What is a South African ID number made up of?

Published on 19 August 2009 • Estimated reading time: 1 minutes

Update 11 August 2011: Want this as an app for your smartphone? Click here Update 30 March 2012: Details of the racial identifier can be found at this page.

Cecil Tshikedi a great question—what is actually in an ID number:

• The first six numbers are the birth date of the person in YYMMDD format—so no surprise that my ID number starts 820716.
• The next four digits are a gender identifier: 5000 and above indicates male, below 5000 indicates female. So my ID number would have a value of 5000 or greater.
• The next digit is the country ID, 0 for South Africa and 1 for others. My ID number would have 0 here.
• The second-to-last number was previously a racial identifier but now means nothing.
• The last number is a check digit, which verifies the rest of the number.

So for my ID number, it would look something like: 820716[5000-9999]0??

There you go—it’s that easy.