A major new report tracking more than a decade of employment trends, industrial shifts, population growth, and post‑pandemic recovery across South Africa’s eight metropolitan municipalities has been released through the Spatial Economic Activity Data – South Africa (SEAD-SA) partnership.

The Cities Economic Outlook 2026 report is the product of this collaboration, led by the National Treasury, the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), the University of the Witwatersrand, and the University of the Free State, and supported by funding from the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office. Drawing on this collective effort, the report provides evidence‑based insights into the performance, pressures, and prospects of South Africa’s metropolitan economies.

Titled Cities in flux: Pathways of stress, adjustment and renewal, the Outlook presents new evidence from the Spatial Tax Panel (STP), a unique administrative dataset built from anonymised tax records.

South Africa’s economic future is closely tied to the trajectory of its cities. Today, approximately four in ten South Africans live in metropolitan areas, and these eight metros have absorbed half of all national population growth over the past three decades. Yet new evidence suggests that metro job growth has slowed and, in recent years, fallen behind the rest of the country.

A decade of change in South Africa’s cities

Drawing on granular employer-to-employee tax data from the STP, the Outlook provides one of the most detailed accounts to date of how local economies are evolving.

Key findings include:

• Metropolitan employment growth has faltered over the past decade, with only Cape Town and Tshwane bucking the trend.

• Higher-value and tradable sectors such as manufacturing have stagnated in several cities, while job growth has been concentrated in non-tradable and public service activities.

• The population of South Africa’s large metros are expanding rapidly, absorbing half of national population growth and doubling in size every 22–30 years – intensifying infrastructure and service delivery pressures.

• The green transition presents both opportunities and risks, with spatially uneven exposure across regions and industries.

• Bounce back from COVID-19 has been uneven, with metros initially absorbing the majority of job losses and lagging behind non-metro areas in recovery.

• Job losses were most intense for youth with little sign of improvement since.

The Outlook also introduces new analysis on economic complexity, spatial mismatch in Gauteng cities, deindustrialisation patterns, urban wage geographies, and the resilience of cities since the pandemic.

Read the full press release here.

The Cities Economic Outlook 2026 is available through the SEAD-SA platform here.