When South Africans say they need to contact “the Master”, they almost always mean the Master of the High Court, the branch of the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development that supervises deceased estates, insolvencies, trusts, curators and tutors, and the Guardian’s Fund. It is worth settling that first, because the word on its own is ambiguous and the wrong assumption sends people to a magistrate or a court registrar instead. The second thing to settle is that there is no single national number for members of the public. The department runs fifteen regional offices and one national office, and it instructs you to contact the office where your matter was reported rather than the national one. The national office exists for oversight and final escalation, not for first enquiries. This page covers the national office and how to work out which regional office is yours; the full regional number list is published separately.
Official contact channels
- National Office, Office of the Chief Master: 012 406 4804
- Terminated trusts — document submissions: [email protected]
- Dormant trusts — document submissions: [email protected]
- Regional offices: fifteen offices, each with its own switchboard, published on the department’s Master contacts page at justice.gov.za.
- Service points: every Magistrate’s Office in South Africa has been a designated service point for the Master since 5 December 2002.
The two trust mailboxes are the exception to the regional rule: they are handled centrally rather than by the office nearest you.
Services and responsibilities
The department divides the Master’s Branch into five divisions, and knowing which one you need is what makes a call short. Deceased estates supervises the winding up of the affairs of people who have died. The insolvency division supervises liquidations and sequestrations, and the department describes it as handling thousands of insolvent estates a year. A third division registers and supervises trusts under the Trust Property Control Act 57 of 1988, covering both inter vivos and testamentary trusts. A fourth supervises curators and tutors — people appointed to control another person’s property. The fifth administers the Guardian’s Fund, which holds money for minors, people lacking legal capacity, and heirs who are unknown, absent or untraceable. The department states the common purpose is protecting the financial interests of people whose assets are managed by somebody else.
Office and address information
- National Office physical address: 22nd Floor, SALU Building, 316 Thabo Sehume Street, Pretoria
- National Office postal address: Private Bag X81, Pretoria, 0001
Which regional office is yours is decided by jurisdiction, not convenience. For a deceased estate it is the office covering where the deceased was living in the twelve months before death. Regional public office hours vary and most close to the public at or shortly after 13h00, so ring in the morning. Note also that the Pretoria regional office moved to 351 Francis Baard Street, Pretoria, 0002 with effect from 1 June 2026 — the national office at the SALU Building and the Pretoria regional office are two different things at two different addresses.
Applications and escalation
The department publishes one escalation sequence and expects it to be followed in order: the Assistant Master handling your matter, then the Deputy Master, then the Head of Office. Only after all three does a matter go to the Office of the Chief Master, where a named complaints management contact is published on the Master contacts page. Starting at the national office skips the people who actually hold your file, which is why it does not speed anything up.
One warning deserves its own line, because it concerns people searching for exactly this information. The department states on its own Master pages that the website chiefmaster.co.za is not a legitimate or official departmental or Master’s website, dissociates itself from the content published there, and says the Master’s offices cannot be held responsible for it. The official pages sit on justice.gov.za. Treat contact details for the Master found anywhere else as unverified until you have checked them there.
Sources
The national office contact details, division descriptions, trust mailboxes, escalation sequence and the counterfeit-website warning on this page were read from the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development’s official Master of the High Court pages at justice.gov.za on 30 August 2026. Individual officials’ personal email addresses published there are deliberately not reproduced here. Confirm anything critical against justice.gov.za before relying on it.