Joburg the epicentre of South Africa's tech brain drain — Johannesburg skyline

New enquiry data from immigration firm New World Immigration (NWI) shows the tech workers approaching it about leaving are in unusual haste – with Johannesburg, not Cape Town, driving the outflow and Australia’s qualification rules quietly deciding who gets out.

For most South Africans weighing a move abroad, emigration is a slow-burning question. For the technology workers approaching one immigration firm, the data suggests it has become urgent.

A snapshot of 437 IT, software, data and cybersecurity professionals who approached New World Immigration about moving to Australia, logged between 22 April and 22 June 2026, shows a workforce in a hurry. Of those who gave a timeframe, around 70% said they wanted to leave “immediately” or “within six months”. Only 21 placed the move on a horizon as long as two years.

“This is quite unusual in comparison to the other enquiries we get, where applicants state between one or two years,” Robbie Ragless, director of New World Immigration, told TechCentral on Monday. “That’s a high number and suggests that many people are committed to planning their moves now.”

Afrobarometer survey work published in December 2024 found that about one in four South Africans have considered emigrating, a figure that rises to 42% among the wealthiest and runs highest among the young and educated. Australia remains a principal destination: roughly 189 000 South African-born people were living there at the 2021 census, and in 2024/2025, South African nationals took up 2 240 places in its skilled migration stream – a 58% jump on the year before.

Permanent migration

And it is not just tech workers. NWI data shows that more than a thousand South African teachers have enquired about moving to Australia since April 2026 alone.

“Salary is certainly part of the conversation, but it’s rarely the main driver on its own,” said Ragless. The reasons the firm hears most often are:

Safety and security
Better opportunities for applicants’ children
Greater economic and political stability
Access to permanent residency and citizenship
Stronger career growth in larger international markets
Concern about South Africa’s long-term direction

Almost none want to leave only temporarily. Despite tech workers being among the world’s most mobile professionals, just one of the 437 asked about a digital nomad visa.

“Very few are asking about digital nomad visas or temporary overseas arrangements,” Ragless said. “Most are looking at permanent migration options and are focused on putting down roots elsewhere.”

Joburg leads the exit

Cape Town has spent a decade branding itself “Silicon Cape”. Yet in the NWI data, it is Johannesburg that dominates. Among leads with a recorded location, 115 came from Joburg against 76 from Cape Town – roughly 51% more – with Durban (27) and Pretoria (23) well behind.

The firm attributed the gap to where the heavy enterprise IT sits: the JSE-listed corporates, banks, insurers and mining houses whose technology departments employ at scale. When those workers go, the institutional skills loss runs deeper than the start-up-flavoured Cape Town narrative suggests.

The starkest split is not where applicants live but what credentials they hold. The gateway to Australian ICT migration is a skills assessment run by the Australian Computer Society (ACS), which judges whether qualifications and experience match a recognised occupation code. It tends to reward formal, ICT-specific degrees, and in the NWI cohort that creates clear winners and losers.

Of the 437, about 154 (35%) hold a bachelor’s degree or higher. At the other end sit 61 people, 14% of the group, whose highest qualification is a school-leaving certificate – many of them self-taught or bootcamp-trained developers with years of production experience. They are the ones who most often fail to qualify. The result is a funnel that can favour a graduate with a generic degree and a year’s experience over a self-taught engineer with five years of shipped code.

The pattern shows up in who converts to a paying client. Business analysts and ICT project managers make up 19% of the leads but 33% of the 21 confirmed clients, because their titles match Australian occupation codes and their degrees assess well. Software developers, the largest technical group, account for 38% of conversions but a far larger share of those who stall.

It is not an absolute bar. The ACS also runs a Recognition of Prior Learning pathway for applicants with substantial experience and no tertiary qualification, requiring detailed project reports and evidence of current knowledge. At least one of NWI’s confirmed clients, an ICT business analyst with no formal qualifications, secured assessment that way. But it is slower and more demanding, and for many of the school-certificate cohort, it is where the process ends.

Buried in the numbers is a category that should give policymakers pause: 20 of the leads are dedicated cybersecurity professionals. The global shortage is acute and worsening, with the 2024 ISC2 Cybersecurity Workforce Study putting the worldwide gap at 4.8 million unfilled roles. Every departure leaves fewer to defend South African banks, hospitals and state systems.

Mobile career stage

The cohort skews young: nearly half are aged 25-34, the most mobile career stage. One software engineer with 19 years’ experience in Joburg was simply “seeking alternative permanent residency”. A 25-year-old developer wrote: “I am a Zimbabwean citizen, resident in SA since age 7. Visas lapsed. Cannot get PR. Hard to find work in my field.”

South Africa’s government has begun to notice the drain, recently floating a white paper aimed at luring expatriate talent home. But the data points to a harder problem. “Many South African tech professionals aren’t asking themselves whether they should leave anymore,” Ragless said. “They’re trying to figure out how quickly they can make it happen.” — © 2026 NewsCentral Media