Nigerian payroll & statutory compliance

Payroll, correct to the kobo.

The Nigeria Tax Act rewrote PAYE from 1 January 2026. KoboHR computes every payslip under the new law — every band, every relief, every statutory deduction — exactly. Not roughly. Exactly.

NTA 2026current tax bands, built in
7 statutory linescomputed & remittance-ready
₦0.00rounding drift, by design
Payslip — A. Okafor
JUN 2026 · NTA bands
Earnings
Gross salary₦650,000.00
Employee deductions
Pension (8% of BHT)₦41,600.00
PAYE — NTA 2026 bands₦86,012.00
Rent relief applied (annual)₦400,000.00
Employer obligations
Pension (employer, 10%)₦52,000.00
NSITF (1%)₦6,500.00
Net pay₦522,388.00
✓ BALANCED TO THE KOBO first ₦800,000 tax-free · 15–25% bands

The Nigeria Tax Act, 2025 — effective 1 January 2026

The rules changed on January 1. Payroll run the old way is now wrong.

Four reform acts replaced the Personal Income Tax Act and rebuilt how PAYE is calculated. Every payroll cycle since January 2026 must use the new framework — and the new Nigeria Revenue Service cross-checks payroll, filings and bank data.

Repealed — PITA

How it used to work

  • Consolidated Relief Allowance (CRA) deducted before tax
  • Bands of 7%–24%, tax from the first naira
  • 1% minimum tax even at low income
  • NHF mandatory for most employees
  • Enforcement: periodic, paper-led audits
In force — NTA 2026

How it works now

  • CRA abolished — replaced by defined deductions
  • First ₦800,000 of chargeable income tax-free, then 15%–25% progressive bands
  • Rent relief: 20% of annual rent, capped at ₦500,000, with documentation
  • NHF voluntary for private-sector employees
  • Enforcement: NRS data analytics across payroll, bank and filing records
₦100,000 penalty in the first month of a late filing, plus ₦50,000 for each month after — and personal liability can follow false declarations. Under the new regime, “roughly right” payroll is not a rounding error. It's exposure.
FREE TOOL Check any salary against the new bands in seconds — no sign-up, runs entirely in your browser. Open the PAYE calculator

Why “to the kobo” is not a slogan

Precision you can audit, not just admire.

A kobo is the smallest unit of the naira. It's also our engineering standard. Every figure KoboHR produces can be traced back to the exact rule, rate and day-count that produced it.

Deterministic computation

The same inputs always produce the same payslip. No spreadsheet drift, no “it depends who ran it this month.” Finalized runs are locked and reproducible.

Exact proration — never rounded decimals

Joiners and leavers are prorated on true working-day counts stored as whole numbers. The fraction is exact, so the pay is exact.

Remittance-ready evidence

Statutory schedules and WHT receipts and statements come out of the same engine that computed the pay — so what you file is what you paid, to the kobo.

Proration, the KoboHR way

18 / 22 days

A mid-month joiner's basis is stored as the integer pair — employed working days over working days in the month — not a rounded decimal that loses kobo.

Stored basis18 / 22 (exact)
Typical spreadsheet0.81818… (lossy)
Difference at scalereal money, every month

Complete statutory coverage

Every statutory line. Every month. One engine.

Most tools handle two or three obligations and leave the rest to you. KoboHR computes the full set Nigerian employers actually owe — employee-side and employer-side — in the same run.

PAYE
Personal income tax

NTA 2026 progressive bands, ₦800k zero band, rent relief with documentation flags.

PENSION
Contributory pension

Employee 8% and employer 10% on basic + housing + transport, per the Pension Reform Act. Learn more →

NHF
National Housing Fund

Handled as voluntary for private-sector staff under the new framework — on or off per employee.

NHIA
Health insurance

Mandatory health-insurance contributions computed and tracked alongside pay.

NSITF
Employee compensation

Employer-side 1% of payroll, computed automatically every cycle.

ITF
Industrial Training Fund

1% employer levy where thresholds apply — applied by rule, not by memory.

WHT
Withholding tax

Receipts and statements generated from the same engine, ready for vendors and auditors.

LEAVE
Labour Act leave

Anniversary-based accrual with the Labour Act 12-month qualifying rule built in — not bolted on.

One platform, not multiple tools

Everything payroll touches — in the same system.

The statutory engine is the hard part. Around it, KoboHR handles the everyday work of running people — leave, advances, self-service and records — so the same numbers flow through every screen, no re-keying, no reconciliation. Tap any card to see how we handle it.

Core

Payroll & statutory compliance

Run a full, compliant cycle — preview every line, finalize with an audit trail, and produce the remittance evidence a clean Tax Clearance Certificate rests on.

How we do it →

The Nigeria Tax Act 2025 (effective January 2026) reset PAYE bands, reliefs and the tax-free floor. KoboHR computes every statutory line — PAYE, pension, NHF, NHIA, NSITF, ITF, WHT — from a single versioned rule set, deterministically: the same inputs always produce the same figures, down to the kobo, with the working shown for audit.

See every statutory deduction explained →

People

Leave management

Requests, approvals and balances — with the qualifying rule built in, and unpaid leave flowing straight into payroll, pro-rated to the day.

How we do it →

The Labour Act (§18) grants paid annual leave only after twelve months of continuous service, above a statutory minimum. KoboHR anchors the leave year to each employee's hire date, enforces the twelve-month qualifying rule and the minimum-day floor automatically, and feeds approved unpaid leave into the next payroll so pay is pro-rated exactly — never estimated, never over-granted.

Read the HR payroll guide →

Money

Staff loans & salary advance

A proper alternative to the informal IOU — with policy control, approvals, and repayment recovered automatically from payroll.

How we do it →

Set the employer policy — how much, over how long, at what rate — then approve requests with separation of duties (whoever requests can't self-approve). Repayments come off payroll automatically, capped to a safe share of each employee's net pay so a loan can never push take-home below a healthy floor; when a month is tight, the shortfall carries forward and the schedule extends rather than over-deducting.

People

Employee self-service

Staff see their own payslips, leave and loan balances, and request changes — routed to HR for approval.

How we do it →

Every employee gets a secure portal: download payslips as PDFs, check leave and loan balances, and submit profile or bank-detail changes that route to HR as an approval — never a silent edit. Sensitive fields stay encrypted, and who-changed-what is recorded. Fewer emails, fewer "can you resend my payslip" messages, and a clean record behind every change.

Compliance

Reports & TCC evidence

The filing-ready schedules, receipts and statements your Tax Clearance Certificate and your auditors ask for — without assembling them by hand.

How we do it →

A Tax Clearance Certificate depends on showing that PAYE and other obligations were computed and remitted correctly. KoboHR generates the remittance schedules, WHT receipts and statutory statements from the very same engine that computed the pay — so the evidence always matches the payroll, cycle by cycle, ready to hand to a tax authority or an auditor.

What the NTA 2026 means for payroll →

Coming soon

Time & attendance

Timesheets and attendance feeding hourly and daily pay directly — the same engine, the same accuracy.

What's coming →

Attendance and timesheet capture will feed straight into the payroll engine for hourly and daily workers — no export, no import, no reconciliation between a separate clock system and pay. On the roadmap; the payroll side that consumes it is already built.

Built for how payroll is actually run

Three kinds of teams. One correct answer.

Nigerian companies

Run your own payroll with confidence

For SMEs that outgrew the spreadsheet — or never trusted it. Finalize a compliant run in minutes, give staff self-service payslips, and keep an audit trail you didn't have to build.

  • New-law PAYE from day one
  • Employee self-service portal
  • Leave, approvals and records in one place
Consulting & accounting firms

Run every client from one seat

For the firms Nigerian SMEs already trust with payroll. Each client lives in a fully isolated workspace — separate data, separate settings, one login for your team.

  • True multi-client isolation, not folders
  • Per-client statutory settings
  • Deliverables your clients can file as-is
Global teams & BPOs

Pay Nigerian staff, satisfy any auditor

For foreign companies and outsourcing operations with staff in Nigeria. Meet every local statutory obligation and hand head office the evidence — receipts, schedules and statements they can actually inspect.

  • Statutory remittance schedules, cycle by cycle
  • WHT receipts and statements for your records
  • No Lagos back office required

Why KoboHR exists

KoboHR exists because Nigerian payroll deserves the same rigour as Nigerian banking. When the tax framework changed, most teams were left choosing between expensive enterprise suites and spreadsheets that were quietly wrong.

We took a different path: build the computation engine first, prove it against the law line by line, and only then dress it up. The name is the standard — if a payslip is off by one kobo, it's off.

Isolated by design. Every employer's data lives behind fail-closed tenant isolation that we prove with attack tests — not comments in the code.
Encrypted personal data. Employee PII is encrypted at rest, with access controlled and revealed only on explicit, logged request.
Locked, reproducible runs. A finalized payrun can't be silently edited. What was paid is what the record shows — forever.
Nigerian-first, not localized. KoboHR wasn't adapted for Nigeria. It was built for Nigeria, from the statutes up.

The parallel-run guarantee

Run one payroll cycle beside your current process. Compare every line.

Bring us a real month. We'll compute it on KoboHR while you run it your usual way, and you compare the figures side by side — PAYE, pension, every statutory line, every kobo. If we don't match or beat your numbers, walk away. We can make this offer because the engine is deterministic; the numbers aren't opinions.

Simple per-employee pricing · no setup fees · hello@kobohr.cloud