Equatorial Guinea Statutory social-insurance contributions
Equatorial Guinea has 2 contribution branches on the calendar held here, in force from 1 Jan 1990. Last checked against the official source on 11 Aug 2026.
Mandatory payroll contributions for an ordinary private-sector employee in Equatorial Guinea (GQ): employee and employer shares of each statutory branch, with the base and the instrument fixing each rate.
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| Current value | 2 entries — see the API for the full schedule |
|---|---|
| In force from | 1990-01-01 |
| Official source | PwC Worldwide Tax Summaries, Equatorial Guinea — Individual: Other taxes (INSESO employer 21.5 % / employee 4.5 %; Work Protection Fund employer 1 % / employee 0.5 %); ILO NATLEX records for Equatorial Guinea: Decreto núm. 104 de 10 de marzo de 1984 promulgating the Ley de Seguridad Social de la República de Guinea Ecuatorial, Decreto núm. 100/1990 approving the Reglamento del Régimen General de la Seguridad Social, and Decreto núm. 23 approving the Estatuto Orgánico del Instituto de Seguridad Social (INSESO); Equatoguinean labour-practice commentary on payroll composition and the treatment of pagas extraordinarias. |
| Last verified | 2026-08-11 |
| Verification | secondary — Corroborated, but the primary instrument was NOT read (usually the publishing host blocks automated access). Marked secondary because no Equatoguinean primary instrument stating the contribution PERCENTAGES could be reached. Specifically: (1) INSESO/INSESO's Ministry has no published rate page that I could retrieve — the institute has no working public website with a contributions schedule; (2) the Boletín Oficial del Estado of Equatorial Guinea (boe.gob.gq) is online and has a search facility, but I did not retrieve from it the text of the Ley de Seguridad Social (Decreto núm. 104 of 10 March 1984), the Reglamento del Régimen General de la Seguridad Social (Decreto núm. 100/1990) or any subsequent rate decree, so the articles fixing 4,5 %, 21,5 %, 0,5 % and 1 % have not been read; (3) the ILO NATLEX database records the existence and titles of those decrees but not their operative text; (4) consequently the four percentages are taken from PwC Worldwide Tax Summaries for Equatorial Guinea, corroborated by independent Equatoguinean labour-practice commentary that states the 4,5 % worker withholding, the 21,5 % employer addition and the 26 % total, and separately the 0,5 % worker Work Protection Fund element. Additional unresolved items: no maximum contribution base was found and none is asserted; no per-branch decomposition of the 26 % was found; the statutory basis of the Work Protection Fund is identified only as a Ministry of Labour levy under the labour legislation, with no decree number; and the effective_from date is inferred from the year of Decreto núm. 100/1990, not verified against any rate-commencement provision. |
| Provenance | source fingerprint |
What this value means
WHAT A PAYROLL ENGINE GETS WRONG IN EQUATORIAL GUINEA. 1. THERE ARE TWO CHARGES, NOT ONE, AND THE SECOND IS SMALL ENOUGH TO DISAPPEAR. INSESO at 4,5 % employee / 21,5 % employer, plus the Work Protection Fund at 0,5 % employee / 1 % employer. Combined: 5 % from the employee and 22,5 % from the employer, 27,5 % of gross salary in total. Records that stop at "26 %" have dropped the Work Protection Fund. 2. THE SPLIT IS EXTREMELY ASYMMETRIC. The employer carries roughly 82 % of the total burden. Cost-of-employment models built on an assumption of shared contribution will understate Equatoguinean employer cost by a large margin, and net-pay models will overstate the employee deduction if they mirror the employer rate. 3. THE BASE INCLUDES THE PAGAS EXTRAORDINARIAS. Statutory extraordinary payments are salary for contribution purposes. A month containing one carries contributions on the enlarged base; there is no separate treatment or exemption for them. 4. NO PER-BRANCH DECOMPOSITION EXISTS. Unlike most systems in this dataset, Equatorial Guinea does not publish the 26 % split between pensions, sickness, maternity, occupational risk and family benefits. There is no occupational-accident tariff to look up and no hazard class — the single rate covers the whole general regime whatever the industry. 5. THE EMPLOYER REMITS BOTH SIDES OF BOTH CHARGES. The obligation to withhold and remit sits entirely with the undertaking, and it applies to all private and public undertakings operating in the country. Non-remittance is a live enforcement issue in Equatorial Guinea — cases of large employers having failed to pay over withheld INSESO contributions for years have reached the national press — so an engine should treat the withheld employee share as a liability held on trust, not as a cash-flow item. 6. THE MINIMUM WAGE IS THE PRACTICAL FLOOR OF THE BASE. There is no separate contribution floor; the base cannot fall below the statutory minimum wage because the contract cannot. SUB-NATIONAL VARIATION: none identified. INSESO operates a single national general regime covering both the insular region (Bioko, Annobón) and the continental region (Río Muni); no provincial rate variation was found. WHAT WE DO NOT PUT A NUMBER ON: ANY CEILING ON THE CONTRIBUTION BASE — deliberately absent rather than asserted as nil. No maximum contribution base was found in any reachable instrument or authority publication, and PwC's summary is silent on it. Do NOT infer from this record that the base is definitely uncapped for high earners; treat the presence or absence of a cap as an open question to be resolved against INSESO before pricing a senior hire. THE PER-BRANCH SPLIT OF THE 26 % — not served, because it is not published. THE MINIMUM WAGE (SMIG) — not served here. It bounds the base in practice but is a separate series, and the current figure was not verified for this record. SELF-EMPLOYED AND VOLUNTARY CONTRIBUTION RATES — outside the scope of an employed-person record. INSESO's remit covers self-employed as well as employed Equatoguinean workers, on terms not served here. GRATUITY, SEVERANCE AND OTHER LABOUR-CODE ENTITLEMENTS — not contributions. The Ley General de Trabajo creates termination entitlements that are employer liabilities but are not monthly percentages remitted to a fund. SOURCING CAVEATS: see confidence_note. In short: the rates could not be read from an Equatoguinean primary instrument or from INSESO's own publication, and are served on the authority of a major professional compilation corroborated by Equatoguinean labour-practice sources. The effective date is the weakest field: 1 January 1990 is given as the year of the Reglamento del Régimen General de la Seguridad Social (Decreto núm. 100/1990), which is the instrument that governs the general regime, NOT a verified commencement date for the current percentages. The rates are long-standing and have been reported unchanged across successive editions of the compilation used, but the date itself should not be relied on.
Get it programmatically
curl https://afriref.dev/v1/gq/social-contributions
# $0.005 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History: curl https://afriref.dev/v1/gq/social-contributions/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://afriref.dev/provenance/gq/social-contributionsOther Equatorial Guinea series: Policy interest rate (BEAC TIAO) · Value added tax (Impuesto sobre el Valor Anadido, IVA) - standard rate · VAT registration threshold · Salario minimo interprofesional (SMI) · Public holidays · Consumer price inflation (year-on-year) · Corporate income tax (Impuesto sobre Sociedades) · Withholding tax rates · Statutory interest (interés legal / taux d'intérêt légal) · Personal income tax (Impuesto sobre Sueldos y Salarios / IRPF)
The same figure elsewhere: Eswatini · Ethiopia · Gabon · Ghana · Kenya · all 34