Vanuatu income tax rates

What this value means

STRUCTURAL NULL, POSITIVELY ESTABLISHED — NOT AN OMISSION AND NOT A DATA GAP. There is no personal income tax in Vanuatu: no PAYE, no tax return for individuals, no tax-free threshold (the concept does not arise), no marginal bands, and no rate to publish. Salaries and wages, self-employment income, investment income, dividends, interest, royalties, capital gains, inheritances and wealth are all outside the charge because no statute imposes a charge on them. The Government's own investment authority states it in terms; the Department of Customs and Inland Revenue — the sole revenue authority — corroborates it negatively, since the complete list of taxes it administers is Rent Tax, VAT and the (repealed) Turnover Tax, alongside customs and excise duties and the business licence regime. A Taxpayer Identification Number (TIN) exists in Vanuatu, but it is issued for business licence, VAT and rent tax purposes, not for an income tax. WHY THE LOOKALIKES ARE NOT A PERSONAL INCOME TAX: (1) The BUSINESS LICENCE FEE (Business Licence Act [CAP 249]) is payable by any individual or company carrying on business for profit, which makes it look like a tax on self-employed earnings. It is not: it is an annual fee for permission to trade, set by business-activity category, payable in full whether the individual earns nothing or a great deal, with no net-income base, no deductions and no progressivity. (2) RENT TAX (Rent Tax Act [CAP 196]) does fall on individuals — 12.5% of GROSS rental income assessed in two six-month periods a year, with the first VT 200,000 of rental income exempt for individual landlords and no deduction for expenses — but it is a schedular tax on one receipt, charged on gross, and only where that rent is not caught by VAT (broadly, long-term residential letting). It reaches no other income of the individual and is not a general income tax. (3) VAT (15%) is a consumption tax on spending, not on income, and is legally borne by the consumer. (4) Import duties, excise, and stamp duty on property transactions and share transfers (up to about 1%) are transaction taxes. None of these has an income base, a personal allowance, a residence test for worldwide income, or a rate schedule — the four defining features of an income tax. VANUATU NATIONAL PROVIDENT FUND contributions are a compulsory social-security saving credited to the member's own account, not a tax, and are excluded. HISTORY AND DEVELOPMENTS — NOTES ONLY, DO NOT SERVE AS FACT: an income tax has been proposed in Vanuatu several times and enacted none; the best-documented attempt, the 2016–2018 personal and corporate income tax proposal, was abandoned in the face of domestic opposition before any Bill was passed. As at 23 July 2026 no Vanuatu Pillar Two / domestic top-up tax measure could be found in any Vanuatu government source (see the corporate-tax series notes). If Vanuatu ever does introduce an income tax it will require a new principal Act published in the Official Gazette; until such an Act exists, null is the correct and complete answer, and any schedule offered by a secondary source is fabricated. ACCESS: same constraint as corporate-tax — no Vanuatu government consolidated statute database exists online, and PacLII returns HTTP 403 to automated fetchers, so this null rests on the revenue authority's own exhaustive tax list plus the Government investment authority's affirmative statement rather than on a negative statute-index search.

Get it programmatically

curl https://ausref.dev/v1/vu/income-tax
# $0.001 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History:    curl https://ausref.dev/v1/vu/income-tax/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://ausref.dev/provenance/vu/income-tax

Other Vanuatu series: policy interest rate · VAT rate · minimum wage · public holidays · inflation rate (CPI) · corporate tax rate