The Separate R400,000 Travel Allowance for Children Under 18 Leaving South Africa

“Wait, the kids get their own allowance too?” It’s a question that comes up almost every time a family sits down to actually plan the exchange control side of an emigration, because most people assume South Africa’s foreign exchange rules are built entirely around adults. They aren’t.

Here’s the short version, and the reason for this travel allowance for children under 18 south africa explainer: it exists as its own, separate limit — not a portion carved out of a parent’s own allowance, and not something split between however many kids are in the family.

Comparing the child allowance to the adult one

An adult’s single discretionary allowance sits at R2 million per calendar year, following the 2026 increase, and doesn’t require a Tax Compliance Status PIN or documentary evidence to use. Each child under 18 has a comparable, though separate and smaller, category: the SARB travel allowance for minors leaving South Africa, which doubled from R200,000 to R400,000 per calendar year in the same 2026 round of changes. It runs on the same per-person, per-year logic as the adult SDA — it just applies at a different ceiling, scaled for the fact that a child’s own exchange control footprint is typically much smaller than an adult’s.

Under 18 travel allowance doubled 2026 — what actually moved

The doubling wasn’t an isolated adjustment to just the children’s figure. It happened as part of the same package that lifted the adult SDA from R1 million to R2 million, the household effects cap from R1 million to R2 million per family unit, and several other exchange control limits, all stemming from the 2026 Budget and the SARB circulars that followed it through March and April. Treasury’s stated rationale, inflation and currency movement since the old figures were set, applied across the whole set of changes, children’s allowance included.

Where families get the comparison wrong

The mistake isn’t usually forgetting the children’s allowance exists — it’s assuming it works like a shared family pool rather than a genuinely separate, per-child entitlement. A family with two children under 18 doesn’t split R400,000 between them; each child carries their own R400,000, on top of whatever the adults are moving under their own SDA and, above that, the unchanged R10 million foreign investment allowance per adult. Stacked correctly across a full household, that adds up to considerably more capacity than treating it as one family-wide number would suggest.

What this doesn’t remove

None of this changes the underlying compliance picture — money above these thresholds still needs SARB’s Financial Surveillance Department involved, and even within the thresholds, the mechanics of actually moving a child’s allowance, whose bank account, what documentation, how it’s structured, are questions for a forex specialist or tax practitioner working from your family’s actual numbers, not a general explainer.

The practical takeaway

Children’s exchange control allowance versus an adult’s isn’t a lesser version of the same rule — it’s its own line item, and a family planning a move should count it as one, rather than assuming the adults’ allowance is the only number that matters.

How these figures stack across a full household is laid out in our exchange control breakdown for emigrating families — worth a read before that conversation with a specialist.