Method and limits

The source

Every figure comes from notices published in the Government Gazette: the notice to creditors (form J193), which the executor publishes once the Master has granted letters of executorship (section 29 of the Administration of Estates Act 66 of 1965), and the liquidation and distribution account lying for inspection (form J187), which the executor publishes once the Master has examined the account (section 35). GazetteSearch holds every such notice since mid-2012, bar a few missing weeks listed on Trust and integrity.

What the Gazette cannot show

• For estates below a value the Minister sets, the Master may dispense with an executor and direct how the estate is wound up (section 18(3)). How many of these are advertised is not known.
• Our times run between public events: the death, the notice to creditors, the account. The department's own figures run from when the Master has received all required documents. The two clocks measure different things.
• The Master's office. The account prints the Master's office. Most notices to creditors since 2023 print it too, after the date of death (filers began printing it in 2021). Open estates are counted by the office their notice to creditors names, which matches the office on the estate's account in 98.2% of estates that have both. New estates by office, from 2023, are counted by that same office, so an estate with no account yet is still counted where it was advertised. Timings and accounts by office use the office on the account.
• A notice is dated by the printed date of the gazette it appears in. From 2021 the Government Printing Works published some gazettes long after their printed date, but fewer than 1% of estate notices sit in those issues.
• Times from the notice to creditors to the account cover estates that reached an account. Times are grouped by the year of the account, so an office that clears old estates shows a longer median that year; the completion curves, grouped by the year of the notice, show the other side.
• The record starts in mid-2012, so an account in 2014 could only show a wait of about two years, while one in 2025 can show thirteen. Times are therefore shown from 2017, the fifth year of the record, and each office is set against the national median: the middle wait of every estate that reached an account that year.
• Six months is under 183 days, a year 365 days, two years 730 days, the same in every figure.

How an estate's notices are linked

An estate's notices appear months or years apart, in different issues. We link them into one estate by the estate number together with the deceased's details (surname, first names and date of birth or identity number), so that a notice to creditors and the account for the same estate share an estate identifier. A notice that matches nothing stays on its own.

How often a notice to creditors is linked to its estate, by year:

An unlinked notice to creditors is an estate that has not reached an account yet, or one whose account the linking missed; for any one estate the record cannot tell which, so open estates include some that are only unlinked. Counting linked estates alone gives the same trend: 72% reached an account within a year for estates advertised in 2016 to 2018, and 57% for 2022. 2025 is lower because many of its accounts are still to come.

Who administers estates: read, not sorted by a rule

The figures of who is named on the notice to creditors and who lodges the first account come from samples, not from every notice. For each of 2013, 2019 and 2025 we drew 1,000 estates at random from those whose first notice to creditors appeared that year, and separately 1,000 from those whose first account appeared that year, and read what our parser had taken from that notice or account. The entries were shuffled across the years and read in batches, each by a reader who did not see the others' work. The readers did not see the whole notice: they saw the fields our parser extracts from it (the executor's name and address, the deceased's surname and address) and how often the executor's name recurs across the record. From those, every entry was read on its own by an AI reader (Anthropic's Claude) and placed in one of a few groups (a private person, a law firm, a bank or insurer trust company, another professional firm, a professional named in person, or unclear); no keyword rule or classifier program decided a group. On an account the name is whoever lodged it, the executor or their agent. A private person is the executor the notice names, even when an attorney acts for them. The 2013 entries come from the older notice layout, whose fields the parser reads less well, so more of them could not be read: 33 notices to creditors named no executor in 2013, against 5 in 2019 and 1 in 2025, and slightly more were unclear (3.1% against 2.6%). No automated classifier is involved in any year.

• The margins are 95% Wilson intervals: what sampling alone could move. They do not cover a reader's mistakes.
• To measure those, 240 notices to creditors from 2025 were read twice; two readers agreed on whether the executor was a private person for 205, and a fresh reader settled the rest. On the accounts, 240 were read twice and the readers agreed on 237.
• No share is given for the banks' and insurers' trust companies: the readers differed on whether a member of a trust company's staff, named in person, counts as the company or as a professional, so the two are counted together.
• The working files hold the names printed in the Gazette and are kept private. What is published is the count in each group, with no names.

The data

• Download. Every chart has "Download CSV" beneath it: the exact numbers the chart draws, one file per figure.
• How it was made. Each figure is one SQL query, run against a reduced copy of the record (what it reads and holds is set out under "Extract" there), except the two executor figures: they are counts from the hand-coded samples above, not from the reduced copy. Its file is named on Trust and integrity.
• Releases. Figures come in dated releases (this one: 2026-10-02b). A release is never changed; corrections come in the next one, listed below.
• Licence. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0): use it freely, with credit.
• How to cite. GazetteSearch (2026). Figure title. Release 2026-10-02b. gazettesearch.co.za/analysis/page#figure. Every chart's "Cite" link gives the exact wording.

Who made this

The analysis is free and carries no advertising. GazetteSearch is run by Phase Transitions (Pty) Ltd, which also offers businesses a paid bulk-matching service.

Changes

• 2 October 2026, executors. Who administers estates is back, rebuilt from samples of 1,000 estates a year in which every sampled entry was read: who is named on the notice, and who lodges the account. The withdrawn charts stay withdrawn. One short answer is back on the new numbers.
• 2 October 2026, release 2026-10-02b. From the same record and gazettes as 2026-10-02. New estates are now set against estates reaching their first account, each counted once; account notices printed, later accounts included, are shown apart. Times start in 2017 and compare each office with the national median. Open estates start in June 2017, five years after the first notice to creditors, with the two to five year band split at three years, and a new figure counts the estates open more than five years. New estates by office use the office the notice to creditors prints, from 2023. A new figure shows accounts each quarter by office. Death to the notice to creditors counts every estate wherever it is drawn. Two findings and two short answers are back on these numbers.
• 2 October 2026, later. Withdrawn until they can be backed up: the charts of who administers estates (a check by hand found that the sorting of executors counted many professionals as private persons), months of backlog, accounts published each year, and estates with no account two years after their notice. Five findings came off the front page and four short answers were withdrawn, each with its reason. Release 2026-10-02 is unchanged.
• 2 October 2026. Release 2026-10-02, from the record of 2 October, using gazettes to 30 September. Open estates are now shown by the Master's office their notice to creditors names. The firms chart now lists the fifteen largest firms each year, each count a minimum, beside the estates of each bank and insurer trust company.
• 1 October 2026. Release 2026-10, the first for publication, from the record of 1 October: offices re-mapped, the notices of 2016 to 2022 re-read and estates re-linked. A notice printed twice in one issue now counts once, the firm list holds only reviewed firms, and the measured error rate is added.
• 28 September 2026. Draft releases built from the record of the same day. Office names are being re-mapped (about 2% of accounts had the magistrate's court counted as the office), the notices of 2016 to 2022 are being re-read, and estates are being re-linked. Draft releases only.