Cape Town businesses report growing confidence in City’s service delivery

Cape Town businesses are feeling greater confidence in City services, according to the results of the 2025/26 Business Satisfaction Survey (BSS). Read more below:

The survey is part of the City’s Ease of Doing Business Index and is designed to capture both quantitative and qualitative data regarding businesses’ interactions with the City of Cape Town. The Index tracks nine business-facing indicators such as land use rights, building plan approvals, wayleaves, energy connections, and business licences, by assessing the number of procedural steps, timelines, and costs involved. Digitisation is positioned as a tenth cross-cutting indicator.

The 2025/26 BSS saw businesses give the City an overall Public Service Quality (PSQ) score of 92, up from 86 in 2023/24, placing performance in the survey’s ‘good performance’ band, a strong result for a public service provider. The PSQ score is calculated from businesses’ responses to four measures covering overall City performance, trust in the City, fulfilment of its role as a municipal service provider, and its performance compared with other public institutions. These responses are combined using the Public Service Quality Index methodology to produce an overall score on a scale from -50 to 150.

‘This is proof that the reforms we are driving through our Ease of Doing Business programme are being felt on the ground. The intention of this programme is simple: to further a culture of service, accountability and speed within the City, because in business, time is money,’ said Alderman James Vos, the Mayoral Committee Member for Economic Growth.

Customer service and the City’s E-services platform continue to perform strongly, with businesses positively rating logging in, signing up and navigating the system. Obtaining a business licence, informal trading permits, electricity and water connections, and wayleaves were also generally well rated, with measurable improvements in complexity, affordability, additional costs and turnaround times noted since the last survey.

The survey also highlighted where businesses needed to see improvement: Land use rights, building plan approvals and public land transfers are the most challenging processes, largely due to their complexity, the number of approvals required, and longer turnaround times. Processing time remains the single biggest concern raised by businesses, adding to costs and uncertainty regardless of the process involved.

‘We can’t shy away from where we need to improve. We will continue to focus on simplifying our highest-impact development processes, strengthening coordination between departments, and giving businesses more certainty and visibility on where their applications stand. That is how we keep Cape Town the easiest place in South Africa to do business,’ said Alderman Vos.

About the 2025/26 Business Satisfaction Survey:

• The BSS was conducted between February and June 2026.
• Data was collected from 369 businesses in the City of Cape Town.
• As respondents were allowed to select and rate up to three Ease of Doing Business indicators, the total number of indicator-level responses used for reporting purposes is 603.
• The study comprised 27 in-depth interviews, with three interviews conducted per service area. Participants included small, medium and large businesses that had recently interacted with one of the City’s nine Ease of Doing Business services.
• Businesses were sourced from lists provided by both the City and from a third-party list provider.

Find more information about the 2025/26 Business Satisfaction Survey in the report linked here.

To see a breakdown of performance across the ten indicators, go to Dashboard.InvestCapeTown.com. Read the latest Ease of Doing Business 2025 publication here.