Every year, thousands of students apply to be funded by the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) through NSFAS bursaries and loans. This year alone, NSFAS funds around a million students.
NSFAS presented a report to Parliament on the progress of 2025 NSFAS applications as well as how ready the financial aid scheme is to tackle the 2025 academic year.
NSFAS 2025 Applications
NSFAS 2025 applications opened on 20 September 2024 and is set to close on 15 December 2024. NSFAS provided the following progress on applications update:
- Assessing financial and academic eligibility with information from third-parties: 5 140
- Verification of completeness and correctness of application: 111 531
- Review of application to confirm student type, SASSA status, DHA relationships etc: 2 662
- Provisionally funded, subject to registration and availability of funds: 442 079
- Rejected: 12 076
- Appeals: 1 300
- Funded: 0
- Cancelled: 15 310
NSFAS also revealed that for 2025, they have so far received 18 390 loan applications.
Of the NSFAS applications received since opening, 465 509 of these were from Sassa beneficiaries. "As at 20 November 2024, 428 906 of these Sassa students were provisionally funded," said NSFAS.
As for non-Sassa beneficiaries, 142 179 applications need to be processed.
To date, about 70 000 of these applications have been reviewed for verification purposes. Over 50 000 of these requires additional documents and 13 173 non-SASSA students were provisionally funded.
The financial aid scheme said that they plan to finalise all NSFAS applications received by 31 January 2025. With matric results being released on 14 January, NSFAS would then be able to finalise funding for those who were provisionally funded and have been offered a space to study next year.
Applicants are urged to continuously check their NSFAS status to keep up-to-date with the progress of their NSFAS application.
How To Do A NSFAS Status Check
To access your NSFAS application status on myNSFAS,
Step 1: Login on the myNSFAS student portal. This will be your main NSFAS login point on the NSFAS website.
Step 2: Enter your username and password on the NSFAS official website and then click SIGN IN!
Step 3: Click on Track Your Funding Progress to check the NSFAS application status.
NSFAS has employed 29 full-time staff members with an additional 183 staff members to process NSFAS applications. "Additional 50 graduates will be added as additional capacity," said NSFAS.
There are also 24 servicing administrators who are deployed for two months across 76 institutions. 10 of which are working on applications for university students and 14 for TVET College students.
"The two-month period will allow the Servicing Administrators to have enough time and capacity to adequately split their time amongst the institutions they look after, as we do not have other additional human resources to do the institution coverage."
