Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) said on Thursday that the Western Cape had the highest provincial economic growth rate in 2025 at 1.4%, compared with a national average of 0.9%. All nine provinces had positive growth rates in 2025.
The Western Cape was followed by Gauteng with a 1.1% increase and Limpopo with a 1.0% gain. Mpumalanga had the slowest growth at 0.5%.
The Western Cape has beaten the national average since 2022. The other provinces have not been as consistently above the national average.
Stats SA noted that the annual provincial GDP estimates were needed for several reasons.
The most important is that the national government uses the provincial data to allocate equitable shares from national revenue to the provinces.
There is also strong investor interest in economic growth in different parts of the country as provinces are keen to understand how they compare with their peers and how they match up with the national economic performance.
Gauteng remained the largest province in terms of nominal gross domestic product (GDP), contributing just under a third or 32.5% to South Africa’s GDP. This is more than twice KwaZulu-Natal’s (15.5%) and Western Cape’s (13.2%), while the Northern Cape (2.7%) was the smallest.
The structure of the economy in each province differed, with finance, real estate and business services being the largest contributor in Gauteng (29%), Western (28%), KwaZulu-Natal (19%) and Free state (18%). Personal services such as hairdressing was the largest contributor in the Eastern Cape (24%) and Limpopo (23%).
Stats SA rebased the economy and benchmarked it as well on Thursday, and this elevated the contribution of mining but reduced the impact of manufacturing.
Consequently, the provinces where mining has an outsized contribution to the provincial economy such as in the Northern Cape (30%), North West (28%) and Mpumalanga (18%), could shortly overtake the Western Cape in the provincial growth leader board.
An example of how the leaderboard could shift is from the fourth quarter 2024 Quarterly Labour Force Survey. This showed that the Northern Cape’s official unemployment rate fell by 3.0 percentage points. The reason for this was an 8.5% year-on-year surge in employment compared with a national average gain of 2.1%, while the Western Cape only managed a 2.0% rise.
In April 2026, the Northern Cape hosted its inaugural investment conference to show investors and the public how attractive the province is and how much stronger it would be in the future.
The conference resulted in investor pledges of more than R105 billion that should result in some 20 000 jobs being created.
The new investor commitments are described by Northern Cape Premier Dr Zamani Saul as taking the Northern Cape a long way toward achieving its target of growing the province’s GDP to R200 billion and creating at least 60 000 sustainable jobs by 2030.
“After all the deliberations of the past three days, serious commitments have been made and we assure all the corporate entities that have made these pledges that we don’t take your commitments for granted,” Saul said.
Helmo Preuss
thenational.co.za