The bane of every South African motorist’s existence is renewing license discs, receiving traffic fines, followed by having to pay those traffic fines, in general, spending any amount of time at your local traffic department. Thankfully, Paycity is trying to assist in part of that equation by making paying your traffic fines, renewing vehicle licenses – and even paying municipal bills – more convenient by completing the entire process online.
What Is Paycity?
PayCity is a merger between energy.co.za – a platform that enabled users to purchase prepaid electricity – and payfine.co.za – a platform that allowed users to pay fines online. After the merger between these online platforms, Paycity would add additional services, including paying municipal bills and licence disc renewals.
How to Register on PayCity
To access the services on PayCity, you need to have a PayCity account. But, registering for an account is straightforward and takes a matter of minutes.
Step 1: Navigate To PayCity’s Website
Visit https://www.paycity.co.za.
Click on register at the top right-hand corner of the page.
Step 2: Register Using Your Details
To create an account, you’ll only need to provide your email address, first name and surname and a secure password.
You will then be sent an activation email with your details.
However, to use the services, you may be required to add your ID numbers, vehicle registration details, as well as your municipal account number – depending on the services you want to access through PayCity.
Step 3: Store Your Registration Details in a Secure Location
To ensure that your PayCity account remains secure, try to use a password that you aren’t using on other platforms. Because if your details for another platform, with the same login credentials, are leaked, your PayCity account may become compromised.
Step 4: Link Your Profile To Your Identification
To do things like view and pay your traffic fines, you will need to add identification to your profile. You can do this by clicking on the traffic fines button on your dashboard and then adding either an ID number, foreign identification, or a company registration number.
To pay municipal accounts, you will need to select your municipality – at this time, PayCity only supports the City of Cape Town, eThekwini Municipality, and Nama Khoi Municipality – and add your municipal account number.
What can I do with my PayCity account?
PayCity allows you to pay traffic fines at a convenience fee of R10. You can also add credit to your PayCity account. This allows you to make payments from your credits in future.
PayCity also offers subscriptions, allowing you to include additional IDs as well as remove the convenience fee.
These subscriptions start at R130 per year, which allows you to have 2 IDs attached to one profile and includes weekly notifications for new fines for the areas they cover. When you sign up for a subscription, you’ll also get reminders for AARTO discounts.
Services available on PayCity
PayCity has four primary services available through paycity.co.za.
Viewing and Paying Traffic Fines
You can view your traffic fines on PayCity and pay them as well. If you have not signed up for a subscription, you will be charged a R10 fee for every traffic fine you pay. The traffic fine payment will reflect with the traffic department instantly.
It’s important to note that for complex queries – like traffic fine reduction requests or disputes – you will need to contact the transport authority who issued the fine as this cannot be completed through PayCity. However, the PayCity helpdesk can assist by giving you information about the documentation the transport authority will need.
License Disc Renewal
Once you’ve added your vehicle registration to PayCity, you will be able to renew your license disc. However, you can access license disc renewal when your license disc is six weeks or less from expiring.
When you are in the process of renewing your license disc, you will also need to add your delivery address where your new license disc must be delivered and upload supporting documentation as requested by the relevant transport authority.
Once you’ve completed the process, your license plate will be delivered by courier within 5 to 14 business days.
Municipal Accounts Payments
Presently, PayCity only allows municipal bill payments for the following municipalities:
- City of Cape Town
- eThekwini Municipality
- Nama Khoi Municipality
If you need to pay a bill from one of these municipalities, you will need to insert your municipal account number, and from there, your bill will be allocated accordingly.
Paying municipal accounts doesn’t come with any fees from PayCity.
Prepaid Electricity
You can manage several electricity metres on your PayCity account and can purchase electricity units directly from PayCity without any additional fees.
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How Safe is PayCity?
If you’re wondering if PayCity is legit, the short answer is yes.
It’s important to note that PayCity is a private company. While they may have a long-established private-public partnership with the government, one that has been ongoing in some capacity for over 20 years, they are not a government department.
However, the site is 100% safe and secure to use. All your information is transmitted on HTTPS encryption, and payCity has committed to legally protect your information and transactions.
Another benefit to using PayCity is that, unlike most government departments, PayCity’s call centre is also available 24/7. This means that if you have any queries or complaints, you can contact them and have those issues sorted without much hassle.
If you ever need any additional information or would like to contact PayCity, you can reach them on social media. Their handle on Facebook is @payCity and on Twitter @paycity. You can also email the team at team@paycity.co.za for queries, or if you need support, reach out to them at support@paycity.co.za. Alternatively, you can call the PayCity helpdesk on 087 237 7011 seven days a week.
