R50k salary but still too broke to make ends meet

Consumers taking home more than R50,000 a month are increasingly turning to debt counselling as they struggle to keep up with their monthly debt.

The DebtBusters Q2 2026 Debt Index shows that these consumers need 103% of their take-home pay to service their monthly debt.

Benay Sager, executive head of DebtBusters, said the figure is a sign that debt repayments have become unaffordable.

“If you are taking home R50,000, you would need R51,500 every month to repay the debt. That’s 103%, which is technically impossible, and that’s why they apply for debt counselling to get help,” Sager said.

Big salaries, bigger debt

The problem does not end with monthly repayments. Top earners have a total debt-to-annual-net-income ratio of 307%, said Sager. “In other words, for every R100,000 they take home in a year, they carry roughly R307,000 in total debt.”

This figure reflected the overall debt consumers carried over the longer term. He attributed this financial pressure to unsecured borrowing such as loans and credit cards. Unsecured debt among higher-income consumers is now 84% higher than it was in 2021, well above cumulative inflation of 29%.

The focus should be on why people with higher incomes had accumulated such large debts and not why they are using debt counselling, he said.

According to Sager, the lending landscape has changed significantly since the Covid-19 pandemic, with more credit being directed towards higher-income consumers. Lenders are increasingly looking for “high-quality clients”, consumers with higher incomes who were considered more likely to repay their loans. This has resulted in larger unsecured loans being granted to fewer consumers, concentrating credit risk among a smaller group.

While lower-income consumers have seen their total debt decline by up to 23%, Sager warned that this did not necessarily mean their financial position had improved.

Cost of living bites

Across all applicants, consumers now need 64% of their take-home pay to service debt, down from a peak of 73% in the first quarter of 2021. But rising household costs continue to put pressure on consumers.

Petrol prices have increased by 52% since 2021, while electricity tariffs have risen by 101%.

Consumers earning between R10,000 and R20,000 a month spend almost a third of their disposable income on food.

Short-term borrowing is also on the rise, with a record 63% of new debt counselling applicants having a one-month payday loan, said Sager.

Despite the debt squeeze, more consumers are taking steps to regain control of their finances. In Q2 2026, about 14 times more consumers successfully completed debt counselling than in the same quarter in 2016, paying R570m to creditors while under debt counselling.

Sager said seeking help showed consumers were trying to do the right thing.

Sowetan