On 1 January 2026, the Nigeria Tax Act 2025 replaced the old Personal Income Tax Act rules for salaries. Every payroll system in Nigeria had to change: the Consolidated Relief Allowance is gone, the first ₦800,000 of chargeable income a year is now tax-free, there's a new rent relief, and the bands are new.
We build HR and payroll software at Orion Soft in Lagos, so we had to get this right anyway. We've now released the tax engine as open source, so nobody else has to rebuild it from the gazette.
Install
npm install nigeria-paye Zero dependencies, TypeScript types included, works in Node.js and the browser.
Use
import { payeSummary } from "nigeria-paye"; // ₦1,000,000 a month, paying ₦2.4m rent a year const pay = payeSummary(1_000_000, { annualRent: 2_400_000 }); pay.paye.monthly; // 140900 PAYE per month pay.net; // 779100 take-home pay pay.effectiveTaxRate; // 14.09 % of gross pay.comparison.monthlySaving; // 10566.67 kept vs the old law pay.employerTotalCost; // 1120000 incl. employer pension, NSITF, ITF What it handles
The new annual bands:
| Chargeable income | Rate |
|---|---|
| First ₦800,000 | 0% |
| Next ₦2,200,000 | 15% |
| Next ₦9,000,000 | 18% |
| Next ₦13,000,000 | 21% |
| Next ₦25,000,000 | 23% |
| Above ₦50,000,000 | 25% |
Plus:
- Reliefs before tax: employee pension (8%), National Housing Fund (2.5% of basic), health insurance (NHIS), and rent relief (20% of annual rent, capped at ₦500,000)
- Employer costs: pension (10%), NSITF (1%), ITF (1%)
- Old-law comparison: the previous PITA calculation (consolidated relief, 7–24% bands, minimum tax, minimum-wage exemption), so you can show users whether they keep more or pay more in 2026
- A band-by-band breakdown for payslips and explanations
Not using JavaScript? There's a free API
No key, CORS enabled:
curl "https://www.orionsoftlimited.com/api/public/paye?salary=500000&rent=1200000" You get PAYE, every deduction, take-home pay, the bands, employer cost and the old-law comparison as JSON. There's an OpenAPI spec, a public Postman workspace, and docs at orionsoftlimited.com/developers.
And if you just want to check your own salary: the calculator.
Accuracy, and how you can help
The figures are estimates for salaried employees based on the published rates and reliefs; they're tested against hand-worked examples. If you find a case where your state IRS computes something different, please open an issue. Pull requests welcome.
⭐ GitHub: orionsoftlimited/nigeria-paye
Orion Soft builds hospital, school, HR and payroll software for organisations across Africa, and custom software for clients worldwide. If you're building something in or for Africa, say hello.
