What does a conveyancing attorney charge?
A conveyancer is an attorney who is additionally admitted under the Attorneys Act and now the Legal Practice Act 28 of 2014 to draft, sign and lodge deeds in the Deeds Office. The conveyancer is the only practitioner entitled to appear before the Registrar of Deeds, and the only one who can sign the power of attorney to pass transfer. Their fee is charged for that specialised role — it is not a generic attorney’s hourly billing but a fee-per-matter, scaled against the value of the transaction.
Historically, conveyancers in South Africa have benchmarked the fee on the purchase price of the property. The reasoning is long-standing: higher-value transactions carry higher professional risk, involve more extensive trust-account management, and demand more sophisticated drafting — and the fee should reflect that. The benchmark has been refined over time and is today published as the LSSA Conveyancing Fee Guideline, the successor to decades of similar recommended tariffs from the provincial Law Societies that preceded the Law Society of South Africa.
The LSSA 2025 tariff — key principles
The current LSSA Conveyancing Fee Guideline took effect on 1 August 2025. It replaces the previous iteration and is published as a downloadable PDF on the Law Society’s website. Three principles sit underneath the document and they matter more than the numbers themselves:
- It is a guideline, not a tariff in the statutory sense. The Legal Practice Act does not delegate fee-setting to the LSSA, and the Legal Practice Council — the statutory regulator of attorneys — does not enforce the document as a price ceiling or floor. It is a recommendation from a voluntary professional body.
- It is advisory and non-binding. Any conveyancer can charge below, at, or above the guideline. In practice, market efficiency keeps most conveyancing quotes close to the guideline on straightforward residential work, but nothing prevents a firm from quoting differently.
- It is always negotiable. Under s 35 of the Legal Practice Act and the LPC’s Code of Conduct, an attorney must explain the basis of the fee to the client before engaging. That conversation is your opportunity to negotiate, and the law protects your right to have it.
The guideline itself is a step-schedule: below R100,000 it sets a low flat fee, from R100,001 to R500,000 it steps up in R50,000 bands, from R500,001 to R1,000,000 in R100,000 bands, from R1,000,001 to R5,000,000 in R200,000 bands, and above R5,000,000 in R1,000,000 bands. Each step adds a fixed rand amount to the running total. The result is a smooth-ish curve that rises faster at the low end and flattens into a near-linear slope above R1 million.
Typical fee ranges
The table below shows the transferring attorney’s fee on the LSSA guideline at five common price points — both the headline VAT-exclusive guideline figure and the VAT-inclusive figure that will appear on the cost statement. These are transfer fees only. If the buyer is taking a bond, the separate bond registration attorney appointed by the bank charges a second fee on the same schedule, calculated on the bond amount.
| Purchase price | LSSA fee (excl. VAT) | Fee incl. 15% VAT |
|---|---|---|
| R1,000,000 | R25,370 | R29,176 |
| R2,000,000 | R35,620 | R40,963 |
| R3,000,000 | R45,870 | R52,751 |
| R5,000,000 | R66,370 | R76,326 |
| R10,000,000 | R92,170 | R105,996 |
Figures computed from the current LSSA Conveyancing Fee Guideline. VAT calculated at 15%. Individual firms may quote above or below these figures.
What the fee covers
The transferring attorney’s fee is a fee per matter — a single price covering every unit of work on the transfer from mandate to registration. For a standard residential transfer, the fee covers the following, in order:
- FICA onboarding of every party. Electronic identity verification against Home Affairs and the credit bureaux, collection and checking of ID documents, proofs of address, tax-status certificates, marriage certificates, antenuptial contracts, and source-of-funds declarations. For trusts and companies, the full suite of entity documents and ultimate-beneficial-owner verifications.
- Deeds Office search and title examination. Pulling the existing title deed, verifying the registered owner, checking for existing bonds, caveats, interdicts and conditions of title that may restrict the transfer.
- Drafting the transfer documentation. The deed of transfer itself, the power of attorney to pass transfer, the conveyancer’s certificates under the Deeds Registries Act 47 of 1937, and any ancillary consents.
- SARS transfer duty declaration. Preparing the TDC01 declaration on SARS eFiling, collecting the duty from the buyer, paying SARS, and obtaining the transfer duty receipt — without which the Deeds Office will not register. See our spoke on transfer duty.
- Rates and levy clearance liaising. Requesting clearance figures from the municipality and, for sectional title, from the managing agent; arranging the seller to pay them; and obtaining the clearance certificates.
- Coordination with the bond and cancellation attorneys. Reconciling figures, synchronising lodgement, signing cross-undertakings between firms, and linking the deeds electronically for simultaneous registration.
- Trust account management. Receiving the buyer’s deposit and costs into the firm’s section 86(4) trust account, complying with the Legal Practice Act’s trust-handling rules, and paying out on registration.
- Deeds Office lodgement, examination support and registration. Lodging the deeds via the registered messenger, attending to any examiner notes, and attending the prep on the morning of registration.
- Post-registration payouts and accounting. Paying the seller, the bond cancellation bank, the agent, the rates and levy arrears, and the municipality’s clearance figures, and delivering the final cost statement and the registered deed.
What the fee does NOT cover
Plenty. The fee is only for the transferring attorney’s professional work. Other, often material, items land on the cost statement as disbursements or are payable entirely outside it:
- Deeds Office registration fees. A separate gazetted tariff (currently published in Government Gazette 54225, Government Notice 7180 of 27 February 2026, effective 1 April 2026) fixes the Deeds Office’s own fee for registering the transfer. It is paid to the Registry, not the attorney, and is a pass-through on the cost statement.
- Transfer duty to SARS. Payable by the buyer to SARS under the Transfer Duty Act. Not the conveyancer’s fee; a pass-through disbursement.
- Bond registration attorney’s fee. A completely separate appointment by the buyer’s bank. The bond attorney charges their own fee, also on the LSSA guideline, calculated on the bond amount, with VAT. Two fees, two firms. See our spoke on bond registration.
- Bond cancellation attorney’s fee. Charged to the seller by the firm appointed by the seller’s bank. Separate again. See our spoke on bond cancellation.
- Sundries and petties. FICA verification bureau fees, Deeds Office search fees, courier and postage charges, printing, bank electronic-transfer fees. Modest, but real, and itemised.
- Compliance certificates. Electrical Certificate of Compliance, gas certificate, electric-fence certificate, beetle certificate (in coastal provinces), plumbing certificate (in Cape Town). Paid by the seller directly to the compliance contractor, not through the attorney.
- Estate agent’s commission. Paid by the seller directly to the agency. The conveyancer typically pays it from the sale proceeds at registration, but the agency’s relationship is with the seller, not the attorney.
Why fees are negotiable
The Legal Practice Act 28 of 2014 regulates the attorneys’ profession through the Legal Practice Council. The Act requires an attorney to explain the basis of the fee at the outset, permits fee agreements subject to reasonableness, and leaves the commercial quantum to the market. Nothing in the Act — and nothing in the LPC’s Code of Conduct — caps what a conveyancer may charge or floors what they may discount. Conveyancing fees are commercial prices within a regulated profession, not administered prices.
What actually constrains fees is not the LSSA guideline but competition. Pretoria and Johannesburg are thick with conveyancing firms, every buyer or seller can get three quotes in an afternoon, and the result is that most firms quote within a narrow band around the guideline on standard residential work. The room for negotiation opens up on volume — a developer lodging fifty transfers from a new estate is in a different position from a first-time buyer — and on complexity: a straightforward freehold transfer has less scope for negotiation than, say, a portfolio transfer between two companies where the professional work is heavier.
For individual residential buyers, the most effective negotiation is not on the headline fee but on certainty and transparency: ask for a written fixed-fee quote, ask the firm to disclose both professional fees and expected disbursements, and ask for confirmation that there will be no further fees unless you instruct additional work outside the normal scope. A firm that declines to commit to a written quote is telling you something about how the fee will emerge at the end of the matter.
Fixed-fee offerings
A growing number of South African conveyancing firms now quote fixed all-in fees for residential transfers rather than the LSSA tariff per se. The fixed fee typically bundles the professional fee, VAT, FICA and sundries into a single stated rand figure — the buyer or seller sees one number for the attorney’s side and separate numbers for the pass-through items (transfer duty, Deeds Office fees, rates clearance). On a standard residential transfer, this pricing model is usually priced close to the LSSA guideline but the transparency is materially higher.
Fixed-fee pricing signals transparency and process discipline: a firm willing to commit to a price up-front tends to have mature workflows, controlled cost structures, and a clear scope definition for what is in and what is out. It is not a guarantee of quality, but the absence of it is a reasonable red flag — if a firm will not tell you what it is going to cost, it is worth asking why.
Where fixed-fee pricing breaks down is on non-standard matters: estate transfers, trust transfers, divorce-order transfers, transfers with curatorship or minors’ interests, portfolio transfers under corporate restructuring, and transfers with exotic suspensive conditions. These routinely justify a fee in excess of the LSSA guideline, and a competent firm will price them individually once the full facts are on the table. Ask the firm how it handles pricing for the type of matter you are running — a firm that quotes a flat residential fee for a complicated estate transfer and then tries to revise it mid-transaction is not charging fairly.
Frequently asked questions
No. The LSSA Conveyancing Fee Guideline is exactly what its name says — a guideline, published by the Law Society of South Africa as a recommendation to its members and as a frame of reference for consumers. It is not a statute, it is not delegated legislation, and the Legal Practice Council does not enforce it as a price. Attorney fees in South Africa are negotiable under the Legal Practice Act 28 of 2014, and every firm is free to charge below, at, or above the guideline. The market and competition are what keep fees broadly within the guideline’s range — not any binding legal rule.
Because the bank — not the buyer — is the one taking security over the property, and the bank has an institutional preference for its own panel attorneys to draft and register the bond. Each South African bank (Absa, Standard Bank, FNB, Nedbank, Investec) maintains a panel of bond registration firms and allocates new bond work among them. The transferring attorney, who represents the seller’s and buyer’s interests in the transfer itself, sits separately. The two firms coordinate closely and lodge simultaneously, but charge two separate fees, each on the LSSA guideline. A few banks will allow a single firm to run both mandates, but that is the exception.
The LSSA tariff figures are VAT-exclusive. VAT at 15% is added to the professional fee on the attorney’s cost statement, and to any separately identified professional disbursements such as FICA verification and deeds-office search fees. VAT is not added to pass-through items that the attorney is simply paying on the client’s behalf — SARS transfer duty, the gazetted Deeds Office fee, and the municipality’s rates clearance figures all pass through without VAT because they are not the attorney’s income. A good cost statement shows these two categories on separate lines so the VAT treatment is transparent.
Yes — and you absolutely should ask. Under the Legal Practice Act 28 of 2014, an attorney is obliged to explain the basis of the fee at the point of instruction, and no statute or regulation caps what a practitioner may charge or floors what they may discount. In practice, a firm will often hold firm on the headline tariff figure on a straightforward residential transfer — the market is efficient and the margin is not large — but may be willing to discount on a repeat instruction, a high-value transaction, or a portfolio of transfers from a developer or investor. Asking for a written quote before instructing is both normal and expected; walking away if the quote does not make sense is your right.