We Read the Fee Documents of 27 Retirement Annuities. Ten Don't Publish a Rate You Can Use.

A retirement annuity is a decades-long product, which makes its fees the most important number in it. A difference of one percentage point a year, left alone for 30 years, can cost more than a year's salary by the end.

So we tried to put the fees of South Africa's retirement annuities side by side. We read each provider's own documents (fee schedules, term sheets, conditions of membership and brochures) for 27 RAs from 25 providers, and recorded only what those documents actually state.

The first finding isn't a fee at all.

Ten of the 27 don't publish a rate you can use

What the provider publishes	RAs
A full fee schedule	12
One figure that depends on which fund you choose	5
No rate an investor can apply	10

The ten in the last row don't all hide their fees the same way:

• The fee comes with your quote. Momentum's Investo RA brochure says so directly: "your quote sets out the fees". Ninety One's page says a schedule of charges "is available on request from the manager".
• Your adviser sets it. At Sanlam Glacier, every fee in the provider's own technical guide is set by your financial intermediary within a permitted range: 0% to 5% initial and 0% to 1% a year. There is no rate that applies without an adviser.
• Only part of it is published. Alexforbes Invest (formerly OUTvest) discloses its ONEfee model only above a R411 538 balance, as a fixed R5 350 a year up to R1 337 500 and 0.40% above that. Below R411 538, no figure is given.
• Only an old schedule exists. The only PPS fee schedule we could find is dated April 2019.
• We couldn't find one. Liberty, Metropolitan, Assupol and STANLIB publish no fee percentage on the product pages and documents we could find. Sygnia's own RA term sheet refers to a separate fee document "available on request", and its fees page could not be read in a way we could confirm.

None of this means those products are expensive. It means you can't find out before you talk to someone. If you're comparing, that's worth knowing before the conversation, not after.

Where the admin fee is published

Eleven of the twelve full schedules are an admin or platform fee charged as a percentage of your balance. (The twelfth, 10X, works differently and is covered below.) Here's what each of the eleven charges on a R100 000 balance, from their own schedules, excluding VAT:

Provider	Yearly fee on R100 000	In rand
Satrix	0.30%	R 300
EasyEquities	0.30% (plus 0.25% on unit trusts)	R 300 to R 550
Prescient	0.34% (0.22% in its own funds)	R 340
Discovery	0.40%	R 400
Honey (Hollard)	0.40%	R 400
Investec	0.40%	R 400
Allan Gray	0.50%	R 500
PSG Wealth	0.575% (0.35% in PSG funds)	R 575
Absa	0.75%	R 750
Alexforbes	0.75%	R 750
Sanlam Cumulus Echo	4.20%	R 4 200

Most of these fees get cheaper as your balance grows, because the rate drops at higher tiers. Allan Gray, for example, charges 0.5% up to R1 million, then 0.2%, 0.1% and 0.075% on the portions above that. Below R50 000, both Allan Gray (1% for most new investors) and PSG (1.15%) charge a higher flat rate.

Sanlam Cumulus Echo is the outlier. Its marketing and administration charge is 4.20% a year on the first R500 000, then 3.75% up to R1 million and 3.50% above. That's five to fourteen times the others. To be fair to it, it's a different kind of product: an insurer-underwritten plan that adds 10% of your contributions to a "Wealth Bonus" that unlocks at 55 and 60. Weigh the bonus against the charge rather than taking either on its own.

The admin fee isn't the whole bill

This is where most comparisons go wrong. An admin or platform fee doesn't include the cost of the fund your money is invested in, unless the provider says it does. That's a separate management fee, charged by the fund, and it varies by fund. It's often larger than the admin fee.

The five providers that publish only a fund-dependent figure show what a full figure looks like. Each publishes an all-in cost for one of its funds:

• Nedgroup Investments Core Guarded Fund: 0.64% a year in total investment charges. Its other direct-investor funds go up to 1.88%.
• Old Mutual Balanced Fund (class B1): 1.40%.
• Coronation Balanced Plus Fund: 1.79% (a 1.61% TER plus 0.18% transaction costs).
• Marriott Balanced Fund: 1.75% annual management fee on class A, 1.25% on class C.
• FNB / Ashburton: no platform fee if you stay in its own funds, 0.40% if you add another manager's fund.

10X does it the other way round. Its 1.04% on the first R1 million is a management fee that covers the fund. Only trading costs of 0.12% to 0.18% sit on top.

So a 0.30% admin fee paired with a 1.5% fund costs 1.8% a year. A 1.04% fee that already includes the fund costs 1.16% to 1.22%. The product with the lower headline number can be the more expensive one.

Advice adds a third layer. Eight of the 27 RAs are sold through a financial adviser, and advice fees come on top. The Glacier range above (up to 1% a year) gives a sense of the size.

What the gap costs over 30 years

An illustration, not a projection. Say you save R1 000 a month for 30 years, and your investments earn 10% a year before costs. You put in R360 000 in total. Here's what you'd have at the end, depending only on the total yearly cost:

Total yearly cost	Balance after 30 years
0.5%	R 1 887 401
1.0%	R 1 714 381
2.0%	R 1 417 613
3.0%	R 1 176 065

The difference between 1% and 2% a year is R296 768, about 17% of the final balance, for exactly the same contributions and the same investment returns. Between 0.5% and 3%, it's R711 336.

The 10% return is only an assumption to make the arithmetic concrete. The gap between the rows is the point, and it holds at any return.

Minimums, and whether you need an adviser

What you need to start ranges widely:

• No minimum: Satrix and EasyEquities accept any amount.
• R500 a month is the most common minimum, at 13 of the 27.
• Higher bars: Investec R1 000 a month, Allan Gray R2 000 a month (or R50 000 as a lump sum), and Sanlam Glacier R2 500 a month (or R100 000).

19 of the 27 can be opened directly online, without an adviser. The other 8 are sold only through one.

How to compare two RAs

1. Ask for the Effective Annual Cost (EAC). It's the South African standard for stating all of a product's costs (admin, fund management and advice) as one yearly percentage. Any quote should show it. It's the only number that compares like with like.
2. Check what the admin fee covers. If it says "admin" or "platform", assume the fund's fee is extra unless the document says otherwise.
3. Check the tiers at your balance. A fee that looks low may apply only above a threshold, and several providers charge more on small balances.
4. Check the advice fee separately, if you're using an adviser. It's negotiable, and it compounds just like every other fee.

Compare retirement annuities on Vulo →

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Sources. Each provider's own published documents (fee schedules, cost profiles, term sheets, conditions of membership and product pages), read on 1 September 2026, with the headline figures quoted above rechecked against the live documents on 28 September 2026. The source for every product is linked on its Vulo listing. Fees exclude VAT where the provider states them that way. The 30-year table is our own arithmetic on stated assumptions, not a provider figure.