What to do when Home Affairs does not decide your application

An application to the Department of Home Affairs goes in, the receipt is issued, and then nothing happens. Months pass. The online status does not change. Nobody answers the telephone number on the receipt, and the visa facilitation centre says it is with the Department.

Most applicants wait, because waiting feels like the respectful thing to do and because they are afraid that complaining will prejudice the outcome. That instinct is understandable and it is usually wrong, for a reason that has nothing to do with the merits of the application: your existing status keeps expiring while you wait.

A failure to decide is reviewable

The Promotion of Administrative Justice Act 3 of 2000, known as PAJA, gives effect to the constitutional right to administrative action that is lawful, reasonable and procedurally fair.

Section 6(2)(g) provides that administrative action may be reviewed where the action consists of a failure to take a decision. This ground applies where there is a duty on an administrator to decide and they have refused to do so, or where they have failed to decide within a prescribed period, or where no period is prescribed and they have failed to decide within a reasonable time.

So the silence is not a state of limbo you have to endure. It is a reviewable failure, and a court can be asked to intervene.

What counts as unreasonable

There is no fixed number. Reasonableness is assessed on the facts, and courts consider the complexity of the application, what the Department itself holds out as its service standard, whether the applicant has done everything required, whether anything further was requested, and the consequences of the delay for the applicant.

Two things strengthen an applicant's position considerably:

A complete application. If the Department asked for something and you did not provide it, the delay is partly yours. Make sure everything requested has been supplied, and that you can prove when.

A documented follow-up trail. Dated emails, reference numbers, and records of every enquiry. An applicant who can produce nine months of polite, dated correspondence is in a very different position from one who simply waited.

Demanding reasons

Where a decision has been taken and you do not know why, section 5 of PAJA lets you request written reasons within 90 days after becoming aware of the action. The administrator must then furnish adequate reasons in writing within 90 days of receiving the request.

This matters for two reasons. Reasons tell you whether the refusal is attackable. And a failure to give reasons is itself a problem for the administrator, because a decision for which no adequate reasons are given is vulnerable.

Where no decision has been taken at all, reasons are not the issue; the decision is.

The escalation, in order

Going straight to court is expensive and it is rarely the first step. The sequence that works looks like this.

Follow up properly and in writing. Email the office where the application was lodged and the relevant directorate, quoting the receipt number, the date of lodgement and the applicant's details. Keep every reply, including automated ones.

Exhaust any internal remedy. PAJA generally requires internal remedies to be exhausted before a review. Where the Immigration Act provides an appeal to the Director-General, that is the route, and our guide on appealing a visa rejection covers it.

Send a letter of demand. A formal letter, ideally from an attorney, setting out the dates, the failure to decide, the prejudice, and a deadline for a decision, with notice that an application to compel will follow. A significant proportion of these matters are resolved by this letter alone, because the file is located and dealt with.

Apply to the High Court. An application for an order compelling the Department to take a decision within a stated period. The relief sought is usually that the decision be taken within, say, thirty days, rather than that the court substitute its own decision, because the discretion belongs to the administrator.

Proceedings must be brought without unreasonable delay and not later than 180 days. Where internal remedies exist, the period runs from the conclusion of those proceedings; where they do not, from when you became aware of the action and the reasons for it.

The problem running alongside

This is the part applicants consistently underestimate.

An undecided application does not extend your permission to be in South Africa. If your visa expires while you wait, you are overstaying, and an overstay results in a declaration that you are an undesirable person, with a ban attached. The reason for the overstay, including a Home Affairs delay, does not prevent the declaration being made at the port when you leave.

There is one important exception, and it has an end date. Immigration Directive 7 of 2026, signed by the Minister on 30 March 2026 and in effect from 1 April 2026, extends the current visa status of people whose applications for long-term temporary residence visas, or whose waiver applications or appeals, were still pending on the date it was signed. The extension runs until 30 June 2027. It applies only if you were legally admitted to South Africa and applied through VFS Global with a receipt that can be verified on the VFS tracking system. While it applies you may do only what your current visa allows. You may leave and re-enter without being declared undesirable, but a person from a country that is not visa exempt needs a port of entry visa to come back.

Read its limits carefully. It does not cover applications for permanent residence, whose applicants must keep their own status valid throughout. It does not cover applications lodged after 30 March 2026. And it ends as soon as you receive the outcome, after which you must comply with the decision immediately. The directive extends an earlier concession, Directive 22 of 2025. Outside these concessions the rule is unchanged: a pending application gives you no status.

The bans are severe and the line is sharp: an overstay of not more than 30 days ordinarily carries 12 months, and one of more than 30 days ordinarily carries five years. Our guide on what happens if you overstay your visa sets out the consequences and the appeal.

The practical implication is that the delay and the status are two separate problems, and the status one is more urgent. Do not allow a visa to expire while telling yourself the application will surely be decided any day. Take advice while you still have status, because the options available then are much better than the options afterwards.

What a court can and cannot order

It is worth being realistic about the remedy, because applicants sometimes expect more than a review can give.

A court asked to intervene in a failure to decide will ordinarily order the administrator to take a decision within a stated period. It will not usually decide the application itself, because the discretion was conferred on the Department and not on the court. That relief is available only in exceptional circumstances.

So the outcome of a successful application to compel is a decision, not a visa. It might be a refusal. What it does is convert an indefinite silence into an answer you can then appeal or review on its merits, which is a real advantage: a refusal with reasons can be attacked, and silence cannot.

Costs usually follow the result, and where the Department has sat on a complete application for many months without explanation, an adverse costs order against it is a realistic prospect. That is part of why the letter of demand is so often effective.

What good correspondence looks like

The letters that produce a decision have some features in common.

They are short. One page, with the reference number at the top.

They contain dates: when the application was lodged, when documents were supplied, when each follow-up was sent.

They state the prejudice specifically: the visa expires on a date, the employment is conditional on the outcome, a child's school placement depends on it.

They ask for one thing: a decision, by a date.

They are kept. Every letter you send becomes an annexure to the application you may have to bring, and the persuasiveness of that application is built almost entirely from this correspondence.

Who to write to, and what to keep

Correspondence that goes nowhere is worse than none, because it consumes the months you will later have to explain.

Address it to the office where the application was lodged and to the directorate responsible for that category of application, and copy the visa facilitation centre where one was used. Put the receipt number and the applicant's full names and passport number in the subject line, so that the email is findable by somebody searching a mailbox.

Keep a single file containing, in date order: the application receipt, every document you submitted with proof of when, every request from the Department and your response to it, every follow-up you sent, and every reply including automated acknowledgements.

That file is the application to compel. When an attorney eventually asks what has happened, the difference between a client who can hand over a chronology and one who remembers "I phoned a few times" is the difference between an application that is ready and one that has to be reconstructed from nothing.

It is also the evidence that supports an appeal against a declaration of undesirability if the worst happens, because it shows the delay was not of your making.

Worked example

This example is illustrative. Chipo lodges an application to change her status in February. The receipt is issued. Her current visa expires in June. By August there is no decision and no communication.

The correct sequence for her began in April, not August: written follow-ups, a record of them, and advice about her status before June rather than after it.

By August she has two problems. The undecided application is a reviewable failure and, on nine months with a complete file and documented follow-ups, an application to compel would have real prospects. But she has also been out of status since June, and every week she remains adds to an overstay that will be assessed at the port when she eventually leaves.

The order in which she should deal with these is the opposite of the order in which they feel urgent. The application she is waiting for is the thing on her mind; the status is the thing that carries a five-year consequence.

A letter of demand may well produce the decision. What it cannot do is undo the weeks of overstay that accumulated while she waited politely.

Change the facts: if Chipo was legally admitted, lodged her application through VFS in February 2026 for a visa the directive covers, and can produce a verifiable receipt, Immigration Directive 7 of 2026 extends her current visa status to 30 June 2027 and she is not overstaying while she waits. The delay is still reviewable, and she should still push for a decision, because the concession ends on that date or when the outcome arrives, whichever comes first. If her application was for permanent residence, the directive does not help her at all.