PAYE is not a once-a-year obligation for an employer. It is deducted every payday and remitted every month, on a fixed schedule that does not move.
The 10th day of the following month. Miss it, and the amount is late from that date, not from whenever it is eventually noticed.
When the deadline falls
The 10th day of the following month. January's deduction, for example, is due by 10 February; February's by 10 March, and so on through the year.
This applies whether an employer has one staff member or several hundred. There is no separate schedule for a smaller payroll.
Which state it goes to
PAYE goes to the state where the employee lives, not automatically to wherever the employer's head office happens to be registered. An employer with staff spread across several states remits to each of those states, not to one alone.
This detail catches out employers who assume PAYE always follows the company's own registered address. It follows the employee instead.
What counts as "on time"
Remitting the correct amount, for the correct month, to the correct state, by the 10th day of the following month is what counts as on time. A payment that arrives on the right date but to the wrong state is not the same as meeting the obligation cleanly.
The Nigeria Tax Administration Act 2025 sets out registration, returns and remittance for tax generally, alongside the Nigeria Tax Act 2025, which the bands themselves come from.
What slows employers down
- Treating remittance as an annual task instead of a monthly one.
- Remitting to the employer's own state by default, rather than checking where each employee actually lives.
- Waiting for a reminder instead of building the date into a fixed monthly routine.
- Assuming a public holiday near the deadline automatically shifts it, without checking first.
Why a fixed monthly date is worth building into payroll
A deadline that repeats every month is easy to treat casually precisely because it is so routine. That is also why it is easy to let slip, especially in a business juggling several other monthly obligations at the same time.
Building the remittance date into a fixed payroll routine, rather than a manual reminder someone has to remember, is the more reliable approach for most employers, whatever their size. A routine does not forget. A person, eventually, might.
Where this fits with other deadlines
The monthly remittance is only one date on an employer's calendar. The employer's annual PAYE return deadline is a separate, yearly obligation. Keeping both in the compliance calendar avoids relying on memory alone.
For the bands behind the amount being remitted, see the 2026 PAYE bands explained, and for the rest of this series, the PAYE and state tax hub.