Five registers decide whether a contractor may lawfully do your work, and four of them cost nothing to check. In order, they are the cidb Register of Contractors and the cidb list of contractors removed from it, then the National Treasury Database of Restricted Suppliers and the Register of Tender Defaulters. The fifth is the record of who the directors actually are. Most clients in South Africa check the first one and stop.
The reason that is not enough has a date on it. As at 20 August 2026, National Treasury had recorded 35 companies and 45 directors or owners on its restricted suppliers database following referrals from Eskom's supplier disciplinary process. Forty five people, thirty five companies. A registration certificate tells you nothing about either number.
1. The cidb Register of Contractors
Start here because everything else assumes it. You are confirming two things: that the registration is live today, and that the grade and class of works actually cover the job you are about to award. A certificate is a photograph of a moment, and the moment may have passed.
The search is public and free at registers.cidb.org.za. Look a firm up by name or CRS number and it returns status, designation and class of works. So ask for the registration number rather than the certificate. A number you look up yourself is evidence. A PDF someone emailed you is a design file.
2. The list of contractors removed from it
Contractors leave the register by notice, and this is the check almost nobody runs. It is the one that catches the gap between a valid looking certificate and a current registration.
Worth being precise about what this is, because it is easy to assume there are two lists here and there is only one. Under regulation 30(2) of the Construction Industry Development Regulations, cidb publishes the particulars of Board findings on contractors removed from the Register. Those findings are published as dated notices on the cidb blacklisted contractors page, and that page is also where the gazette removal notices live. The blacklist and the removals notices are the same filing cabinet. Checked in August 2026, the page carried notices for August 2026, April 2026, November 2025 and October 2025, so it is updated in bursts rather than monthly.
Read the latest notice against your own vendor list rather than against the one contractor in front of you. The value of a removals notice is that it audits everybody you already use, in one sitting.
3. The National Treasury Database of Restricted Suppliers
This is the one that has moved recently. Eskom reported on 20 August 2026 that its supplier disciplinary process restricted 101 suppliers for periods of up to ten years. Fifty three of those matters went on to National Treasury. By that date, 35 companies and 45 directors had been recorded on the national database.
Eskom states the effect plainly. A listed supplier is barred from doing business with the State for the restriction period. If you are a municipality, an entity or anyone spending public money, this register is not advisory. If you are a private client, it is still the single best free read on whether the people you are about to trust have been found wanting by somebody with subpoena powers.
What makes this list easy to populate is that no court has to be involved. Any organ of state can submit a name to it, on its own administrative findings, which is exactly how Eskom's 53 referrals got there.
4. The Register of Tender Defaulters
Different list, different law, and the reason it is worth a separate look is that most people treat it as the same thing. The Register of Tender Defaulters sits under sections 28 and 29 of the Prevention and Combating of Corrupt Activities Act. A name goes on it only after a criminal conviction, when a court orders the particulars endorsed.
So the two Treasury lists answer two different questions. The restricted suppliers database tells you an organ of state made a finding. The tender defaulters register tells you a court did. A firm can be on one and not the other, and the second is much shorter than the first for exactly that reason.
Both are published together in the Restricted Supplier and Tender Defaulter Report, which is a free download and the thing to actually search. Note also what does not yet exist: the Public Procurement Act 28 of 2024 provides for a single central debarment register, but the Act has not commenced, so that register is not there to check. Until it is, these two lists are what there is.
5. The people, not the company
The fifth check is the one that makes the other four work. Pull the company's own record of its directors and members, then run those names, individually, against checks three and four. Companies are cheap to register and names are not cheap to change.
This is the one that costs money, and it costs almost nothing. A CIPC disclosure certificate, giving the full governance structure and history of a company or close corporation, is R30.
The Eskom numbers make the point better than any argument. There are ten more people on that database than there are companies. Any panel checked only on company registration numbers will pass a restricted director through without a flicker.
What none of the five tells you
Registration is a licence to bid, not evidence of competence. None of these registers records whether the firm finished its last three jobs, whether it paid its subcontractors, or whether the site agent who impressed you still works there. That information exists, but it lives with the previous client, and it is retrieved by telephone rather than by search box.
Nor does any of them stay true. A firm that passes all five today can be removed by gazette next month, and nobody will write to you about it. Vetting is a date-stamped result, not a status.
On Monday
Take your approved vendor list, strip it back to registration numbers and director names, and run the five checks across the whole list in one sitting. Budget an hour. On a panel of twenty firms you will typically find at least one lapsed registration and one director you did not know was there. Both are cheaper to find on a Monday morning than on the day a job stops.
Arabella runs those five checks once per contractor and keeps them current. A client commissioning work then sees a network that has already been through the registers, rather than a list of names to check themselves. What that covers is set out on the client page, and the compliance notices we read each week are in insights.
