South African citizens living overseas can now apply for passports at dedicated Home Affairs service centres instead of waiting for a consular appointment. The Department of Home Affairs says these centres process applications in about five weeks, against the 12 to 18 months many citizens abroad had been waiting. What began in July 2025 with four new centres in Australia and New Zealand, alongside London, has grown into a network across several continents.
How the network has grown
Minister Leon Schreiber launched the first centres in July 2025: Sydney and Melbourne in Australia, and Auckland and Wellington in New Zealand, alongside the existing London centre. The Department said Perth would follow, then the United Arab Emirates and China, then France, Germany and the Netherlands, then North America.
By October 2025, when the Department announced doorstep delivery, centres were running in 18 cities. Business Day reported that the Minister had launched 25 by the end of 2025, including Ottawa and Toronto, and in April 2026 the Department announced six more centres in Canada: Edmonton, Vancouver, Regina, Winnipeg, Montreal and Halifax. That followed a petition from South Africans in Canada, many of whom had been travelling thousands of kilometres to reach the VFS Global centre in Toronto. In the United States, applications are taken in seven cities: New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Houston, Miami, Los Angeles and Washington DC.
Many of the centres, including those in the United States, Canada and the United Arab Emirates, are operated by VFS Global for the Department. Details for each are published on the local South African mission’s website.
What the centres offer
- Applications for new passports and renewals, for adults and children
- Birth registration for children born abroad
- Online appointment booking, with email support and SMS tracking of the application
Since 1 November 2025, citizens using the service centres can also choose to have the finished passport delivered to their door. The Department put the delivery fee at between USD 30 and USD 60, with delivery taking 24 to 72 hours.
What it means if you live abroad
Where a centre is within reach, renewing a passport is now a matter of weeks and a local appointment rather than a long trip or a long wait. Five weeks is the Department’s stated turnaround, not a guaranteed date, so if a job move, a visa renewal in your country of residence or a trip home depends on your passport, apply well before you need it.
What comes next
In its statement of 3 July 2026, Home Affairs said the next phase would digitalise Smart ID and passport applications for citizens abroad, in the way its partnership with banks has done inside South Africa. No date has been given. The same statement noted the automated citizenship reinstatement portal the Department built after a Constitutional Court order, which matters to South Africans who took another citizenship and were told they had lost their own. Our guide to how South African citizenship is acquired and kept explains that judgment.
For the wider set of changes at the Department since mid-2024, see our summary of the Minister’s first year in office.
What we recommend
- Check your passport’s expiry date now, and book at the nearest centre through your local South African mission’s website.
- Confirm your citizenship status first if you took another nationality without Home Affairs’ permission to keep your South African citizenship. A passport application is the wrong place to discover a problem.
If your question is about South African citizenship itself rather than a passport, see our South African citizenship services.
First published
