"Rich" is relative — here's the number
People are famously bad at guessing where they sit on the income ladder: high earners often feel middle class, and vice versa. South Africa has some of the widest inequality in the world, which makes the result especially striking. This replaces the feeling with a percentile based on the SA income distribution.
What you're probably wondering
These thresholds are for individual gross income among earners, which is how SA earnings distributions are usually reported.
It's based on an approximate SA income distribution. Real percentiles vary by source and year, so treat it as a close estimate.
A lot. The same salary stretches very differently between, say, a small town and Sandton. This shows the national picture.