The legal minimum for the trade, what the four big salary surveys actually report, and why three of them sit below a rate your employer is not allowed to pay under.
A qualified fitter and turner salary in South Africa starts at R114.66 an hour, which is about R19,874 a month. That is not a survey average. It is a minimum, and in the metal and engineering industry an employer that is party to the main agreement is not allowed to pay you less than it for ordinary hours.
The number comes from MEIBC Industry Circular 2026/06, signed on 4 June 2026, which sets Rate A at R114.66 an hour for the year running 1 July 2026 to 30 June 2027. The main agreement defines Rate A in one line: "Artisan's work." That is you.
Here is the part that should annoy you. Of the four salary sites that rank for this search, three quote a figure below that legal floor. SalaryExpert says R87.59 an hour, which is 24% under. If you walked into a wage discussion with their number, you would be arguing yourself down to something your employer could not lawfully offer you.
A fitter and turner installs, strips, repairs and rebuilds mechanical plant, and machines the replacement parts on a lathe or mill when the part is not available. The fitting half is on the machine. The turning half is in the workshop. Most people in the trade end up doing more of one than the other, and pay does not really care which.
To check whether you are being paid legally, you need one number: 173.33. The main agreement sets ordinary hours at 40 a week, and 40 hours over 52 weeks divided by 12 months is 173.33 ordinary hours a month.
Take your monthly basic, before overtime and before allowances, and divide it by 173.33. If the answer is under R114.66 and you hold your trade papers at an employer bound by the main agreement, you have a conversation to start today. At R114.66 the floor is R4,586.40 a week or R19,874 a month, and that is basic pay only, before a single hour of overtime.
The floor moves every July. It was R109.20 for the year to 30 June 2026, so anyone still on last year's rate in September is being underpaid by roughly R950 a month.
Apprentices have their own schedule, set weekly rather than hourly. From 1 July 2026 the minimums are R2,397.33 a week in first year, R2,621.34 in second, R3,072.86 in third and R4,411.18 in fourth year. Converted the same way, that is about R10,388 a month at the start and R19,115 a month at the end.
Look at that fourth year number next to the artisan floor. A final year apprentice is legally owed 96% of what a fully qualified fitter and turner gets. Which means the trade test is not really where the money arrives. It arrives in the third to fourth year jump, where the weekly minimum climbs by R1,338 in one step. Everything after your papers is about sector, and the next section explains why the salary sites hide that from you entirely.
Adjust the options below for an estimate based on your province, sector and years on the machines.
Figures are estimates built from the salary surveys listed at the end of this article.
Read this table as a map of where the money is, not as what a job in that town pays. Every figure here comes from Indeed's city breakdowns, which are built on far smaller samples than its national number. Pretoria at R35,301 a month is more than double Indeed's own national average of R16,488, and no province in South Africa pays double for the same trade. What a gap that size actually shows is a handful of well paid plant jobs in one city dragging a small sample upwards.
| Province / City | Annual Salary | Monthly | vs National | Pay Level |
|---|
Source: Indeed South Africa, fitter salaries, 144 salary reports, updated 31 August 2026. Annual figures are the reported monthly average multiplied by twelve. City figures rest on much smaller samples than the national one.
This ladder comes from Jobted, which builds its figures from fitter and turner vacancies advertised in South Africa over the last twelve months. It is the most complete experience breakdown any source publishes for this trade, and the shape of it is honest: the big jump happens once, when you finish your apprenticeship, and everything after that is slow.
Sector moves a fitter and turner's pay more than province does, and more than another ten years on the tools does. The same trade papers are worth very different money depending on what the plant makes and who bargains for it. Tap a sector to see what to expect.
This is the table the ranking pages do not publish, because it makes most of them look bad. Every source below is quoted accurately. The last column simply compares each one's hourly rate to the R114.66 an artisan is legally owed in the metal and engineering industry. Only one of the four clears it.
| Source | Hourly | Monthly | vs Legal Floor |
|---|---|---|---|
| MEIBC Rate A (the law) | R114.66 | R19,874 | the floor |
| PayScale, 117 profiles | R132.70 | R23,001 | +16% |
| Jobted, advertised jobs | R109.00 | R19,058 | -5% |
| Indeed, 'Fitter', 144 reports | R95.12 | R16,488 | -17% |
| SalaryExpert / ERI | R87.59 | R17,080 | -24% |
Monthly figures are each source's own where it publishes one, otherwise the hourly rate at 173.33 ordinary hours a month. SalaryExpert's monthly is its annual divided by twelve, which is why it does not reconcile with its hourly at 40 hours a week. Sources dated between 1 July and 31 August 2026 and listed in full below.
None of these sites are lying. They are measuring different things badly, and each one fails in a way you can check yourself in about two minutes.
Indeed does not have a fitter and turner page. Search for one and it hands you "Fitter", a bucket of 144 reports that mixes the trade with jobs that share the word. On the day this was written, the vacancies Indeed listed on that very page included a shop fitter in Durban at R7,000 a month, which is retail shopfitting and not an artisan job at all. The other end is contaminated too: Indeed's highest paying employers for "Fitter" are Regenesys Business School at R540,000 and False Bay College at R410,099. Those are people teaching the trade, not working it.
SalaryExpert has the trade coded as the wrong occupation entirely. Scroll to the bottom of its fitter and turner page and read its own answer to "What does a Fitter & Turner do?" It says: "All food processing workers not listed separately." That is a mis-mapped occupation code, and it explains why the site reports a lower number for a fitter and turner than it reports for a boilermaker, which anyone in a workshop knows is backwards.
Jobted measures adverts, not payslips. Its R109 an hour comes from vacancies posted over the previous twelve months, and the scheduled minimum for most of that period was R109.20. A figure that lands within twenty cents of the rate employers were legally required to advertise at is exactly what you would expect from advert data. It is an accurate picture of what gets offered, which is not the same as what gets paid.
PayScale is the only one that clears the floor, at R132.70 an hour from 117 individual profiles updated on 1 July 2026. It surveys people by job title and reports a median rather than a mean, so outliers do not drag it. Sixteen percent above the legal minimum is roughly what real pay should look like when a legal minimum exists, and that is why it is the number to trust here.
Yes, and the legal floor is the reason. A trade with a published, enforceable minimum that rises every July is a genuinely different proposition to one where pay is whatever a survey says. You start above the national median wage without a degree, and the number under you moves up on its own.
The honest caveat is that the ceiling in a general workshop is low. The Jobted ladder shows ten extra years of experience buying about R3,000 a month. Sector changes it, time does not. If you stay in a jobbing shop for twenty years you will finish near where you started in real terms, which is why the fitters earning R30,000 and up are almost all on mines, on petrochemical plants, or out on contract.
There is one more caveat worth knowing. The circular states plainly that its rates bind the organisations party to the agreement, and not non-party employers including NEASA, the Consolidated Employers Organisation, SAEFA, FEOSA, SAUEO and the union Solidarity. The council attempts to extend the rates to non-signatories, and NEASA confirmed on 8 June 2026 that it was fighting that extension again. So before you quote R114.66 at anyone, find out whether your employer is party to the main agreement. If it is, that rate is not a suggestion.
The jobs that pay well over R114.66 an hour are mining maintenance, petrochemical shutdowns and continuous production plants. Almost none of them are filled from a public advert. Shutdown crews in particular get staffed off contractor lists within days of a window being confirmed.
So the practical move is to be findable before the work exists. Get your trade test certificate, your red seal, your medical status, your machining tickets and contactable references into one place a plant or a labour broker can search when they are staffing up in a hurry. The fitter who is already on the list gets the call. The one still updating a CV does not.
Put your certificates, experience and contact details in front of employers searching the Workforce Direct database. Setting up a profile takes about two minutes and it costs you nothing.
Salary surveys disagree because they measure different things. Figures here are gross, before deductions, and are a guide for negotiation rather than a guarantee.