Papua New Guinea VAT rate
Papua New Guinea has NO value-added tax called VAT. Its broad-based consumption tax is the Goods and Services Tax (GST), imposed by the Goods and Services Tax Act 2003 (in operation 1 January 2004) and administered by the Internal Revenue Commission. This series carries the standard GST rate; the series id is 'vat' only because that is the schema's slot for the general consumption tax.
| Current value | 10 percent |
|---|---|
| In force from | 2004-01-01 |
| Official source | Goods and Services Tax Act 2003 (Papua New Guinea), Section 8 — 'a tax, to be known as Goods and Services Tax, shall be charged ... at the rate of 10% on the supply (but not including exempt supply) in Papua New Guinea of goods and services, by a registered person in the course or furtherance of a taxable activity'; Section 6 imposes the same 10% on imported goods entered for home consumption under the Customs Act. Rate independently confirmed by the Department of Treasury, 2026 National Budget Volume 1, section 7.4: 'Goods and Services tax (GST) is considered a broad-based tax on consumption at the rate of 10.0 per cent ... The GST is regulated by the GST Act 2003.' |
| Last verified | 2026-07-23 |
| Verification | primary — No verification limitation recorded — read from the official source cited. |
| Provenance | source fingerprint |
What this value means
10% since the GST replaced the old value-added/sales tax regime on 1 January 2004; the headline rate has never changed. NAME IT CORRECTLY: it is GST, not VAT — PNG statute, Treasury and the IRC all use 'Goods and Services Tax'. Structure: exports of goods and services are ZERO-RATED (ss. 19, 23); exempt supplies (s. 25) include financial services, medical and educational services. LIVE POLICY OVERLAY, expiring: under the Household Assistance Package the Government zero-rated GST on 13 essential household goods — rice, flour, tinned fish, tinned meat, chicken, biscuits, noodles, tea, coffee, cooking oil, soap, sanitary pads/tampons, baby diapers — from 1 June 2025. The 2026 National Budget extended this zero-rating to the END OF 2026 (Budget Vol 1 §5.2.1; the pre-Budget position had it ending 30 June 2026). Businesses must strip GST from the retail price of these items but still claim input credits; the measure costs about K250 million per six months in forgone revenue. BPNG's Governor flagged in the March 2026 outlook that 'the zero-rated GST policy concludes at the end of 2026 and we will be monitoring closely for any pass-through effects on prices' — expect an inflation step-up in early 2027 if it is not extended again. ACCESS: the Internal Revenue Commission's own site (irc.gov.pg) returns HTTP 403 to every request from outside PNG — the whole domain, including the homepage, is geo/bot-walled; do not point a source-watcher at it. PacLII hosts the sessional Act text (reproduced by permission of the Office of the Legislative Counsel but not stated to be the authorised version); note that PacLII's PNG CONSOLIDATED database does not contain the GST Act, and that /pg/legis/consol_act/gasta2003226/ 404s — the working path is /pg/legis/num_act/gasta2003226/. PacLII also 403s bare curl/fetch clients on .pdf paths.
Get it programmatically
curl https://ausref.dev/v1/pg/vat
# $0.001 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History: curl https://ausref.dev/v1/pg/vat/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://ausref.dev/provenance/pg/vatOther Papua New Guinea series: policy interest rate · minimum wage · public holidays · inflation rate (CPI) · corporate tax rate · income tax rates