Load Shedding Stages Explained: What Each Stage Means and Where the Official Schedule Is

Load shedding is the deliberate, controlled switching off of parts of the national grid so that the whole grid does not collapse. Eskom rotates the switch-offs between areas, which is why your power goes off while the shop down the road stays on.

This page explains what the stage numbers actually mean, how the schedule reaches your area, and where the official schedule is published. It does not carry a live stage, because that changes by the hour. It tells you where to read the live one.

What a stage means

One stage is roughly 1,000 megawatts of demand that Eskom must remove from the system. Stage 1 removes about 1,000 MW, stage 2 about 2,000 MW, and so on. Higher stages exist because the shortage is bigger, not because the grid behaves differently.

What that means in your street: the higher the stage, the more blocks are switched off in each time slot, and the more hours your area is dark in a day. At the low stages an area is usually off for short slots with long gaps in between. At the high stages the gaps shrink and some areas are off for ten hours or more across the day.

How your area ends up with a schedule

The country is divided into load shedding blocks, and every suburb and township falls inside one of them.
The stage decides how many blocks are off at the same time.
Your schedule is the list of time slots when your block is the one switched off.
Municipalities publish their own version of the schedule, because they do the switching inside their own networks. Eskom publishes its schedule for the areas it supplies directly.

That is why a neighbour in the next municipality can be off while you are on, and it is why a schedule from a national page can differ slightly from your metro’s own PDF.

Where to read the official schedule

Eskom’s own load shedding pages and app. Eskom publishes its schedule and its current stage at eskom.co.za. If you want the live outlook rather than a search result, that is the source.
Your municipality. Metros publish load shedding schedules on their own websites, often as a PDF for each suburb or as a searchable page. This is the schedule to trust for a municipal area.
Municipal and Eskom outage notices. When power is off and the stage does not explain it, it is usually a fault, not load shedding. Report it. A cable fault, a substation failure or cable theft is repaired by the municipality or by Eskom, and it does not follow the schedule at all.

Two thirds of the confusion about load shedding comes from treating a fault as a schedule. Check the stage first, then check whether your area is supposed to be off. If it is not, report an outage.

Three things that are not load shedding

Load reduction. This is aimed at areas with high demand and illegal connections and meter tampering. It runs mainly in the early morning and evening peak, it applies even when load shedding is suspended, and it is not part of the national stage system.
Load curtailment. Large industrial customers are asked to cut their demand to a set level before rotational load shedding is used, so that households are spared. It shows up as an instruction to a mine or smelter, not as a stage for your house.
Load limiting. On some smart meters, instead of switching an area off, the supply is limited so that basic use continues. It keeps lights on and heavy appliances off.

Why the stage moves during the day

The stage is set by how much generation is available against how much the country is using. It moves when unplanned breakdowns take units out of service, when planned maintenance is scheduled, when demand climbs in the morning and evening peaks, and when the emergency reserves that cover the gap run low. That is why an announcement can arrive with an hour’s notice, and why a good week can still end at a high stage.

Practical things worth doing

Treat every dark traffic light as a four way stop. Most load shedding collisions happen in the first minutes after a suburb goes dark.
Protect what matters with surge protection. The switch back on is harder on electronics than the switch off.
Keep phones, power banks, torches and a radio charged, and keep a light where you can find it without a phone.
Gate motors, alarms and electric fences need a battery backup. Test it before a high stage weekend, not during one.
If someone in the house depends on power for medicine, oxygen or refrigerated drugs, register with your municipality as a life support customer so your area is treated differently, and keep your own backup regardless.
Freezers hold temperature for hours if you do not open them. Move food in, not out.

Where these answers come from

Eskom’s published load shedding information, including its explanation of stages and of load reduction.
Municipal load shedding schedules for the metros, which are the operative schedule inside a metro.
The national regulatory framework for load shedding that sets out how stages are applied.

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