as an example of what counts here.

Run that 6% back against the full population and it works out to roughly 1.6% of all South African adults actually doing something about it, not merely talking about it — a much smaller slice than the headline figure implies, and the one that actually predicts who shows up in a visa office queue.

Why the gap matters more than the headline number

South african emigration intention statistics like “27% have considered leaving” travel far on social media precisely because they sound dramatic on their own. Reported alone, without the follow-through numbers, they paint a picture of a country in the middle of a mass exodus. Reported alongside the 6% figure, they paint a much more grounded picture: a lot of ambient consideration, and a comparatively small, sustained group of people actually working through visa applications, savings plans and job searches.

What this means if you’re one of the 6%

If your family has moved past considering it and into actually preparing — gathering documents, researching programmes, talking to a professional about the pathway that fits your situation — you’re already in a smaller, more committed group than the headline percentage suggests. That’s worth remembering on the days the process feels slow or bureaucratic: most people who “think about” leaving never reach this stage at all, and reaching it is itself the harder, less common step. The 20% still planning without preparing, and the 66% not yet planning at all, are the ones the headline number is really describing — not the group actually filling out forms.

The honest number to hold onto isn’t 27%. It’s 6% of that 27% — the real follow-through rate once you strip out the talk and count only the applications actually filed.