The 20% middle tier no longer exists. A company is either small — and pays nothing, with no Development Levy either — or it pays 30%. The line moved from ₦25m of turnover to₦100m, with a second test on fixed assets. If nobody has walked you through this, it is worth twenty minutes.
Both rulebooks stay live inside Core Ledger, each with its own effective dates. Which one applies is resolved from the period being computed, not from today's date.
These are the rates and thresholds Core Ledger's own tax engine runs on — the page and the software read the same table, so they cannot drift apart. Old column struck through, current column in blue.
The old regime eased you up through a 20% band. The new one has nothing between nothing and 30%, so one naira of turnover over the line changes the whole bill. Move the sliders to your own figures — the chart is the same profit taxed at every turnover level, under both rulebooks.
Company tax plus levies, at every level of turnover. Nothing is sent anywhere — this runs in your browser.
One exception worth knowing. The Act carves professional-services companies out of small-company status, and there is no settled guidance yet on how widely that reaches. If you are a consultancy, a law or accounting firm, or similar, treat the 0% outcome as a question for your adviser rather than an answer.
At ₦100m of turnover the old regime moved you from 20% to 30% — painful, but proportionate. The new one moves you from nothing to 30% plus a 4% levy. On ₦12m of profit that is ₦4.08m appearing in a year where turnover grew by a naira.
Which is why the two limbs are worth watching monthly rather than discovering at year end — and why Core Ledger keeps turnover and fixed assets against their limits on the dashboard rather than in a report you have to ask for.
A deduction against a 0% rate is worth 0%. If you are inside the box, capital allowance and every other relief are book-keeping rather than money — until the year you leave the box, when the pool you carried forward becomes worth 30 kobo in the naira.
The Consolidated Relief Allowance is gone. In its place is a rent relief — a fifth of the rent you actually pay, capped at ₦500,000 — which means two people on identical salaries can now owe different tax. The first ₦800,000 of chargeable income is taxed at nothing.
Annual figures. Gross is treated as fully pensionable, which keeps this to two inputs instead of five.
Rent is now a payroll input. It has to be collected from every employee, kept current, and evidenced — which is a new administrative duty rather than a smaller one, and the reason a spreadsheet that worked last year does not this year.
At lower salaries the new nil band dominates and tax falls sharply. Higher up, losing a relief that scaled with gross pay starts to bite, and the direction reverses — the point where it does depends on the rent that employee pays, so move the rent slider and watch the line move. Any payroll still applying last year's relief is wrong in one direction or the other for every employee on it.
This is the change most likely to still be wrong in a schedule someone is maintaining by hand, because the old mechanism was elaborate and the new one is not. Relief is now a flat share of original cost each year until the pool runs out. Here are both schedules, year by year, on the same asset.
If your own schedule spikes in year one, check it. Total relief over the life of the asset is the same under both regimes — the cost, once. What moved is when you get it, and a schedule still built the old way overstates year one and understates every year after it.
The old regime settled up when you sold an asset — a balancing charge if you had claimed too much, a balancing allowance if you had claimed too little. Neither survives. Under the current rules the asset simply leaves the pool, the proceeds are dealt with as a chargeable gain, and only the residue is deducted. A disposal at undervalue now relieves nothing at all.
The rulebook is chosen by the period being computed, not by the date you compute it. Pick a job below — every one of these can land on the same accountant's desk in the same week.
Everything posted from 1 January 2026 is computed the new way — two company tax tiers, one levy, rent-based PAYE relief and flat capital allowance. The engine picks this up from the transaction date, so there is no switch for you to throw.
Core Ledger holds both regimes side by side, each with its own effective dates, and resolves which one applies from the period being computed rather than from today's date. That is a dull-sounding piece of engineering with a practical consequence: the transition is not a migration project you have to run, and a prior-year adjustment cannot quietly pick up this year's rates.
Everything on this page is general information about published law, not advice about your situation. The figures the instruments produce are simplified — they take the inputs shown and nothing else. Take a decision that matters to a professional who can see your whole position.
Both regimes, with their own effective dates, applied from the period being computed — and the workings kept, so the answer can be shown rather than asserted.
