What Is an IT3(b) Tax Certificate

An IT3(b) is a tax certificate issued by a bank, investment platform or other financial institution that reports the investment income you earned during the tax year, mainly local and foreign interest and dividends. It is not something you fill in. The institution reports the same figures to SARS, which then pre-populates them on your eFiling return. Your job is to check that the amounts on the certificate match the ones on your return and to declare anything that is missing.

Think of the IT3(b) as the interest-and-dividends counterpart to the IRP5 your employer issues for salary. Where the IRP5 covers employment income and PAYE, the IT3(b) covers what your money earned while it sat in accounts and investments.

What is on an IT3(b)

The certificate groups your investment income into source codes, each of which maps to a specific field on the income tax return (the ITR12). The common ones are:

What it reports	Typical certificate label
Local interest (SA banks, fixed deposits, money market)	Local interest
Foreign interest	Foreign interest
Local dividends already subject to dividends tax	Local dividends
Foreign dividends	Foreign dividends

You may hold accounts at several institutions. Each one issues its own IT3(b), so if you bank in one place and invest in another, expect more than one certificate. The figures from all of them are added together on a single return.

IT3(b) versus IT3(c) versus IRP5

These three certificates are easy to confuse because they look similar and arrive around the same time.

• The IRP5 reports employment income, allowances and the PAYE your employer withheld. It comes from your employer.
• The IT3(b) reports interest and dividends. It comes from a bank or investment house.
• The IT3(c) reports proceeds and gains from disposals of investments, that is, capital gains information. It also comes from your investment house, usually when you sell units or shares.

An IT3(b) tells you what your investments paid you while you held them. An IT3(c) tells you what happened when you sold. The IT3(c) feeds the capital gains section of the return; a taxable capital gain is worked out there and then added to your taxable income.

Where each figure goes on your return

On the ITR12, SARS asks you at the start of the wizard to tick the kinds of income you received, which then opens the matching containers. The interest and dividends from your IT3(b) flow into the investment income container:

• Local interest goes into the local interest field. The section 10(1)(i) exemption is applied by SARS automatically once you have declared the full amount.
• Foreign interest goes into its own field and does not get the local-interest exemption.
• Local dividends are shown for completeness. They are generally exempt from normal tax because dividends tax of 20% was already withheld at source, so they are not taxed again on assessment.
• Foreign dividends go into their own field, where a partial exemption applies.

Because SARS pre-populates these from the institution's submission, the amounts are often already there when you open the return. Do not assume they are complete. If an account is missing, or a figure looks wrong against your certificate, correct it. You remain responsible for the accuracy of the return even when SARS filled in the numbers.

A worked example

Take a taxpayer under 65 with a taxable income of R400,000 from salary, which places them in the 31% marginal bracket for the 2026 year of assessment. Their bank issues an IT3(b) showing R30,000 of local interest for the year.

Step 1: apply the section 10(1)(i) local-interest exemption. For someone under 65 the exemption for the 2026 year of assessment is R23,800.

R30,000 − R23,800 = R6,200

So R6,200 of the interest is taxable; the first R23,800 is exempt.

Step 2: the R6,200 is added to taxable income and taxed at the marginal rate. This person's salary already reaches the R370,501 – R512,800 bracket, where the rate on the top slice is 31%.

R6,200 × 31% = R1,922

The extra tax caused by the interest is R1,922. The exempt R23,800 carries no tax at all. On the return you still declare the full R30,000 from the certificate; SARS sets the exemption against it.

Had the same person been 65 or older, the exemption would be R34,500, which exceeds the R30,000 of interest, so none of it would be taxable.

What to do when the certificate arrives

Match every IT3(b) you receive against the pre-populated figures on eFiling before you submit. Add the totals across all your certificates for each income type, since the return holds one combined figure per field, not one per institution. Keep the certificates: SARS can ask for them during verification, and a mismatch between what an institution reported and what you declared is a common trigger for a query.