Lesotho corporate tax rate
The rate of income tax on the chargeable income of a resident company from sources other than manufacturing — item 4, 'Other income', of the Third Schedule (Resident Company Income Tax Rates) to the Income Tax Act 1993 (Act No. 9 of 1993), applied by section 10 of that Act and collected by Revenue Services Lesotho. The Lesotho year of assessment runs 1 April to 31 March unless the Commissioner General approves a substituted accounting period; companies pay in three advance instalments under section 150 and file by 30 June.
| Current value | 25 percent |
|---|---|
| In force from | 2007-04-01 |
| Official source | Income Tax Act 1993 (Act No. 9 of 1993), Third Schedule (section 10), 'Resident Company Income Tax Rates', item 4 'Other income ... 25%', the Schedule having been substituted by section 3 of Act No. 2 of 2007 — consolidated text published by Revenue Services Lesotho on its own site; confirmed as current by RSL's Tax Rates page ('Company Income Tax (CIT): For manufacturing companies and commercial farming 10%; Other companies 25%') |
| Last verified | 2026-07-24 |
| Verification | primary — No verification limitation recorded — read from the official source cited. |
| Provenance | source fingerprint |
What this value means
OTHER RATES IN THE SAME SCHEDULE (not this series): item 1, manufacturing income from a manufacturing activity of an industrial, scientific or educational nature which promotes industrial, scientific, educational or other development within Lesotho — 10%; item 2, manufacturing income from activities relating exclusively to exports to a country outside the Southern African Customs Union — 0%; item 3, other manufacturing income — 10%. RSL's public Tax Rates page compresses this to 'manufacturing companies and commercial farming 10%'; commercial farming is not named in the Third Schedule text (subsistence farming income of a resident individual is exempt under section 29), so treat the farming leg as an administrative statement by RSL rather than a schedule item. BROKEN OFFICIAL GUIDE — DO NOT USE IT. RSL's own 'Guide on Corporate Tax' (https://www.rsl.org.ls/sites/default/files/2025-06/Guide%20on%20Corporate%20Tax.pdf) prints a rate table whose rate column is misaligned: it shows manufacturing income at 25% and 'Other Income' at 10%, i.e. the two rates swapped. Its own explanatory notes immediately below contradict the table ('a corporate tax rate of 25% is imposed on profits of a resident non-manufacturing company or branch profits of a non-resident company' and '10% is levied on income from exporting manufactured goods outside the Customs Union'), and the table also contradicts RSL's Tax Rates page and the Act. The Act is right; the guide's table is wrong. BRANCHES: the rate applies to all income of a Lesotho branch of a non-resident company; section 12(1) taxes a non-resident at the standard rate of tax. EFFECTIVE-DATE CONFIDENCE: the RATE is solid, the DATE is an inference. The only annotation in the consolidated Act is '[Third Schedule substituted by sec. 3 of Act No. 2 of 2007]', and the Income Tax (Amendment) Act 2007 could not be retrieved from any reachable official source — RSL's Legal Notices index does not list it and its download links are all broken, LesothoLII does not hold it and is behind a Cloudflare bot wall, and gazettes.africa's Lesotho collection has no 2007 year. 1 April 2007 is used because that is the start of the 2007/08 Lesotho year of assessment, which is when amendments of this kind bite; re-verify the date if the amending Act ever becomes reachable. STALENESS WARNING ON THE SOURCE DOCUMENT: the consolidation RSL hosts is titled 'Updated up to 1 April 2012'. It is fourteen years out of date and its Second Schedule (individuals) is definitively stale — it still shows 22%/35% on M40,368 when the current rates are 20%/30% on M77,760. The Third Schedule figures are nonetheless corroborated by RSL's current Tax Rates page, so 25% stands. NO 2026 CHANGE: the 2026/27 budget speech delivered on 18 February 2026 proposed only personal income tax credit and threshold adjustments plus a Tax Amendments Bill and a VAT Administration Bill 'to be tabled in 2026/27'; it proposed no change to the company rate, and Corporate Income Tax revenue is budgeted at M1.11 billion, 'broadly stable'. OTHER COMPANY-LEVEL CHARGES not in this rate: fringe benefit tax 40% of the taxable amount; additional tax for late filing or payment 22% per twelve-month period; withholding tax on resident contractors 5%, non-resident contractors 10%, non-resident technical services 7.5% (RSA only).
Get it programmatically
curl https://afriref.dev/v1/ls/corporate-tax
# $0.001 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History: curl https://afriref.dev/v1/ls/corporate-tax/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://afriref.dev/provenance/ls/corporate-taxOther Lesotho series: policy interest rate · VAT rate · minimum wage · public holidays · inflation rate (CPI) · income tax rates