Zambia Personal income tax (PAYE) bands
Zambia Personal income tax (PAYE) bands run from 0% to 37% across 4 bands, cited to The Income Tax (Amendment) Act, 2023, in force since 1 Jan 2024. Last checked against the official source on 24 Jul 2026.
Statutory rate schedule for individuals in Charging Schedule paragraph 2(1) of the Income Tax Act, Chapter 323 of the Laws of Zambia, operated by employers as Pay As You Earn (PAYE) and administered by the Zambia Revenue Authority. The Act states the bands ANNUALLY; ZRA's monthly PAYE tables are these figures divided by twelve. Tax deducted must be remitted to ZRA by the 10th of the following month.
| Current value | 0–37% across 4 bands |
|---|---|
| In force from | 2024-01-01 |
| Official source | The Income Tax (Amendment) Act, 2023 — Act No. 22 of 2023 (enacted 26 December 2023; s.1(2): 'This Act shall come into operation on 1st January, 2024'), s.11(a) amending Charging Schedule paragraph 2(1): exempt threshold raised to sixty-one thousand two hundred Kwacha; 20% to K85,200; 30% to K110,400; thirty-seven percent per annum on the balance above K110,400 |
| Last verified | 2026-07-24 |
| Verification | primary — No verification limitation recorded — read from the official source cited. |
| Provenance | source fingerprint |
What this value means
CORRECTION TO THE COMMISSIONING BRIEF: there was NO threshold change in the latest national budget. The bands have been unchanged since 1 January 2024. I read the full text of every subsequent amending Act: the Income Tax (Amendment) Act No. 22 of 2024 (effective 1 Jan 2025) and the Income Tax (Amendment) Act No. 10 of 2025 (effective 19 Aug 2025) do not touch Charging Schedule paragraph 2(1), and the Income Tax (Amendment) (No. 2) Act No. 17 of 2025 — the 2026-budget Act, assented 23 December 2025, commencing 1 January 2026 — amends the Charging Schedule only at paragraph 5 (rental turnover rates and the railway PPP ladder), leaving the individual bands alone. Several tax-advisory sites state that the 2026 budget 'revised the PAYE bands'; that is wrong, and one states the top rate as 37.5%, which is also wrong — the statutory top rate is thirty-seven percent. MONTHLY TABLE as operated by ZRA: first K5,100 at 0%; next K2,000 (K5,100.01-K7,100) at 20%; next K2,100 (K7,100.01-K9,200) at 30%; balance above K9,200 at 37%. ZRA's own worked example on its Tax Information page confirms this (gross K15,000/month gives tax of K3,176.00). The bands ratcheted up quickly before freezing: the exempt threshold went K48,000 (to 2021) -> K54,000 (Act No. 43 of 2021, 2022) -> K57,600 (Act No. 24 of 2022, 2023) -> K61,200 (Act No. 22 of 2023, 2024) and has been static for three charge years, so real bracket creep is significant given 2024-25 inflation above 14%. HISTORY is deliberately empty: the pre-2024 THRESHOLDS are verifiable from the amending Acts (they are given above), but each of those Acts amends only the figures it changes and never restates the full schedule, so the marginal RATES that applied in 2022 and 2023 (in particular whether the top rate was then 37.5%) cannot be established from any current official Zambian text — the consolidated Income Tax Act published by the National Assembly is the 1996 edition. Unverified band arrays are not served. RELATED, NOT MODELLED IN THE BANDS: a personal tax credit of K7,200 per annum for a person with a disability registered by the Zambia Agency for Persons with Disabilities (Charging Schedule paragraph 1, amended by Act No. 24 of 2022); a deduction of K2,500 under s.43D (raised by Act No. 17 of 2025 s.5, effective 1 January 2026); statutory NAPSA pension and NHIMA health-insurance contributions, which are separate levies and not part of this schedule. ACCESS NOTE: zra.org.zm serves an incomplete TLS certificate chain and fails standard fetchers; the National Assembly PDFs are the reliable primary route and are text-extractable.
Get it programmatically
curl https://afriref.dev/v1/zm/income-tax
# $0.005 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History: curl https://afriref.dev/v1/zm/income-tax/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://afriref.dev/provenance/zm/income-taxOther Zambia series: Bank of Zambia Policy Rate · VAT standard rate · VAT registration threshold · Statutory minimum wages by category (no single national rate) · Public holidays · CPI inflation (year-on-year) · Company income tax standard rate · Withholding tax rates · Statutory late-payment interest · Statutory social-insurance contributions
The same figure elsewhere: Algeria · Angola · Benin · Botswana · Burkina Faso · all 34