Lesotho VAT rate
The standard rate of value added tax on goods and services in Lesotho. VAT is imposed by section 5 of the Value Added Tax Act 2001 (Act No. 9 of 2001) on every taxable supply and every taxable import, and is administered by the Commissioner of Value Added Tax in Revenue Services Lesotho (RSL). Unusually, the RATES are not in the Act: section 19(3) says 'The rates of value added tax shall be prescribed by regulation but shall not exceed four rates, including a zero rate', so the standard rate lives in regulation 6(1) of the Value Added Tax Regulations 2003 (Legal Notice No. 95 of 2003) as amended by legal notice from time to time.
| Current value | 15 percent |
|---|---|
| In force from | 2018-04-01 |
| Official source | Legal Notice No. 27 of 2018, Value Added Tax (Amendment) Regulations 2018 (Lesotho Government Gazette Extraordinary Vol. 63, Friday 23rd March 2018, No. 24, p. 287), made by the Minister of Finance under section 88(1)(e) of the Value Added Tax Act 2001: 'shall come into operation on the 1st April, 2018' and 'Regulation 6 of the Value Added Tax Regulations, 2003, is amended by ... (b) deleting "14%" in paragraph (c) and substituting "15%"' |
| Last verified | 2026-07-24 |
| Verification | primary — No verification limitation recorded — read from the official source cited. |
| Provenance | source fingerprint |
What this value means
RAISED from 14% to 15% with effect from 1 April 2018 (announced in the 2018/19 budget speech of 28 February 2018 and gazetted three weeks later as LN 27 of 2018). The 15% standard rate is unchanged since and is confirmed as current on Revenue Services Lesotho's own Tax Rates page (https://www.rsl.org.ls/tax-rates) and VAT page (https://www.rsl.org.ls/value-added-tax-vat), both of which list: '0% - Exports and basic commodities; 10% - Electricity; 15% - Telecommunications; 15% - Other goods and services'. FOUR-RATE STRUCTURE — do not confuse the legs. Regulation 6(1) of the VAT Regulations 2003 has paragraph (a) zero rate (exports and basic commodities), paragraph (b) electricity, paragraph (c) the standard rate on other goods and services, and paragraph (d) telecommunications, which was ADDED by LN 27 of 2018 at 9% (the same notice deleted the words 'and telephone calls, 5%' from paragraph (b), leaving electricity there at 8%). The subsequent amendments touched only the electricity and telecoms legs, never the standard rate: LN 18 of 2020 (Value Added Tax (Amendment) Regulations 2020, in operation 1 April 2020) took paragraph (b) from 8% to 9% and paragraph (d) from 12% to 15%; LN 30 of 2021 (dated 5 March 2021, in operation 1 April 2021) took paragraph (b) from 9% to 10%. An intermediate notice moved telecoms from 9% to 12% — Value Added Tax Amendment (Regulations) No. 34 of 2019 — which was not opened in this pass; the endpoint (15%) is confirmed by RSL and by LN 18 of 2020. So Lesotho today runs 0% / 10% electricity / 15% telecoms / 15% standard, exactly at the four-rate ceiling section 19(3) allows. REGISTRATION THRESHOLD: M2,000,000 of taxable turnover per annum (RSL VAT page); auctioneers must register regardless of turnover; voluntary registration is available below the threshold. NO 2026 CHANGE: the 2026/27 budget speech (18 February 2026) proposed only personal tax credit and threshold adjustments and a VAT Administration Bill; it proposed no change to the VAT rate, and the only VAT legal notice RSL has published in 2026 is the e-invoicing instrument (VAT (E-Invoicing) Regulations No. 25 of 2026). ACCESS NOTES: www.rsl.org.ls is severely flaky — roughly half of all HTTPS connections are refused outright and retries are needed for every fetch. RSL's own Legal Notices index (https://www.rsl.org.ls/legal-notices) is BROKEN: every 'Download' button on it has an empty href, so the PDFs are only reachable through the per-item node pages (e.g. /node/635) or the topic pages. The RSL Tax Rates page also carries injected spam links to Ukrainian payday-loan sites, so the page is compromised even though the rate figures on it match the gazetted instruments.
Earlier values
| From | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 2003-07-01 | 14 | Value Added Tax Regulations 2003 (Legal Notice No. 95 of 200 |
Get it programmatically
curl https://afriref.dev/v1/ls/vat
# $0.001 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History: curl https://afriref.dev/v1/ls/vat/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://afriref.dev/provenance/ls/vatOther Lesotho series: policy interest rate · minimum wage · public holidays · inflation rate (CPI) · corporate tax rate · income tax rates