What lands in your account?
Enter your salary. No button. The alert below updates as you type.
Before deductions. Include allowances if they're part of your normal pay.
+ Rent, pension basis, NHF
Unlocks rent relief. Keep your tenancy agreement handy.
Blank uses full gross, which slightly overstates the deduction.
Type a number above — your alert appears here.
Why your payslip looks different this year
Nigeria rewired how it taxes salaries on 1 January 2026. The Nigeria Tax Act 2025 tore up the old Personal Income Tax Act bands and killed the Consolidated Relief Allowance, so if your mental math is still running on 2025 assumptions, it's wrong now. Not slightly off. Wrong.
The good news for most people: this version is more generous at the bottom and middle of the income scale. The bad news, if you can call it that, is that it takes more once you're well into seven figures monthly. Where you land depends on your chargeable income, which is what the ladder above shows in real time as you type.
Tip
Two protections exist for low earners, and people mix them up. One: monthly gross at or below ₦70,000 means PAYE-exempt, full stop. Two: even above that, your first ₦800,000 of yearly chargeable income is taxed at 0%. You can benefit from the second without technically being a "minimum wage" earner.
The order things get deducted in
Gross pay comes first. Pension comes off that. NHF, if it applies to you, comes off next. Rent relief, if you can document it, comes off after that. What survives all three subtractions is your chargeable income, and that's the only figure the tax bands ever touch. Skip this order and your number will be wrong even if every individual rate is right.
Worth knowing
Pension runs on basic salary, housing and transport allowance combined, not your whole gross. If your payslip lumps everything into one line with no breakdown, ask HR for the split. It can move your take-home by real money, especially if a big share of your package is bonus pay that shouldn't be pensionable at all.
A note on bonuses
A lump sum lands on top of your annual gross and usually gets taxed at your marginal rate, the rate on your last naira earned, not your average rate across the year. That's often higher than what you'd guess from your monthly payslip. Add it to your annual gross above and treat that as a separate "what if."
Questions people actually ask
Why is my take-home lower than gross minus 15%?
Because pension comes off your full gross before tax is even calculated. Someone on ₦500,000 a month loses ₦40,000 to pension alone before PAYE enters the picture.
Does this apply if I'm self-employed or a freelancer?
No. This tool is built for salaried PAYE employees. Self-employed income runs through direct assessment, a different process, and this number won't match yours.
Is rent relief automatic?
No. You have to declare what you pay, and most employers want a lease document or receipt before applying it to your payroll.
What happened to the Consolidated Relief Allowance?
Gone. Replaced by rent relief: 20% of what you actually pay in rent each year, capped at ₦500,000. If you don't rent, you don't get this one.
Quick sanity check
Assumes standard 8% pension on full gross, no NHF, no rent relief claimed. Your own numbers above will differ.
| Monthly gross | PAYE | Take-home |
|---|
Sources
- Nigeria Tax Act 2025, Fourth Schedule — PAYE bands, effective 1 January 2026
- PwC Nigeria, Worldwide Tax Summaries — minimum wage exemption and rent relief structure
- National Pension Commission (PenCom) — 8% employee / 10% employer contribution rate
- PwC Nigeria, Worldwide Tax Summaries — NHF at 2.5%, private-sector voluntary status
Last checked 8 August 2026. PenCom has proposed raising the employer pension rate; this page updates if that becomes law.
Estimates only, based on what you enter and current published rules. Not a tax assessment. Confirm with your payroll team or the Nigeria Revenue Service.