The Department of Home Affairs publishes a single national contact centre number and a contact centre mailbox for its head office in Pretoria. Complaints that a local office has not resolved are escalated through these, not by visiting head office.
Official task/support route
- Home Affairs Contact Centre, toll-free: 0800 60 11 90
- Contact centre email: [email protected]
- Head office location: Pretoria, Gauteng
- Website technical problems only: [email protected]
The webmaster address is for problems with the website itself and is not a complaints route. Sending a service complaint there will not have it registered.
The department publishes its contacts as a directory organised by category — civic services, immigration services, ministerial offices, head quarters, provincial managers, bank branches offering Home Affairs services, and offices by province. The provincial and office-level entries are where a local matter is best raised first.
What you need before contacting
Have your identity number, the application or reference number, the office where the application was made and the dates involved. A complaint without an application reference is very difficult to trace, because records are held against the application rather than against your name alone.
Write down what you were told and by whom on each previous visit or call. Escalation depends on showing that the matter was already raised and not resolved, and specific dates carry far more weight than a general account of delays.
Step-by-step contact process
Home Affairs also delivers some civic services through bank branches, and the department publishes those separately by province. If your application was made at a bank rather than a Home Affairs office, establish which of the two holds it before escalating, because the record sits with whoever captured it.
Raise the matter at the office handling your application first, and ask for the office manager if the counter cannot help. Get a reference for that complaint.
If it is unresolved, call the national contact centre on 0800 60 11 90 with the office name, the date of the original complaint and the reference. Follow up in writing to [email protected] so there is a record — a written complaint is much harder to lose than a phone call.
For matters concerning a specific province, the department also publishes provincial manager contacts, which sit between the local office and national head office in the escalation chain.
Escalation route
Keep every reference number and note the date of each contact. Home Affairs processes — identity documents, passports, birth registration, citizenship and immigration permits — have their own statutory timeframes, and a complaint is far stronger when it can show that a published timeframe has been exceeded.
If the department’s internal escalation does not resolve the matter, the Public Protector investigates maladministration and improper conduct in state institutions and accepts complaints from the public. The South African Human Rights Commission is the route where a matter involves a rights issue, such as access to documentation affecting a child’s schooling or a person’s ability to work.
Sources
Contact details on this page were checked against the Department of Home Affairs’ own contacts directory, dha.gov.za, on 30 August 2026. Details the department does not publish are not listed here.