1 September 2026 · Dealers · Gqeberha

Seven days, or seven working days?

Every second-hand dealer in South Africa has to hold goods for seven days before they move. Almost everyone counts it wrong, and the way most people count it puts the item out the door two days early. Here is how the count actually works, where it is genuinely unsettled, and the one escape route that no longer exists.

The short answer

Seven calendar days. Not seven business days, not seven working days. Saturdays count. Sundays and public holidays usually count too — and there is exactly one situation where they do not, which is where most of the trouble lives.

And the count does not start on the day you bought the item. That single point puts a lot of dealers two days early without them knowing it.

This guide is about how to count the seven days. If your question is the one before that — whether the Act applies to you at all, and what else it asks for — that is The seven-day rule that catches repair shops out.

What the Act actually says

Section 23(1) of the Second-Hand Goods Act 6 of 2009 opens with the words “No dealer may—” and paragraph (d) reads:

“deliver goods acquired by him or her to a person or change the form or alter the appearance thereof until after the expiration date of a period of seven days from the date of acquisition thereof”

Read that twice, because it is wider than most people remember it. It is not only a rule about selling. Three separate things are prohibited for seven days:

• Delivering the goods to a person — which catches a sale, but also a swap, a courier collection, or letting the buyer take it now and pay Friday.
• Changing the form — stripping a phone for parts, cutting up scrap, breaking a unit down.
• Altering the appearance — a respray, a re-cover, a polish and a new badge.

And section 23(2) adds a duty that is easy to miss entirely:

“During the period contemplated in subsection (1)(d) or during any period that any pawned goods are subject to a pledge, the articles must be kept separate from all other goods of the same or similar kind and description.”

So held stock must be physically separate from your ordinary stock of the same kind, not merely flagged in a book.

Do not want to count it by hand? Use the free calculator — type the date you took it in and it gives the earliest lawful release date and shows its working. It runs in your browser; the date is not sent anywhere.

Where the count starts — and where two days go missing

The Act does not define “day”. Where a statute is silent, section 4 of the Interpretation Act 33 of 1957 supplies the rule, and it reads:

“When any particular number of days is prescribed for the doing of any act, or for any other purpose, the same shall be reckoned exclusively of the first and inclusively of the last day, unless the last day happens to fall on a Sunday or on any public holiday, in which case the time shall be reckoned exclusively of the first day and exclusively also of every such Sunday or public holiday.”

Two things follow, and both cost you a day:

“Exclusively of the first” — the day you acquired the item is not day one. Day one is the following day.

“Inclusively of the last” — the seventh day is inside the period, and section 23(1)(d) says you must wait until after the expiration of that period. So you may not release it on day seven either. The earliest lawful day is day eight.

Worth noting too that the 2009 wording says “the expiration date of a period of seven days”. The word “date” was not in the 1955 predecessor, and it reads as a whole calendar date having to pass, not an hour-for-hour count from the moment of purchase.

Worked example — an ordinary week

You buy a laptop on Tuesday 1 September 2026.

• Day 1 is Wednesday 2 September. Day 7 is Tuesday 8 September.
• The period expires at the end of Tuesday 8 September.
• The earliest you may deliver, strip or respray it is Wednesday 9 September.

Counted the common way — purchase day as day one, out the door on day seven — you would have sold it on Monday 7 September. Two days early — and the section does not care whether anyone meant it.

Saturdays count. That surprises people.

Section 4 names only “a Sunday or… any public holiday”. Saturday appears nowhere in it.

The reason so many people believe otherwise is that plenty of other South African instruments define a “day” or a “court day” to exclude Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays — the court rules do, and so do a number of statutes and regulations. That is where “seven working days” comes from. It is a real rule. It is just not this one. Section 4 is the residual rule that applies precisely because the Second-Hand Goods Act says nothing.

The Sunday and public-holiday twist

Sundays and public holidays inside the seven days are counted normally. They only matter if the last day of the period lands on one. Then that day drops out of the count and the period stretches.

Remember also section 2(1) of the Public Holidays Act 36 of 1994:

“The days mentioned in Schedule 1 shall be public holidays, and whenever any public holiday falls on a Sunday, the following Monday shall be a public holiday.”

So a holiday falling on a Sunday takes the Monday with it, and the period stretches further again. December is where this compounds.

Worked example — the December stack

You buy a set of tools on Friday 18 December 2026.

• Day 1 is Saturday 19 December — Saturdays count.
• Sunday 20 December counts as well: it is not the last day.
• Counting on, day 7 falls on Friday 25 December — Christmas Day, a public holiday. It drops out.
• Saturday 26 December is the Day of Goodwill — also a public holiday. It drops out too.
• Sunday 27 December drops out.
• Which puts the seventh countable day on Monday 28 December, and the earliest lawful release on Tuesday 29 December.

Counted the common way, that item would have gone out on Thursday 24 December. Five days early, in the busiest trading week of the year.

The part nobody has actually decided

We would rather say this plainly than pretend to a certainty that does not exist.

That last clause of section 4 — “exclusively also of every such Sunday or public holiday” — can be read two ways, and the difference changes your release date.

• The narrower reading: where the last day lands on a Sunday or holiday, you skip that day and any run of Sundays and holidays immediately after it, and stop. In the December example that gives Tuesday 29 December.
• The wider reading: once the last day lands on a Sunday or holiday, every Sunday and public holiday anywhere in the period drops out. In the December example that also removes Sunday 20 December and gives Wednesday 30 December.

We could find no South African judgment deciding between them. The point survived a full review: when the South African Law Reform Commission examined the Interpretation Act in Discussion Paper 112, it quoted this clause twice without ever construing it — and then proposed replacing section 4 outright with a clean roll-forward rule that would make the question disappear. That proposal is not law.

So the practical rule is simple: when the two readings disagree, take the later date. There is no offence in holding goods too long. There is a serious one in releasing them too early.

The exception that used to exist — and no longer does

This is the single most important thing in this guide for any dealer who has been trading for a while.

The old Second-Hand Goods Act 23 of 1955 had the same seven-day rule, in almost identical words, at section 7(c):

“deliver any such goods acquired by him to any person or change the form or alter the appearance thereof until after the expiration of a period of seven days from the date of acquisition thereof, except after notice to the officer in charge of the nearest police station.”

The 2009 Act reproduces that wording almost word for word — and stops exactly where the exception used to begin. There is no equivalent of it anywhere in the current Act.

Nothing in the Second-Hand Goods Act 6 of 2009 allows a police official, a station commander or the National Commissioner to authorise an early release. Section 39 lets the National Commissioner extend a period on good cause shown. It does not let anyone shorten one.

If your yard has a long-standing practice of phoning the station and moving something on day three, that practice was lawful in 1990. It has had no statutory basis since 2009 — and the maximum sentence attached to the section went from twelve months to ten years in the same move.

Three more traps

1. It applies dealer to dealer

Section 23(1)(d) says “goods acquired by him or her” with no qualification, and “acquire” is defined in section 1 as “acquire by any means”. There is no carve-out for goods bought from another registered dealer. The seven days start again in each dealer's hands. Buying from a colleague who has already held it a fortnight does not inherit his clock.

2. The exemptions are not automatic

Section 42(1) does exclude some things from the Act — but read it carefully. Goods sold by public auction under a warrant of execution are excluded outright. Members of an accredited association and charity organisations are excluded only “to the extent that the Minister by notice in the Gazette exempts” them. No notice, no exemption.

This matters for the motor trade in particular: a draft exemption notice for vehicle dealers who belong to accredited associations has been circulating, and it does touch section 23(1)(d) — but we could not find a Gazette citation showing it has been promulgated, and the dealers' own association guidance was still saying the dealer exemptions had not been published. Do not assume you are exempt. Ask your association for the Gazette number, and if they cannot give you one, count the seven days.

3. The R100 floor

“Second-hand goods” is defined in section 1 to exclude “goods with a value of less than R100”. Note the wording: less than, so an item worth exactly R100 is inside the Act. That figure is written into the Act itself and has not been adjusted since 2009, so inflation has quietly narrowed the exclusion year after year. In 2026 it covers very little.

What it costs to get wrong

Schedule 3 of the Act sets a maximum of 10 years' imprisonment for a contravention of section 23. Section 32(2) allows a fine, that imprisonment, or both; the Act itself sets no rand figure for the fine.

Schedule 3 attaches that ceiling to section 23 as a whole. The seven-day rule therefore sits in the same penalty band as taking in goods without satisfying yourself the seller owns them. Whether a court would ever go near the ceiling for a timing error is another question — but it is the ceiling Parliament chose, and it tells you how the offence is regarded.

What we would actually do about it

1. Write the acquisition date on the item, not only in the register. The date has to travel with the goods, because the goods are what an inspector picks up.
2. Start counting the next day. Purchase day is day zero.
3. Release on day eight, not day seven.
4. If day seven lands on a Sunday or a public holiday, skip the whole run of them, then check whether a holiday fell on a Sunday and took a Monday with it — and then, where the two readings above disagree, take the later date.
5. Keep held goods physically separate from the same kind of stock, as section 23(2) requires.
6. Do not rely on a phone call to the station. That exception was repealed with the 1955 Act.

All six of those are calendar arithmetic and shelf discipline, which is exactly the kind of thing that goes wrong on a busy Friday. It is also exactly the kind of thing software should be doing for you: Dot Book stamps the acquisition date on the item, carries it through every move, and will not let the till ring the item up before the release date has passed. It does not make anyone compliant — no software does. It takes the counting off a person on a busy Friday, which is where this actually goes wrong. If you would like to see it on a tablet for fifteen minutes, the number is below.

Where we are uncertain, said plainly

• We found no reported South African case interpreting section 23(1)(d). Everything above is read off the words of the Act and the Interpretation Act.
• The Sunday counting question above is genuinely unsettled. We have told you which way we would err and why.
• SAPS National Instruction 2 of 2016 governs second-hand goods dealers and recyclers, but it does not explain how the seven days is counted, and neither do the 2012 regulations. There is no official worked example to point at.
• We build record-keeping software. We are not attorneys. If you are already facing an inspection, a docket or a charge, get a lawyer, not a guide.