There are two ways a South African company dies. CIPC can strike it off for not filing annual returns — a death by paperwork. Or the owners can walk into the process themselves and ask CIPC to remove the company from the register. That second route is called voluntary deregistration, and it is the closest thing the public record has to a measure of business owners giving up on purpose.
ClearComply analysed every voluntary deregistration list CIPC has gazetted since June 2023 — twelve publications, 29,458 companies, with every company counted once. The trend is not subtle: the number of companies per gazette list roughly doubled between 2023 and 2024, and stayed at that level through 2025.
What the gazettes show
CIPC does not publish voluntary deregistrations on a fixed schedule — lists appear every few months, sometimes as an initial notice and a final list covering the same companies. So the honest way to read the trend is per list, with repeat appearances removed. Here is every publication since mid-2023:
| Gazette list | Companies (first appearance) |
|---|---|
| June 2023 | 1,697 |
| August 2023 | 1,265 |
| October 2023 | 1,358 |
| December 2023 | 2,311 |
| February 2024 | 2,586 |
| May 2024 | 4,962 |
| August 2024 | 2,373 |
| October 2024 | 4,079 |
| March 2025 | 3,289 |
| October–November 2025 (one cohort, two lists) | 3,584 |
| February 2026 (initial list — cohort not yet complete) | 1,954 |
Average companies per gazette cohort: roughly 1,660 in 2023, 3,500 in 2024, and 3,440 in 2025. The step up happens between 2023 and 2024 and it holds. This is not one bad list — every 2024 and 2025 cohort is bigger than every 2023 cohort.
Who is closing? Not startups.
The registration numbers on the lists tell you when each company was born. The intuitive story — that these are young companies that never got going — is wrong.
| Registered | Companies voluntarily closing |
|---|---|
| Before 2010 | 4,378 |
| 2010–2015 | 3,906 |
| 2016–2019 | 7,257 |
| 2020–2021 | 4,917 |
| 2022–2023 | 3,906 |
| 2024 or later | 1,388 |
The median company on these lists was registered in 2018. More than half were registered before 2020. These are businesses that made it through the hard lockdown, the July 2021 unrest, and the worst load-shedding years — and then sat down in 2024 or 2025 and decided, deliberately, to wind up. Only about one in twenty was registered in 2024 or later.
The gazettes do not say why. Rising input costs, the cost of staying compliant, owners consolidating several entities into one, retirement without succession — all plausible, none provable from this data. What the data does prove is the direction: the rate at which established businesses are choosing the exit has doubled, and it has stayed doubled.
The other kind of company death
Voluntary deregistration is a choice. The bigger killer is not. When a company fails to file its CIPC annual returns for successive years, CIPC begins deregistration on its own — and those gazette lists are far larger. A single annual-return deregistration publication in July 2023 carried 15,383 companies. The current annual-return deregistration track holds over 20,000 companies, and the median company on it was registered in 2005— twenty-year-old businesses being struck off for paperwork.
Put the two lists side by side and the contrast is stark. The voluntary list is a 2018 company choosing to close. The annual-return list is a 2005 company that may not even know it is dying. If you want to understand what deregistration actually does to a company — frozen bank accounts, void contracts, directors personally exposed — we walk through it in What is CIPC deregistration?.
The honest caveats
Three things to know before you quote these numbers. First, CIPC publishes these lists irregularly — comparing per-list averages is the fairest available reading, but it is not a calendar-month series. Second, where CIPC published an initial and a final list for the same cohort (October and November 2025, for example), we counted each company once, at first appearance — the raw lists overlap by about 3,500 companies. Third, the February 2026 list is an initial notice; its cohort is not complete, so it says nothing yet about whether 2026 is better or worse.
If you’re closing — or being closed
If you are winding up deliberately: do it properly. Outstanding annual returns and beneficial ownership filings do not disappear because you have stopped trading — and a half-closed company can follow its directors around. The clean route is in our guide to winding up and deregistering a company.
If you are not closing: make sure you are not on the other list by accident. Deregistration for unfiled annual returns arrives quietly — a gazette notice most owners never see. Check your company’s CIPC status free at clearcomply.co.za/check— 30 seconds, no sign-up. If your company appears on a deregistration or non-compliance list, the result explains exactly what it means and what to file, and reinstatement is possible if the process has already gone further than you knew.
Data: ClearComply’s analysis of CIPC voluntary deregistration and annual-return deregistration gazette publications, June 2023 – February 2026 (12 voluntary publications; 29,458 distinct companies after removing repeat appearances). Company ages derived from CIPC registration numbers. Source lists are public CIPC gazette notices (cipc.co.za). ClearComply surfaces public information — it does not report on private company affairs.