Home › Guides › Expired or late firearm licence renewal

Expired or late firearm licence renewal

This is the most serious situation in this guide, and the worst thing you can do about it is nothing. Read this before you decide how to handle it.

Missed the 90 days but not yet expired

If you are inside the 90-day window — the licence has not expired but you are past the deadline for lodging — go to your Designated Firearm Officer now, with everything ready, and lodge. Explain honestly why you are late. Being a few days inside the expiry with a complete pack is a very different conversation from arriving after the date.

Already expired

Go to your Designated Firearm Officer as soon as possible, and take advice first if you can. Do not wait, and do not carry the firearm around while you think about it.

What generally happens is that the firearm is surrendered to SAPS while the position is resolved. That is not the end of the matter — but the surrender being voluntary, prompt and documented matters a great deal compared with the firearm being found in your possession later.

Ask for a written receipt for anything you hand in, and keep it.

Why people end up here

Almost never carelessness. The usual causes are:

• The competency expired first. A ten-year Section 15 or 16 licence sits on top of a five-year competency. The competency lapses at year five, nobody notices, and the renewal at year ten cannot proceed.
• Nobody was reminded. SAPS does not send renewal reminders. If the date is not in a system that will shout at you, it will pass.
• A licence inherited or transferred whose paperwork was never properly updated.
• A move without a SAPS 521(b) change of address, so correspondence went to an old address.

If a late application is refused

You have 90 days from the refusal to lodge an appeal on the SAPS 530. That window is hard and it runs whether or not you have decided what to do. How to appeal →

Making sure it does not happen again

Record the expiry date of every licence and every competency you hold, and put them somewhere that will actively remind you rather than somewhere you would have to remember to look. Firearm License Pro SA does this free — four months ahead of each date, which leaves you a comfortable month before the 90-day deadline. More on reminders →

This is general information about South African firearm law and SAPS procedure, not legal advice, and we are not SAPS. Where your situation is unusual — a past conviction, a pending case, a firearm inherited from a deceased estate — speak to a firearms attorney.

Frequently asked questions