Increased urbanisation, migration, and population growth have led to accelerated housing demand in cities. Many people are living in cities worldwide. With Gauteng province perceived as the economic hub of South Africa, this increases the influx of both domestic and international in-migration to the cities in this province. This exerts pressure on the existing facilities and infrastructure, particularly housing. Therefore, due to housing challenges experienced in Gauteng, many people live in unplanned informal settlements where conditions are below the housing standard of adequacy. This study investigates the growth of informal settlements in Gauteng's municipalities over timethrough application of various data collection and analysis methods to detect changes and establishgrowth. The ArcGIS tools and functionalities were employed to establish the distribution patterns ofinformal settlements. Census 2001 and 2011 depicted the growth of informal settlement households,while the General Household Survey (GHS) 2016-2018 illustrates the condition and form of informalsettlement structures using logistic regression.