Sunday Times (South Africa) Paywall: How to Read Sunday Times Articles for Free

The Sunday Times is South Africa's biggest-selling Sunday newspaper, published by Arena Holdings and known for the investigations that have shaped the country's politics for decades. Its website lives inside TimesLIVE, Arena's news portal, and the Sunday paper's reporting sits behind the premium paywall that the group introduced across its titles. Readers who follow a link to a Sunday Times exposé usually run into a subscription prompt. This guide explains how the paywall works and how to read a full article.

How the Sunday Times paywall works

The Sunday Times uses a premium paywall shared with TimesLIVE. Breaking news on TimesLIVE is largely free, but stories carrying the Sunday Times name, including investigations, columns, lifestyle features and most of the Sunday edition, are marked premium and locked for non-subscribers. A visitor sees the headline and the opening paragraphs, then a panel inviting them to subscribe.

The gate is applied in the browser. Arena delivers the full text of each article in the page so that search engines can index it, and a script then hides the body for anyone without a subscriber login. A crawler-style reader that never runs that script receives the complete story. Our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls sets out why this matters.

Our tests on 5 October 2026 through Skip the Paywall:

• A 1,165-word Sunday Times investigation into how a state development corporation lost R1.5 billion on a failed steel plant loaded in full, all 28 paragraphs.
• A 1,147-word Sunday Times lifestyle column on a mother's heartache, a design award and a perfume launch loaded in full, all 28 paragraphs.
• An 877-word Sunday Times report on university graduates honouring their families loaded in full, all 27 paragraphs.

Read a Sunday Times article in full

• Copy the article link. Sunday Times links look like sundaytimes.timeslive.co.za/news/2026-10-05-headline-slug/, with the date in the path.
• Paste it into the box on the home page and press Read Article.
• The story appears in a clean reader view with the headline, byline and body text.

Links on the main timeslive.co.za domain follow the same pattern and open in the same way.

Other approaches

• Library access. Larger South African public libraries and most university libraries offer the Sunday Times through PressReader, which includes the print edition page by page.
• Newsletters. TimesLIVE's free newsletters carry summaries and links to the week's main stories, some of which are open.
• Introductory offers. Arena runs regular low-cost trial subscriptions for new digital readers, and a subscription covers TimesLIVE, the Sunday Times and the group's other titles.
• Private windows. Premium stories are locked from the first visit rather than metered, so a private window does not help.

How it compares with other South African papers

The Sunday Times is the second South African title on our list. News24, the country's biggest news site, uses a freemium model and also loads in full. Business Day, Arena's financial daily, shares the Sunday Times platform but we have not tested it. Despite the shared name, this is a different paper from the London Sunday Times; our guide to The Times and The Sunday Times covers that one. The full list of sites that work is kept up to date.

Subscribe if you read it regularly

The Sunday Times has broken many of South Africa's biggest stories, from state capture to corporate fraud, and investigations of that kind are expensive to produce. If it is part of your weekend, a subscription is the honest way to pay for the next one, and it includes the whole Arena stable.