How to file your taxes as a Nigerian business

Filing taxes as a small Nigerian business is less about the maths and more about knowing which steps apply to you, and which dates you cannot afford to miss. Here is the order it actually happens in.

1. Start with your CAC registration

Everything downstream, VAT, Company Income Tax, PAYE, assumes your business is registered with the Corporate Affairs Commission. Under the 2026 reforms, a newly incorporated business's CAC RC Number now doubles as its unified Tax ID. That means if you are registering a new company today, you do not file a separate application for a Tax Identification Number, it is issued alongside your incorporation.

Two groups still need to apply for a TIN separately from the Nigeria Revenue Service: businesses registered before the 2026 reform took effect, and sole proprietors or informal businesses that have not incorporated with CAC at all. If you are not sure which category you fall into, that is the first thing to confirm before anything else on this list.

2. Register for VAT once you cross the threshold

VAT registration becomes required once your business crosses ₦50,000,000 in annual turnover. Below that threshold, you are generally not required to register or charge VAT. Once you are registered, the current rate is 7.5%, charged on top of the sale price and collected from your customer, not deducted from your margin.

Monthly VAT returns are due by the 21st of the following month. Miss it once and it is usually recoverable with a conversation and a penalty. Miss it repeatedly and it becomes the kind of problem that shows up when you are trying to get a loan or a bigger customer that wants to see your compliance history.

3. File your Company Income Tax return, even at 0%

This is the step most small businesses get wrong, not the tax itself, but the filing. Businesses with annual turnover under ₦100,000,000 currently qualify for a 0% Company Income Tax rate. Above that threshold, standard CIT of 30% applies to profit. But the exemption is not automatic and it is not a reason to skip filing.

The penalty structure is what makes this worth taking seriously: an initial ₦25,000 for filing late, then ₦5,000 for every month it stays unfiled after that. That is money leaving your business for a form, not for tax owed.

4. Register for PAYE if you have staff

The moment you put anyone on payroll, even one person, you are expected to register as an employer with your State Internal Revenue Service and deduct Pay As You Earn tax from their pay. PAYE deducted in a given month is due for remittance by the 10th of the following month.

• Register with your state's Internal Revenue Service before your first payroll run.
• Deduct PAYE from each employee's pay using the applicable tax brackets.
• Remit what you deducted by the 10th of the following month, every month.

5. Keep records as you go, not at year-end

Every one of the filings above depends on being able to show your revenue, your expenses, and your sales history when asked. Invoices, receipts, and bank statements are the raw material for all of it. The businesses that struggle at tax time are almost always the ones trying to reconstruct a year of sales from memory and scattered chat messages in the weeks before a deadline.

This is exactly the gap Lameda's Books and Analytics area is built to close. Every order placed through your Lameda store gets logged automatically as it is verified, sale by sale, with VAT computed on taxable sales as it happens rather than estimated afterward. The intention is that your records fall out of running your store day to day, instead of being a separate task you have to remember to do. Books is still being built out, so treat it as the direction Lameda is headed rather than a finished substitute for your own record-keeping today, but the sales log behind it is already accumulating with every order.

A rough checklist

1. Confirm your CAC registration status and whether you need a separate TIN.
2. Track your rolling annual turnover against the ₦50M VAT threshold.
3. Register for and file VAT monthly, by the 21st, once you cross it.
4. File your CIT return within 6 months of year-end, even if you owe ₦0.
5. Register for PAYE and remit by the 10th, the day you hire your first person.
6. Keep invoices, receipts, and bank statements current, not reconstructed later.