For households on the lowest to middle rungs of the income ladder, the monthly sequence is rarely theoretical: electricity and prepaid airtime, groceries, and getting to work or school typically come first. Research suggests the next layer of spending is less about optional treats than about shelter, cleanliness and dignity, keeping children fed and in class, and—where there is any slack—formal risk cover that wealthier bands take for granted.
What national spending data shows
Statistics South Africa’s Income & Expenditure Survey 2022/2023, summarised in press coverage, found that South African households spent close to R3 trillion over the survey window, with the four largest buckets—housing, food, transport and insurance/financial services—absorbing roughly three-quarters of household consumption expenditure. The same reporting noted a wide gap between average and median spending, a pattern that usually signals many households concentrated far below the mean (TimesLIVE).
That top-line picture aligns with the editor’s premise: power, connectivity, food and mobility are structural anchors in the national budget. The open strategic question is which adjacent needs still feel unavoidable once those anchors are paid—and where price sensitivity is acute.
When food, transport and power already crowd the purse
The Pietermaritzburg Economic Justice & Dignity Group’s monthly Household Affordability Index, summarised by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, puts hard numbers on the squeeze. In April 2025 it recorded an average cost of R5,420.30 for a 44-item household food basket tracked across major metro townships and secondary centres, with month-on-month and year-on-year increases (Heinrich Böll Foundation).
The same briefing sketches a minimum-wage arithmetic that many employers and consumers already recognise informally: after setting aside Pietermaritzburg-based illustrative amounts for electricity and transport, the index calculated that those two items alone could consume most of a national minimum wage envelope in a 19-day April month, leaving a remainder that its authors argue is insufficient to buy a basic nutritional food basket for a family of four. Separately, it priced basic household domestic and personal hygiene products at about R1,033 on average in April 2025, and explicitly framed those goods as competing with food for the same cash because they support health and dignity (Heinrich Böll Foundation).
Child-specific costs surface in the same dataset. The April 2025 update put the average cost to feed a child a basic nutritious diet at R973.25, and noted that the Child Support Grant of R560 sat below both the official food poverty line and that nutrition benchmark (Heinrich Böll Foundation). For editors weighing “essential” categories, nutrition for dependents is therefore not a niche line item; it is a recurring pressure that sits alongside adult staples.
How priorities shift by pay band—once debt is paid
DebtBusters analysis of consumers who applied for debt counselling, reported in multiple outlets, slices the picture by take-home pay brackets (under R5,000; R5,000–R10,000; R10,000–R20,000; R20,000–R35,000; and above R35,000). Benay Sager, executive head of DebtBusters, told journalists that transport, utilities and cellphone spending were surprisingly consistent across those income bands, whereas accommodation varied sharply: recipients under R5,000 directed about 9% of non-debt-disposable income to housing, against 31% for households earning R10,000–R20,000—the steepest housing share in the study (TimesLIVE, Cape Times).
Those articles also highlighted two linked facts for lower bands. First, grocery spending consumed more than half of non-debt disposable income for the lowest earners, while top earners allocated just under a quarter to food. Second, the coverage noted that consumers surveyed were, on average, using a large share of take-home pay—about 68% in the TimesLIVE report—to service existing debt before any of these category choices are made (TimesLIVE).
Insurance including medical aid was described as negligible in the two lower brackets and only rose meaningfully toward the top, which suggests that for millions of households “the next essential” after core bills may be pay-as-you-go care, school incidentals, or informal mutual-help arrangements rather than comprehensive cover—patterns that are widely observed in South African consumer research even when formal policies are thin on the ground (Cape Times).
A growing working-class band
The same Cape Times report amplified a parallel University of Cape Town Liberty Institute of Strategic Marketing study commissioned by Liberty and Standard Bank, which estimated that roughly 1.2 million households had joined a “working class” segment—defined there as earning between R8,000 and R22,000 per month—over the preceding decade. The coverage stressed long commuting times, rising transport costs, dependence on debt, and vulnerability to income shocks such as retrenchment (Cape Times). For product and service design, that implies a customer base that is urbanising and wage-dependent but still perennially one shock away from arrears.
Implications for a business built on the “next” essential
Taken together, the evidence points to a short list of categories that behave like essentials for lower-to-middle earners after electricity, data, food and minibus-taxi or bus fares: rent or bond payments (especially pronounced around the R10,000–R20,000 band), hygiene and household cleaning, child nutrition and school-related outlays, and small, predictable substitutes for insurance such as funeral cover or community savings schemes where budgets allow. None of these are luxuries in the colloquial sense; they are recurring obligations that compete for the same narrow margin.
Any venture aiming at this market must therefore assume heavy substitution: a rand saved on dishwasher tablets or nappies may be redeployed to maize meal or taxi fares the same afternoon. Pricing models that bundle, shrink pack sizes transparently, or reduce trip frequency—without cutting nutritional adequacy—are more aligned with observed behaviour than premium positioning.
Neutral reporting does not pick winners among business models. It does suggest that stakeholders who map spending in quintiles and pay bands, track grant values against child nutrition benchmarks, and benchmark wage floors against basket costs will be closer to the lived sequence in which South Africans decide what they still “need” once the lights stay on, the phone stays loaded, the pot is on the stove, and the taxi is paid.
References
- Household spending reached R3-trillion in 2022/23: Stats SA survey (TimesLIVE)
- Low-income earners spend more than half their disposable income on food, study finds (TimesLIVE)
- April 2025 Household Affordability Index and Key Data (Heinrich Böll Stiftung)
- Revealed: How South Africans are spending their money in 2025 (Cape Times)
