Overview

On 24 April 2026, the Minister of Water and Sanitation, Ms Pemmy Majodina, published Government Notice 7408 (Notice) in Government Gazette No. 54575 under the National Water Act 36 of 1998 (NWA), read with Regulation 3(b)(i) of the Water Use Registration Regulations. The Notice is a call to action directed at all unregistered water users: those who abstract water from a water resource under section 21(a) of the NWA, and those who engage in stream flow reduction activities under section 21(d), must register with the Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS) before the deadline.

The deadline is 23 July 2026. Registration within the 90-day window carries no charge. Failure to register on time exposes operators to a R300-per-property administrative charge and, on conviction, to a fine or imprisonment of up to five years.

The Notice casts a wide net. It reaches agricultural operations, industrial facilities, commercial landowners, lessees, and any operator whose registration records no longer reflect the current legal entity or contact details. Even water users who have been abstracting lawfully for years may find themselves captured if their registration has not kept pace with changes in their business or property.

Why Water Use Registration Matters – The Environmental Context

South Africa is a water-scarce country operating well beyond the margins of comfortable availability. Climate change is intensifying that scarcity: shifting rainfall patterns, prolonged droughts, and rising temperatures are reducing reliable inflows into already stressed catchments. At the same time, aging municipal and irrigation infrastructure leaks the water that is available, and decades of under-investment in catchment management have eroded the ecological health of the river systems that underpin the whole water cycle. In this context, knowing precisely how much water is being taken from a resource, by whom and where, is not an administrative nicety, it is a precondition for managing what remains.

The Water Authorisation and Registration Management System (WARMS) is the national database through which the DWS and Catchment Management Agencies (CMAs) track registered water uses. When WARMS is incomplete (when ownership changes are unrecorded, boreholes are unregistered, and industrial uses sit outside the system) it distorts the picture of how stressed a catchment actually is. CMAs cannot make defensible allocation decisions on flawed data. Over-allocation, the assignment of more water use rights than the resource can sustainably yield, is a direct cause of ecological harm: diminished dry-season flows, the degradation of riparian vegetation, the collapse of aquatic habitat, and the slow impoverishment of downstream communities and ecosystems that depend on adequate river flows.

The Notice is the DWS’s most direct recent effort to close those data gaps and restore the integrity of WARMS. Accurate registration records are, as the DWS puts it, essential for understanding the “who”, “what” and “where” of water use, the foundation on which sustainable allocation, catchment management plans and long-term water security are built. Compliance with the Notice is, in that sense, both a legal obligation and an act of environmental accountability.

Who Is Affected

The Notice sets out seven categories of unregistered water users, framed broadly enough to capture a wide range of operators who may not have recognised that their registration is incomplete:

1. Property purchasers: water users who acquired property from a registered water user but never notified the responsible authority of the change of ownership.
2. Land restitution beneficiaries: water users who received property through a land restitution process where the transfer of ownership was never reported to the responsible authority.
3. Lessees: water users leasing on a property where the owner did not register the water use in the first place.
4. Operators with outdated contact details: water users who have changed their postal address, physical address, email address, telephone or cell phone number without notifying the responsible authority.
5. Entities that have changed their registered name: water users who have restructured, merged, demerged or changed their trading name without notifying the responsible authority for substitution of the registered name.
6. Commercial borehole operators: water users who operate boreholes for commercial purposes but have not registered those boreholes with the responsible authority.
7. Agricultural-to-industrial users: water users who registered agricultural water use but never separately registered the industrial water use that results from the same operation.

What is significant about this list is its reach into administrative history. A company that changed its name three years ago, a farm that changed hands without a WARMS update, a mine that has been operating commercial boreholes under an incomplete registration, all fall within the Notice’s scope. Compliance is not just for those who have never registered; it is for anyone whose registration has drifted out of alignment with operational reality.

What The Notice Covers And What It Does Not

The Notice applies only to water uses under two subsections of section 21 of the NWA:

1. Section 21(a) – taking water from a water resource: this covers abstraction from rivers, streams, boreholes, springs and dams. It is the most common form of commercial water use and the one most directly linked to reductions in available water in a catchment.
2. Section 21(d) – stream flow reduction activities: this covers large-scale commercial afforestation and other activities designated under section 36 of the NWA, which reduce the volume of water reaching streams and rivers from the landscape.

The Notice does not apply to water storage (section 21(b)), the impeding or diverting of watercourse flow (section 21(c)), irrigation with wastewater (section 21(e)), controlled activities (section 21(f)), waste disposal (section 21(g)), reconnaissance (section 21(h)) or alterations to the beds and banks of watercourses (section 21(i)). Registering under the Notice will not therefore address all potential gaps in an operator’s section 21 compliance position. A broader water use compliance review is advisable for any operator whose activities span multiple section 21 categories.

Exemptions And Their Limits

Two categories of water user are exempt from the registration requirement:

1. Schedule 1 users: reasonable domestic use, small-scale gardening for non-commercial purposes, and the watering of animals are exempt from registration. These Schedule 1 uses are defined by the NWA as basic water uses that require no authorisation and fall outside the scope of the Notice.
2. Water User Association members: water users falling within the area of operation of a Water User Association (WUA) are generally exempt, with one important exception: commercial boreholes must still be registered with the responsible authority regardless of WUA membership.

The WUA exemption deserves careful scrutiny in practice. The NWA established WUAs under Chapter 8 as the statutory successors to irrigation boards, with a transitional period during which existing boards were intended to convert. That transition is incomplete in many catchments: irrigation boards continue to operate in practice without having formally converted to WUAs. Operators whose membership is in an unconverted irrigation board rather than a properly constituted WUA should not assume the exemption applies without obtaining specific advice.

Registration Is Not A Clean Bill Of Health

There is an important distinction between registering a water use and having that use confirmed as lawful. Registration is the entry point into the regulatory process, not the end of it. Operators should understand what follows registration before submitting their applications.

Under section 35 of the NWA, a registered water use is subject to verification by the responsible authority. Verification is the process by which the authority determines whether the use is lawful, and if so, to what extent and under what conditions. An operator whose historical abstraction exceeds a defensible entitlement, or whose use cannot be substantiated with adequate records, may find that verification leads to limits on what may continue to be used. A use that is found to be unlawful, or whose verification application is refused, may be discontinued entirely.

In catchments that are over-allocated or approaching the limits of sustainable yield, registration also opens the door to compulsory licensing under section 43 of the NWA. Compulsory licensing is the process through which the responsible authority requires all users in an area to apply for licences, which are then allocated against the section 27 criteria, criteria that include environmental sustainability and the Reserve, the minimum water volumes required to protect aquatic ecosystems and meet basic human needs. The effect in a stressed catchment can be a material reduction in the volumes previously used.

From an environmental compliance perspective, this means that the registration submission is a disclosure event. The information provided becomes the basis for ongoing regulatory scrutiny. Operators with historical, unscrutinised abstractions should carefully review the defensibility of their use, in terms of both the legal basis and the volume claimed, before submitting, and should integrate the registration process into a broader water use compliance and risk assessment.

Practical Environmental Actions Before 23 July 2026

Environmental managers, compliance officers and legal advisers should work through the following before the deadline:

1. Audit existing WARMS registrations: confirm that the registered water user name, ownership details and contact information in WARMS accurately reflect the current entity. Changes not previously reported must be corrected by submitting Form DW811 (Amendment Application Form) to the DWS.
2. Identify and register unregistered commercial boreholes: any borehole used for commercial purposes that does not appear in WARMS must be registered under the Notice. This applies regardless of WUA or irrigation board membership and extends to boreholes used for processing, irrigation on commercial farms, and industrial cooling and supply.
3. Close the agricultural-to-industrial gap: where operations on land with an existing agricultural water registration have evolved to include industrial abstraction, the industrial use must be separately registered if it has not previously been. This gap is common on mixed-use properties and agro-processing facilities.
4. Test the WUA exemption carefully: do not assume that membership of an irrigation board that has not formally converted to a WUA gives the same protection as WUA membership. Obtain specific advice before treating any water use as exempt under this category.
5. Assess defensibility before submitting: registration subjects a water use to verification under section 35 and, in stressed catchments, to potential compulsory licensing under section 43. Operators with historical uses that have not previously been reviewed should assess the legal and volumetric defensibility of those uses before making disclosures that could trigger a formal regulatory process.
6. Integrate with the broader water use compliance framework: registration submissions should be aligned with any pending Water Use Licence applications, existing general authorisations, and catchment-level obligations. The registration exercise is an opportunity to take stock of the full section 21 compliance position, not just the two categories covered by the Notice.

Conclusion

The water use registration requirement is one expression of a broader shift in South Africa’s water governance: a move towards closer scrutiny of actual resource use, more rigorous enforcement of the NWA’s allocation framework, and a clearer insistence that water use be registered, verified and, where necessary, licensed. That shift is being driven by environmental necessity. South Africa’s freshwater systems cannot sustain open-ended, unmonitored abstraction. The Reserve, the ecological baseline embedded in the NWA, reflects a recognition that water must first protect ecosystem function before it can be allocated for use. Registration is the mechanism through which that protection is made operational.

The 23 July 2026 deadline is firm. The registration window is free of charge. The costs of non-compliance, administrative, criminal and reputational, are real and avoidable. Operators who complete this process thoughtfully, with proper attention to their registration history and compliance position, will be better placed for the scrutiny that follows.

How LexEco Can Assist

LexEco’s water law and environmental compliance practice supports clients across the agricultural, mining, industrial and infrastructure sectors to navigate water use authorisation, registration and regulatory strategy. In the context of the Notice, our team assists with:

1. auditing existing WARMS registrations to identify gaps in ownership records, contact details and water use categories that require correction or fresh registration under the Notice;
2. preparing and submitting registration applications using the appropriate DWS forms, including DW811 for amendments and DW760 for new registrations, and engaging with the relevant provincial DWS or Catchment Management Agency offices;
3. advising on the scope of the WUA and Schedule 1 exemptions, including the legal position of operators whose membership is in an irrigation board that has not yet converted to a WUA;
4. assessing the environmental and legal defensibility of historical water uses prior to registration, including the risk profile under verification (section 35) and compulsory licensing (section 43) in stressed catchments;
5. integrating registration submissions with the broader water use compliance position, including pending Water Use Licence applications, general authorisation positions and catchment management obligations; and
6. engaging with the DWS on water use licence applications, verification processes and compulsory licensing proceedings where catchments are approaching the limits of sustainable allocation.

With the 23 July 2026 deadline approaching, the window for considered, well-prepared registration is narrowing. Early engagement allows operators to address gaps systematically, assess regulatory exposure in advance of disclosure, and approach the process as part of a coherent water use compliance strategy rather than a last-minute compliance rush. Contact LexEco to discuss your water use registration and compliance position.