Delayed RAF Claims

Last reviewed: February 2026

If you submitted a claim to the Road Accident Fund and have heard nothing for months or years, you are not alone. This article explains why claims take so long, what that means for what you’re entitled to, and what your options are.

The Scale of the Backlog

At the end of March 2025, the RAF had more than 440,000 outstanding claims in its system. That number comes from the organisation’s own reporting to Parliament. Behind each of those numbers is a real person. Someone who was injured in a road accident, who submitted the paperwork, and who is now waiting.

The fund receives roughly R50 billion a year through the fuel levy. Every litre of fuel bought in South Africa includes an amount that goes directly to the RAF. But National Treasury has formally flagged the RAF as a “significant fiscal risk.” Its total liabilities are estimated at over R40 billion, against assets of around R14 billion. The fund spends more than it takes in. Its debt is growing. It is technically insolvent.

When a fund is under that kind of financial pressure, claims take longer to process. The RAF has fewer resources to assign to each case. Decision-making slows down. And the people waiting, many of whom are injured, out of work, or covering medical bills out of pocket, carry the cost of that slowdown in their daily lives.

What Is a Direct Claim and Why It Matters

When we talk about people being left behind in this system, one group stands out: direct claimants.

A direct claim is when an injured person submits their claim to the RAF themselves, without any legal representation. The RAF has actively promoted direct claims over the years, setting up offices at hospitals to encourage people to lodge claims on the spot. The pitch is simple: no lawyers, no fees, faster results.

In principle, that sounds reasonable. In practice, it rarely works out that way.

The RAF is an institution dealing with hundreds of thousands of outstanding claims. It is well documented that claimants without legal representation get left behind. Direct claims sit in queues. Files go cold. When claimants follow up, they are often told documentation is missing, or that their case cannot be located. Without legal pressure being applied, there is little incentive for the fund to move quickly.

More significantly, most people making direct claims do not know the full extent of what they are entitled to claim.

What Most Direct Claimants Don’t Know They Can Claim

Most people who go it alone claim for their medical expenses and, if they were employed, for loss of income. Those are legitimate claims. But they are not the full picture.

Under the Road Accident Fund Act, claimants may be entitled to compensation across several categories. General damages, sometimes called pain and suffering, is one of the most significant and most overlooked. This is compensation for physical pain, emotional distress, long-term disability, and permanent changes to quality of life. In serious injury cases, with a good attorney, general damages awards can run into hundreds of thousands of rands.

But general damages are not automatic. They require a formal serious injury assessment, conducted by a medical professional and submitted in a specific format. They also require supporting reports from specialists. Occupational therapists, industrial psychologists, and actuaries may all be needed to quantify the long-term impact of the injuries on a person’s ability to work and live normally.

Someone navigating a direct claim without legal training typically does not know that this pathway exists. They do not know how to initiate it. And they have no network of medical experts to call on. The result is a settlement that covers the basics but leaves a significant portion of what the claimant is legally entitled to unclaimed.

To illustrate the gap: the average RAF settlement was approximately R287,000 in the 2023/2024 financial year. But court-contested claims with legal representation regularly result in payouts of several million rands for serious injuries. In one case from 2024, a woman received over R4.6 million following her husband’s death in a motorcycle accident. In another, a seriously injured claimant was awarded over R4.7 million for loss of earnings and general damages.

These outcomes are not unusual for claims that are properly built and properly pursued. The difference between those results and what a direct claimant typically receives is not usually about the seriousness of the injury. It is about whether the claim was constructed to capture everything the person was entitled to. That depends on having a dedicated team of attorneys fighting for the claimant.

What are Contingency Fees? (no-win, no-fee)

Many people who would benefit from legal representation assume they cannot afford it. They believe attorneys require upfront payment, or that any money recovered will be eaten up by legal fees. That assumption is wrong.

Most attorneys who specialise in RAF claims work on a contingency fee basis. This means the attorney only gets paid if the claim is successful. If the claim does not pay out, the claimant owes the attorney nothing. There is no upfront cost.

Building a strong RAF claim costs money. Medical assessments, specialist reports, actuarial calculations. With legal representation, the attorney typically covers those costs from their own practice, at no charge to the client. The client does not pay for the reports. The attorney does, and recoups those costs only if the claim succeeds.

A claimant who tried to apply without legal assistance is not saving money. They are foregoing expert assessments they do not know how to commission, and settling for less than a represented claimant with identical injuries would receive. The RAF has spent years promoting direct claims as the more cost-effective option. In most cases, the opposite is true.

How We Can Help

The RAF responds differently to legally represented claimants. In a well-functioning system, every claimant would receive the same attention and the same opportunity to receive fair compensation, regardless of whether they had a lawyer. The system is not well-functioning. In that environment, having a specialist attorney, someone who knows the process, can apply legal pressure, and has the expertise to build a complete claim, changes how a file is treated.

At ClaimNow, we assess your situation at no cost and connect you with specialist RAF attorneys who work on a contingency basis. There is nothing to pay upfront. There is nothing to pay at all if the claim is unsuccessful. Our attorneys handle the full process, including commissioning the medical and expert reports needed to build the strongest possible case.

A short initial conversation is usually enough to give you a clear picture of where you stand.

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This article is for general information only and does not constitute legal advice. Every claim is different. If you need advice about your specific situation, speak to a qualified attorney.