Good news for motorists renewing their driver’s licence card in South Africa

The South African backlog of driving licence cards has reached a new milestone, with nearly 80% of the accumulated backlog now cleared.

This backlog resulted from a three-month breakdown of the country’s sole card printing machine earlier in the year.

The clearing of the backlog is thanks to the introduction of a backup card printing machine, which ensured continuity in renewals should another breakdown occur.

Additionally, there are signs that the legal dispute over the new licence card contract is unlikely to continue past January 2026.

Should this prove to be true, and the backlog continues to fall, the years-long trend of South Africans needing to wait months to receive their renewed licences will have come to an end.

The massive backlog of cards, reaching nearly 750,000, resulted from the breakdown of the card printing machine between February and May 2025.

While speaking to MyBroadband, Collen Msibi, spokesperson for the transport department, revealed that the backlog had dropped to 169,606 cards by 8 November 2025.

This represents a 77% decrease since the printing machine resumed operations.

Msibi also noted that the number of cards printed since the machine came back online had reached 1,909,407 by 10 November, translating to roughly 10,266 cards per day.

Broken printer and new plans

South Africa’s sole printing machine is so old that maintenance has become a difficult task, requiring specialised skills and parts that are sometimes only available overseas.

Across its numerous breakdowns in recent years, parts have had to be imported from Europe to repair it, resulting in even longer downtimes.

In response to this problem, the government has started plans to introduce new printers to produce more advanced smart driving licence cards.

However, this plan is being held up by legal disputes.

In the meantime, the transport department has entered into a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Home Affairs’ Government Printing Works (GPW) to provide an interim solution.

The GPW already prints smart ID cards, so it should, technically, be capable of producing the new polycarbonate smart driving licence cards.

Transport Minister Barbara Creecy previously indicated that the solution was expected to be ready in October 2025; however, this has not happened.

Creecy recently noted that the National Council of Provinces had been given samples of the licences it could print by Home Affairs.

She also outlined how implementing required them to figure out how to integrate the two departments’ databases.

Until then, South Africans will at least be spared lengthy delays thanks to the reduction in the backlog of unprinted cards.