Cameroon Statutory social-insurance contributions

What this value means

WHAT A PAYROLL ENGINE GETS WRONG IN CAMEROON. 1. TWO OF THE THREE BRANCHES ARE CAPPED AND THE THIRD IS NOT. Family benefits and PVID stop at a contributory salary of 750 000 FCFA/month. Occupational risk is levied on the whole salary with no ceiling. This is the single most expensive modelling error available in Cameroon and it only shows up on high earners, so it survives testing on ordinary salaries. At 3 000 000 FCFA/month in a 5% establishment the uncapped branch alone is 150 000 FCFA against a capped model's 37 500 FCFA. 2. THE CEILING IS 750 000, NOT 300 000. Decret n°2016/072 of 15 February 2016 raised it, and 300 000 FCFA is still published by live government-facing portals. It is the same decret that moved the pension rate, so a source carrying 300 000 is almost certainly wrong on the pension split too. 3. THE 2016 PENSION INCREASE FELL ENTIRELY ON THE WORKER, AND THE EMPLOYER FIGURE IS UNCHANGED. Before: 7% total, 4,2% employer, 2,8% employee. After: 8,4% total, 4,2% employer, 4,2% employee. Because the employer share is identical either side of the change, a stale table produces the correct employer cost on this branch and only understates the employee deduction - by exactly 1,4 points of capped salary, up to 10 500 FCFA a month. Reconciling employer cost will not detect it. 4. FAMILY BENEFITS HAS THREE RATES CHOSEN BY SECTOR. 7% general, 5,65% agricultural, 3,70% private education - all employer-only, all on the 750 000 ceiling. This sector test is separate from, and must not be conflated with, the occupational-risk band assigned to the establishment. 5. OCCUPATIONAL RISK HAS THREE DISCRETE RATES, NOT A RANGE. 1,75%, 2,50%, 5%. Do not interpolate. Note that Cameroon's bands (1,75/2,5/5) differ from Senegal's (1/3/5) and from Cote d'Ivoire's continuous 2-5% band even though all three are CIPRES members - the bands are national and are not harmonised. 6. THERE IS A FLOOR AS WELL AS A CEILING, AND IT MOVES. The contributory salary may not be less than the SMIG. The SMIG is fixed by decret and has moved repeatedly in recent years, so the floor is a live parameter, not a constant. A single SMIG figure should not be hard-coded, and note that Cameroon publishes more than one minimum: a non-agricultural private-sector figure, a lower agricultural figure, and a separate figure for State agents governed by the Code du travail. 7. ONLY ONE BRANCH TOUCHES THE PAYSLIP. Family benefits and occupational risk are wholly employer-borne. The employee's deduction is 4,2% for PVID and nothing else. There is NO CNPS HEALTH BRANCH in Cameroon - no employee health contribution exists in this scheme, and a universal-health-coverage payroll contribution should not be modelled unless and until one is legislated with its own instrument. 8. EMPLOYER TOTALS. General non-agricultural sector: 7% + 4,2% capped, plus 1,75%, 2,50% or 5% uncapped. Expressing Cameroon as a single "employer percentage" is not possible, because two of the components stop at 750 000 FCFA and one does not. 9. CIPRES DOES NOT SET THESE RATES. Cameroon's CNPS is a CIPRES member, but CIPRES harmonises supervision, not contribution rates or ceilings. Cameroon's 750 000 FCFA ceiling is specific to Cameroon and must never be carried to another CEMAC state sharing the XAF. SUB-NATIONAL VARIATION: none. The CNPS regime is uniform across all ten regions. The only differentiation is by SECTOR (the three family-benefit rates) and by ESTABLISHMENT RISK (the three occupational-risk bands), never by region. 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 three bands are published; the activity-to-band mapping is not, and the operative band attaches to the undertaking's assessed risk. The three possible rates are given so an engine can bound the exposure. THE FLOOR AMOUNT - floor_monthly is omitted rather than filled with a SMIG figure. The rule (contributory salary not less than the SMIG) is served in the base text, but the SMIG itself is a separately moving instrument with sector-specific values and a contested recent history in the public record, and pinning one number into the contribution record would silently freeze a parameter that is not part of this instrument. TAX DEDUCTIBILITY - the tax_deductible flag is omitted throughout. I did not reach the Cameroonian Code general des impots provisions on whether the employee's 4,2% PVID share reduces the base of the salary taxes. VOLUNTARY INSURANCE - not modelled. The CNPS runs a voluntary regime for independent and informal-sector workers alongside the obligatory regime for Code du travail employees; this record covers the obligatory regime for an ordinary private-sector employee only. SOURCING CAVEATS: The decisive facts - the identity and date of decret n°2016/072, the ceiling moving from 300 000 to 750 000 FCFA, the PVID rate moving from 7% to 8,4% with the worker's share moving from 2,8% to 4,2%, and the SMIG floor rule - are taken from the CNPS's own website content describing that decret. I did not open the decret's own text: its operative articles, its stated entry into force and its treatment of the occupational-risk assiette remain unread, and the CNPS site returned 403 to direct retrieval of some pages. The absence of a ceiling on the occupational-risk branch is the one point where I would most want the decret itself; it rests on two independent sources agreeing - CLEISS's contribution table and the Cameroonian government's business-procedure portal - rather than on the instrument. The three sectoral family-benefit rates and the three occupational-risk bands come from the CLEISS table stated effective 1 January 2024. The SMIG decret number and date are secondary-sourced and the public record disagrees on the private-sector amount, which is precisely why no floor figure is served. Re-verify on any new CNPS decret and at each SMIG revision.

Get it programmatically

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

Other Cameroon series: Policy interest rate (BEAC TIAO) · Value added tax (TVA) · VAT registration threshold · Guaranteed interprofessional minimum wage (SMIG) · Public holidays · Consumer price inflation (year-on-year) · Corporate income tax (Impot sur les Societes) · Withholding tax rates · Statutory interest (taux d'intérêt légal) · Personal income tax (IRPP) - salary schedule

The same figure elsewhere: Central African Republic · Chad · Côte d'Ivoire · Democratic Republic of the Congo · Egypt · all 34