Nigerian small company tax, explained in plain words

VAT, PAYE, WHT and company income tax, what each one actually is, when each is due, and how a small company keeps up without hiring a tax team.

Nobody starts a company because they love remittance schedules. But the schedules exist, the penalties are real, and most of the fear around Nigerian tax is really just unfamiliarity. Here is the whole picture for a small company, in the order the money moves.

A caution before we start: this is orientation, not advice. Rates and thresholds shift, and the recent tax reforms changed several of them. Confirm your specifics with a professional or the law itself before filing.

VAT: tax you collect for the government

Value added tax is charged on most goods and services you sell. The customer pays it, you hold it, and you remit it. The standard rate has been 7.5 percent. If you are registered for VAT, the VAT you paid on business purchases can offset the VAT you collected, and you remit the difference.

The rhythm: file and remit by the 21st of the month after the sale. Miss it and penalties stack monthly. The practical trap is treating collected VAT as revenue and spending it. It was never your money.

PAYE: your staff income tax

Pay As You Earn is your employees income tax, deducted from salaries at graduated rates and remitted to the state where each employee lives, by the 10th of the following month. Pension and housing fund deductions ride alongside it.

The painful part is the arithmetic across reliefs and bands, done correctly for every person every month. This is exactly the kind of work software should do, which is why Dbrij payslips compute PAYE, pension and NHF from the gross and keep the running schedule for you.

WHT: tax deducted before you get paid

Withholding tax flips the direction. When a company pays you for services, they may be required to keep back a percentage and remit it against your name. It stings in the moment, but it is not lost money. It is a credit against your company income tax, provided you collect the evidence.

Two disciplines matter: record the WHT amount whenever a customer pays you short, and chase the credit notes. On Dbrij, an invoice records the WHT suffered at payment time, and the annual estimate already nets it off.

Company income tax: the yearly reckoning

CIT is charged on profit for the financial year. Small companies under the turnover threshold have enjoyed a zero rate; above it, the full rate applies with a development levy alongside. Filing is due within six months of your year end.

The trap here is estimating profit from your bank balance. Profit is revenue minus deductible expenses, and every expense you failed to record is tax you will overpay. Salaries, rents, software, transport, the airtime you bought for the referral program, all of it belongs in the books.

How to actually keep up

Dbrij Finance was built around exactly this rhythm: the tax page keeps the calendar, the invoices feed the VAT and WHT schedules, payslips feed PAYE, and the CIT estimate reads your real numbers all year. The filing is still yours, but the fear does not have to be.

Put the deadlines on a calendar you cannot ignore: VAT and WHT by the 21st, PAYE by the 10th, CIT six months after year end.
Invoice from a system, not a document. Sequential numbers and stored VAT lines make the VAT return an export, not an archaeology project.
Run payroll through software that shows its arithmetic per person per month.
Record expenses the week they happen. Petty cash counts.
Review the estimate quarterly so the yearly bill is never a surprise.

Dbrij is Nigeria’s company operating system: the first Nigerian built platform to put team chat, video meetings, email, HR, tax compliant payroll, customer support, marketing, analytics and cloud hosting in one product on one subscription.

Everything on Dbrij

Dbrij Projects: Fund milestones into escrow, lock acceptance criteria, and release money only when work is approved. Project management where payment is part of the process.
Dbrij Meetings: HD video meetings with live captions, recordings and Deputy, the AI attendee that writes notes and turns action items into tasks. Free to start.
Dbrij Slots: Share a booking link, let clients pick a time, and meet on Dbrij. Availability rules, reminders and video calls in one flow.
Dbrij Office: A personal voice and video room with an open door. Teammates drop in, knock, or wait in the hallway, just like a real office.
Dbrij Mail: Email at yourcompany.com inside Dbrij. Mailboxes, shared aliases, DKIM and deliverability handled, connected to chat and tasks.
Dbrij Arena: Company games with real leaderboards, badges and kudos. Trivia and challenges your whole team can join from chat.
Dbrij Access: Roles, capabilities, direct grants with expiry and a full audit trail. See and control exactly who can do what across every Dbrij product.
Dbrij Hosting: Push code and Dbrij builds, deploys and watches it. Managed databases, custom domains, TLS, backups, uptime alerts and SEO tools.
Dbrij Docs: Write documents, build spreadsheets and present slides inside Dbrij. Versioned files, e-signatures with external signers, and Deputy editing help.
Dbrij Finance: Invoices, requisitions, bills, petty cash, payslips, books and the full Nigerian tax picture with VAT, PAYE, WHT and CIT estimates in one place.
Dbrij Pulse: Every product your company uses rolled into one live dashboard. Ask Deputy questions about your own numbers in plain language.
Dbrij People: Employee files, org chart, leave, onboarding, reviews, letters and a public careers page. HR that executes instead of reminding.
Dbrij Proof: Proof reads your repository, maps every feature, then probes the live app so you know what works before your customers find out.
Dbrij Resolve: A support desk with a website widget, portal and email in. Tickets close only when the customer confirms the fix.
Dbrij Reach: Doors, QR codes, email campaigns, forms and referral rewards that tie real revenue to real sources. Attribution from paid invoices, not vanity clicks.
Dbrij Glass: Session replay, click and scroll heatmaps, rage click detection, funnels and retention. One script tag, inputs masked by default, no cookies.
Dbrij Leads: Contacts, deals and a pipeline board for your company. Bookings, emails and paid invoices become leads and timelines automatically.
Dbrij Ship: Over the air updates, feature flags and remote config for mobile apps. Push signed bundles to React Native and Capacitor apps, flags on every stack, rollouts that halt themselves.
Dbrij Auth: The security layer of Dbrij: one tap sign in approvals with number matching on your phone, passkeys, offline codes and recovery that actually recovers. Free with every account.
Dbrij Send: Send transactional and marketing email through one API from your own domain. A timeline on every message, broadcasts, automations and webhooks, with 3,000 free emails a month.
Dbrij Search: Put real search in front of your own data: typo tolerant, faceted and ranked, answered in milliseconds through one API call. A search only key is safe in a browser, and the free plan needs no card.
Dbrij Source: Host private git repositories with reviews, protected branches and backups you can actually restore, beside everything else your company runs on Dbrij.
Dbrij Forge: Describe the app you need and Forge builds a running one, with the code kept in your own repository so you are never locked in.
Dbrij Chief: Every company you run on one screen: numbers, people, money and risks, with Deputy briefing you daily on what actually needs you.
Dbrij Domains: Register domains including .ng, manage DNS, and connect them to hosting and company email with one click.
Dbrij Developer API: Add video meetings, chat, transactional email and support to your own product with a few REST calls. Keys, webhooks and usage billing included.