Plenty of claimants type www.labour.gov.za into their browser expecting a box where they can enter an ID number and see their UIF claim. The Department of Employment and Labour’s website does not have one. When we checked it on 3 October 2026, the site worked as a signpost rather than a status tool: it points you to the system that holds your claim, and to the people who can look it up for you. Knowing what is on the site, and where it is, still saves time, especially on a day when the claims portal will not load.
The department’s route to your claim status
The site’s Online Services page lists “UIF Online Services” and links it to uifonline.labour.gov.za, the system that has handled employee benefit claims since 1 April 2025. Older guides send claimants to uFiling instead, but uFiling’s employee claims portal closed on 20 May 2026 and now serves employers only. Signing in to UIF Online and finding your claim is covered in our UIF Online dashboard walkthrough. Most other tools on that page, such as the UIF e-Compliance certificate and the employment equity reporting system, are for employers.
What the UIF contacts page gives you
Under Contacts, the UIF page is the department’s own list of ways to reach the Fund. On 3 October 2026 it showed:
- the call centre, 0800 030 007, and the Pretoria switchboard, 012 337 1997;
- weekday office hours, from 07:30 until 16:00;
- three email addresses: uifcallcenter@labour.gov.za for general queries, ufiling@labour.gov.za for uFiling, and uifcomplaints@labour.gov.za for complaints;
- the head office address, the UIF Building at 230 Lillian Ngoyi Street, Pretoria Central.
We keep these, together with fraud and specialist addresses, in our full UIF contact list.
Using labour.gov.za when UIF Online is down
The department’s website runs on a different address from the claims portal, so it may still load when UIF Online will not. On those days it gives you four ways forward:
- The labour centre directory lists centres province by province, with street addresses, phone numbers and opening hours, so you can find the nearest office and ask staff there to look up your claim.
- The Online Services page also links a web self-service ticketing system for the department’s contact centre. We could not confirm which UIF queries it accepts, so treat it as an extra route, not a replacement for the call centre.
- The call centre and email addresses above work without the portal.
- The Newsroom is where the department announces outages and changes. It confirmed the restoration of UIF online services on 17 October 2024, for example, and explained the uFiling-to-UIF Online migration on 24 May 2026.
Limits of the department website
Nothing on labour.gov.za shows your personal claim, your payments or your credits. What it does hold, besides contacts, is the official form library in its Resource Centre, including continuation forms such as UI-6A, which is useful if you have to submit one on paper. If you are unsure whether the website, the call centre or a labour centre suits your situation best, our guide to choosing a UIF status channel compares them.