About Gazette Finder

Gazette Finder makes South Africa's Government Gazettes findable: each one named the same way, dated, attributed to the authority that issued it, searchable, and always linked to its original.

Who provides it

Gazette Finder is an independent, free public-interest service. It is not a government service and is not affiliated with the Government Printing Works or any department.

It is free to use: browsing, searching and reading every gazette costs nothing and needs no account.

Where the gazettes come from

Every gazette here is published by the Government Printing Works, the state printer, which publishes the gazettes free online. Each gazette's page links to it in the Government Printing Works' own library, and offers our copy of the PDF beside that link — never in its place.

The Southern African Legal Information Institute (SAFLII) also publishes South African gazettes, and its collection was consulted in planning this service; no gazette shown here so far is taken from it.

What is held

The national Government Gazette as the Government Printing Works' online library holds it, from 20 May 2016: 7 701 gazettes so far — the weekly gazettes, the regulation gazettes, the departmental separates, the board notices and the road carrier permits — with new issues added as they are published.

Not yet here: the provincial gazettes, the Legal Gazettes, the liquor licence gazettes, Acts and the tender bulletin; gazettes from before 2016; and the individual notices within each gazette, which are read out later. Until then, the full text of each gazette is searchable.

What is ours

A gazette's name here — "Government Gazette 55525 of 9 October 2026" — is composed by Gazette Finder from the source's listing by one rule, and each page says so. Its date, kind and issuing authority are read the same way, and the text is machine-read from the PDF: none of it is the gazette's own typesetting, and the PDF remains the record. A notice's class on the Legislation page — a bill, a commencement, regulations, a call for comment — is ours in the same way: read by rule from the gazette's contents page, labelled so wherever it shows.

Terms

Gazettes are official texts: section 12(8)(a) of the Copyright Act, 1978 excludes official texts of a legislative, administrative or legal nature from copyright. They are reproduced here as published, attributed to the Government Printing Works.

The data Gazette Finder composes — names, dates, kinds, authorities, and the search over them — is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0): reuse it freely, crediting Gazette Finder.

Reporting a problem

Something wrong — a gazette's date, number, issuing authority or name, a gazette that is missing, or a page that does not work? Tell us through the feedback form, from any page; you can ask for a reply. Suggestions and comments are welcome there too. Anything else: contact us.

How to use it

Finding and reading gazettes, keeping up with new ones — and, with a free account, bookmarking them and watching an authority — are explained step by step on the Help page.