Botswana Withholding tax rates
Botswana Withholding tax rates: no single figure applies. The reason is set out below, cited to the governing instrument. Last checked against the official source on 10 Aug 2026.
Botswana domestic statutory withholding tax rates on payments to non-residents, administered by the Botswana Unified Revenue Service (BURS). Since 1 July 2026 these are imposed as 'non-resident tax' under section 10 and Schedule 1 paragraph 6 of the Income Tax Act, 2026 (Act No. 13 of 2026), which repealed the Income Tax Act Cap 52:01; the five long-standing rates were carried over unchanged.
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What this value means
THERE IS NO SINGLE WITHHOLDING TAX RATE, WHICH IS WHY value IS NULL. Botswana levies different statutory withholding rates depending on the character of the payment (dividends, interest, royalties, technical/management fees, entertainment fees, and several categories new in 2026); read withholding_rates rather than expecting a headline figure. ALL RATES ARE DOMESTIC STATUTORY RATES, BEFORE TREATY RELIEF. A double-tax agreement can reduce any of them (Botswana's treaties commonly reduce the dividend rate to 5% for substantial corporate shareholders, for example). We do NOT serve treaty rates: they are bilateral, depend on the recipient's residence, beneficial ownership and shareholding, and applying one is a legal determination rather than a lookup. INCOME TAX ACT 2026 COMMENCEMENT: the guidance that the new Act was gazetted with a blank/unproclaimed commencement date is NOT borne out by the primary source. The Income Tax Act, 2026 (Act No. 13 of 2026) was assented to on 29 June 2026 and published in a Government Extraordinary Gazette dated 1 July 2026 with 'Date of Commencement: 01.07.2026' printed on its face; BURS publicly confirmed on 1 July 2026 that the new Income Tax Act 'officially came into force'. It repealed Cap 52:01 (section 143). One residual formality: section 1 still reads 'shall come into operation on such date as the Minister may, by Order published in the Gazette, appoint', so commencement rests on a ministerial order, but both the gazetted commencement date and BURS administration treat the Act as in force from 1 July 2026 — Cap 52:01 no longer governs. Substantively the five classic non-resident rates are unchanged from Cap 52:01 (dividends 10% — raised from 7.5% effective 1 July 2021 by the Income Tax (Amendment) Act 2021; interest, royalties and management/consultancy ['technical'] fees 15%; entertainment fees 10%). The 2026 Act ADDS new non-resident withholding categories: insurance premiums 3%, director's fees 15%, natural resource amounts 15%, repatriated profits of a Botswana permanent establishment 10% (a new branch-profits tax), and capital gains 10%. 'Technical fee' is defined in section 2 as any amount payable for 'an administrative, managerial, technical, or consulting service or any similar service... or the development or customisation of software', so the former management-or-consultancy-fee head is now taxed as technical fees at the same 15%.
Get it programmatically
curl https://afriref.dev/v1/bw/withholding-tax
# $0.005 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History: curl https://afriref.dev/v1/bw/withholding-tax/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://afriref.dev/provenance/bw/withholding-taxOther Botswana series: Monetary Policy Rate (MoPR) · VAT standard rate · VAT registration threshold · Minimum wage (general hourly rate, scheduled trades) · Public holidays · CPI inflation (year-on-year) · Corporate income tax rate · Prescribed rate of interest · Personal income tax brackets (resident individuals) · Statutory social-insurance contributions
The same figure elsewhere: Burkina Faso · Cameroon · Central African Republic · Chad · Côte d'Ivoire · all 34