Benin Statutory social-insurance contributions

What this value means

WHAT A PAYROLL ENGINE GETS WRONG IN BENIN. 1. THERE IS NO CONTRIBUTION CEILING AT ALL. This is the single most important fact about Beninese payroll and it is the opposite of almost every neighbour. Article 22 of the Code de securite sociale defines the assiette as the whole of remuneration and no article of the Code caps it; the CNSS's own rate page states the rates without a plafond; and the branch total of 19% employer plus 3,6% employee runs on the entire salary however large. An engine ported from Cote d'Ivoire, Senegal, Cameroon or Burkina Faso will carry a ceiling that does not exist here and will under-collect on every high earner. 2. THE 1 500 000 FCFA FIGURE IN CIRCULATION IS A BENEFIT CEILING, NOT A CONTRIBUTION CEILING. Article 95(6) provides that the monthly old-age or invalidity pension may not be less than 60% of the SMIG nor more than 80% of the insured's average monthly remuneration, and that "Le plafond de la pension de vieillesse ou d'invalidite est fixe periodiquement par decret pris en Conseil des Ministres" in relation to the SMIG. That is a cap on what the CNSS PAYS OUT. Sources that report a monthly plafond "pour les prestations de retraite" are describing that, and an engine that repurposes it as a contribution cap will under-collect from every employee above it. 3. THE ASSIETTE EXPRESSLY INCLUDES COMMISSIONS AND BENEFITS IN KIND. Article 22 names "indemnites, primes, gratifications, commissions et tous autres avantages en especes, ainsi que la contre-valeur des avantages en nature". Only reimbursements of expenses and benefits paid under the Code itself are excluded. Note the cross-code dependency: benefits in kind are valued "conformement aux regles prescrites par le Code general des impots", so an amendment to the TAX code changes the SOCIAL base without any social-security instrument moving. 4. TWO BRANCHES ARE EMPLOYER-ONLY BY STATUTE, NOT BY CUSTOM. Article 25 provides that family benefits and occupational risks are "a la charge exclusive de l'employeur", and that the employer's own contributions "restent definitivement a sa charge; toute convention contraire etant nulle de plein droit". Model the employee rate on those branches as a hard zero with no override. 5. THE WORKER'S PENSION SHARE HAS A STATUTORY MAXIMUM OF HALF THE BRANCH. Article 25 caps the worker's share at 50% of the pension contribution. At 3,6% of a 10% branch the worker bears 36%, leaving legal room for the worker's share to rise as far as 5% by decret alone, without touching the Code. Rates are set and revised by decret in Council of Ministers after the board's opinion (article 24(2)), and articles 36 and 37 make revision MANDATORY when the technical or security reserve falls below its required level or when the five-yearly actuarial analysis reveals a risk of imbalance. Benin's rates are therefore structurally more changeable than a statutory-rate country's, and the trigger is actuarial rather than political. 6. APPRENTICES TAKE ONLY ONE BRANCH. For apprentices and pupils of vocational schools the CNSS states that only the occupational-risks contribution applies. Running the full stack on an apprentice over-charges on family benefits and pensions. 7. OCCUPATIONAL RISK IS A CONTINUOUS BAND, 1% TO 4%, BY NATURE OF ACTIVITY - narrower at the top than Senegal's 5% or Cameroon's 5%, and set by the undertaking's activity rather than by the individual's job. There is also a statutory abatement route under article 82 for employers authorised to administer care and daily-allowance benefits themselves. 8. ONLY ONE BRANCH TOUCHES THE PAYSLIP, AND THERE IS NO HEALTH BRANCH. The employee's deduction is 3,6% for pensions and nothing else. The CNSS regime has no health-insurance branch producing a payroll contribution for an ordinary private-sector employee; do not model one. 9. THE EMPLOYER IS THE DEBTOR FOR THE WHOLE AMOUNT AND THE DEDUCTION IS NOT OPTIONAL. Article 25: the employer owes the CNSS the total contribution including the worker's share, which must be precompted at each pay, and no worker may object to the deduction. Contributions are "portables et non querables". Where a worker has two or more employers, each is separately liable on the remuneration it pays - so a multi-employer worker generates the full percentage more than once, with no aggregation and no cap to stop it. 10. CIPRES DOES NOT SET THESE RATES. Benin's CNSS is a CIPRES member, but CIPRES harmonises supervision, not rates. Benin's total of 19% employer + 3,6% employee on an UNCAPPED base is structurally unlike its WAEMU neighbours despite the shared currency. SUB-NATIONAL VARIATION: none. The CNSS regime is uniform nationally. The only differentiation is by ACTIVITY (the 1-4% occupational-risk rate), by WORKER STATUS (apprentices take occupational risk only) and by EMPLOYER AUTHORISATION (the article 82 abatement), never by department or commune. WHAT WE DO NOT PUT A NUMBER ON: I put no number on the following, deliberately. THE OCCUPATIONAL-RISK RATE FOR A GIVEN EMPLOYER - rate_employer stays null. The 1-4% band is published by the CNSS; the activity-to-rate mapping is not, and the article 82 abatement can move an individual employer off the band entirely. THE ARTICLE 82 ABATEMENT - not quantified. Its amount is fixed in the individual ministerial arrete authorising the employer to self-administer, not by any published national scale. THE PENSION BENEFIT CEILING - deliberately excluded from the contribution record. It is real and is fixed periodically by decret under article 95(6), but it belongs to the benefit side and including it here is precisely the confusion described above. TAX DEDUCTIBILITY - the tax_deductible flag is omitted throughout. I did not reach the Beninese Code general des impots provisions on whether the employee's 3,6% reduces the base of the impot sur les traitements et salaires. SOURCING CAVEATS: The three branch rates, the employer/employee split and the apprentice rule are read from the CNSS's own contribution-recovery page. The assiette, the statutory allocation of each branch, the 50% cap on the worker's pension share, the precompte obligation, the article 82 abatement and the pension-ceiling mechanism are quoted from the Code de securite sociale text published by the CNSS on its own site (loi n° 98-019, updated to 2007). I did NOT open the decret taken under article 24(2) that actually fixes the current rates - the CNSS publishes the resulting percentages without citing the decret's number or date, so effective_from is set conservatively to the date from which an independent contribution table confirms the same figures rather than to a decret date. The absence of a contribution ceiling is established negatively - no ceiling article exists in the Code's contributions chapter and the CNSS states no plafond - reinforced by an independent contribution table stating that contributions are computed on total gross income. The 0,2-point maternity element within the 9% is secondary-sourced and nothing turns on it, since the branch is levied and declared as a single 9%. Because articles 36 and 37 make rate revision mandatory on actuarial imbalance and the mechanism is a decret rather than a law, re-verify the CNSS rate page at each cycle rather than assuming multi-year stability.

Get it programmatically

curl https://afriref.dev/v1/bj/social-contributions
# $0.005 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History:    curl https://afriref.dev/v1/bj/social-contributions/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://afriref.dev/provenance/bj/social-contributions

Other Benin series: Policy rate (BCEAO minimum bid rate) · Value-added tax (TVA) standard rate · VAT registration threshold · Minimum wage (SMIG) · Public holidays · CPI inflation (IHPC, year-on-year) · Corporate income tax (IS) standard rate · Withholding tax rates · Statutory interest (taux de l'intérêt légal) · Personal income tax on salaries (ITS)

The same figure elsewhere: Botswana · Burkina Faso · Cameroon · Central African Republic · Chad · all 34