About

Last updated 16 August 2026

afriref is operated by 3L Group Consulting (PTY) LTD, a company registered in South Africa at 55 Blanc de Noir Street, Bellville, 7530, South Africa. It is a single, identifiable counterparty with a named human address, reachable at [email protected], and it is governed by the laws of the Republic of South Africa.

What this service is

afriref publishes afriref - Pan-African government reference data: policy rates, VAT, minimum wages, CPI, corporate and personal income tax, social contributions, statutory interest and public holidays — each value tied to the official instrument it was read from, with the date it took effect and the date it was last confirmed against that instrument. It also computes answers from that data, such as working-day counts, payroll workings and cross-border VAT treatment.

It is one of seven regional services on a shared platform — latamref, asiaref, euroref, usaref, mearef, ausref cover the other regions, and one API key works across all of them.

Judge us on what you can check

Any data service can claim it reads primary sources and never guesses. Those are sentences, and sentences are cheap. Each commitment below is stated because you can verify it from outside — without taking our word for it, and without asking us anything. That, rather than the wording, is what we ask to be judged on.

Every value names the instrument, not the institution. A citation identifies the gazette, statute, decision or authority publication the figure was read from, with the provision where it appears — not merely the body that issued it. Check it: open the source.url on any response and find the number.
The cited document is fingerprinted and archived. We hold a SHA-256 over the bytes of each cited source as retrieved, with the dates first and last seen, so a document that changes under us is detectable rather than silent. Check it: https://afriref.dev/provenance, free.
Values are researched and then adversarially challenged. One process establishes a value against primary sources; a second is tasked with refuting it before it is served. Where the primary instrument could not be read, the response says so in confidence and confidence_note rather than presenting a corroborated guess as a read one.
We refuse, uncharged, rather than approximate. Out-of-coverage ranges, undated commencements, regimes with no single national rate and conventions not in force on the date asked are returned as reasoned refusals with machine-readable codes, validated before the payment gate.
We publish our own errors. Mistakes we have shipped are written up with their cause and the change that prevents recurrence. Check it: https://afriref.dev/accuracy.
Answers can be signed. Any value is available as an Ed25519-signed extract carrying its citation, the archived document hash and the confirmation chain, verifiable against a public key we publish. Check it: https://afriref.dev/certified/public-key.
We are an identifiable counterparty. The Service is operated by 3L Group Consulting (PTY) LTD, a company registered in South Africa, reachable at a named human address published in security.txt and in our terms. Corrections sent with a primary source are acted on and credited on the accuracy record.

None of this makes a value correct. It makes a value checkable, which is the most any reference service can honestly offer.

What we are not

3L Group Consulting (PTY) LTD is independent. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting on behalf of any government, central bank, revenue authority or public body. Data is compiled from official published sources and reproduced with attribution.

Nothing this service returns is tax, legal, accounting or financial advice. It is reference data and arithmetic performed on reference data. Verify against the cited official source before relying on any value for a legal, tax, payroll or financial decision. The full position is in the terms.

See for yourself, now

Coverage — every country and series held, and where we hold nothing.
Provenance — every cited source, its fingerprint, and which ones we currently cannot re-reach.
Accuracy — errors we have shipped, their cause, and what changed.
Incidents — an append-only log, including the ones nobody outside would have noticed.
Status — live availability, measured against the probes that should have run, so our own gaps count against us.
Signing key — verify a signed extract came from us unaltered.

Those pages are generated from the data they describe, so they go against us when we are behind. The provenance page reports sources we cannot currently re-fetch rather than hiding them, and the status page refuses to publish an availability figure it does not have enough observations to support.

Corrections