The scope of this contribution was to interrogate the alleged rural–urban dichotomy effects of social grants on sustainable poverty alleviation. One major problem that has marked previous comparative studies in this area is that there is no universally agreed definition of ‘urban’ or ‘rural’. Their inherent contrasts are critical to the applicability and effects of concerted interventions due to the diversity of actors, agendas, underlying intentions and so on. This contribution was anchored in the belief that socio-economic narratives were intrinsically distributed among rural and urban households as well as societies and so, too, were the effects of intervention strategies. The study, by focusing on Polokwane Local Municipality has argued that social grants have dichotomous and differential effects as a strategy for poverty amelioration in rural and urban settings. The paper has engaged on a scholarship synthesis of characteristics and contexts of the rural–urban dichotomy, types of social grants and dimensions of poverty in rural and urban areas. In our conclusion, we consolidated recommendations revolving around the enhancement of the rural–urban effects of social grants so as to optimise sustainable poverty alleviation across space.