A payslip is easy to glance at and file away without really reading. Five short checks are enough to catch most PAYE errors, and none of them take long.
These checks assume the bands set out in the Nigeria Tax Act 2025, which have applied since payroll systems updated for 2026.
1. Does the gross pay match your contract?
Start here, before PAYE even enters the picture. If gross pay is wrong, everything calculated from it will be wrong too.
2. Does the PAYE line match the calculator?
Enter your gross pay for the period into the PAYE calculator and compare it with the PAYE figure on your payslip. A close match is expected; a large gap is worth asking about.
3. Is the tax-free amount reflected?
If your yearly pay is at or under ₦800,000, there should be no PAYE at all. If it is only slightly above that line, only the small excess should be taxed, at 15% on income from ₦800,001 to ₦3 million, not your whole salary.
4. Is anything from the old system still showing?
Abolished from 1 January 2026. A payslip that still lists a consolidated relief allowance is running on an outdated template, not the current bands.
Rent relief is different: it is a legitimate, current relief, but only where documented rent has actually been submitted for it.
5. Does the net pay add up?
Gross pay, minus PAYE, minus any other listed deduction, should equal the net pay shown. If the arithmetic does not add up on its own terms, that is worth raising before even getting into whether the PAYE figure itself is correct.
Why these checks matter more this year
Payroll teams across the country updated their systems for the same new bands at roughly the same time. That kind of large, simultaneous change is exactly when small errors slip through, whether from a template that was only partly updated or a figure typed in wrong.
None of the five checks above need special knowledge. They are the same checks a payroll clerk would run internally, just done from the employee's side of the payslip instead.
Doing this once a quarter, not just once
A quick pass through these five checks each quarter catches a slow drift that a single glance in January might miss, especially if pay or allowances change during the year.
What to do if something looks wrong
Ask payroll to show the calculation band by band, the same way how PAYE is calculated step by step sets it out. A specific, band-by-band question is easier for payroll to answer than a general "this looks wrong".
For the bands themselves, see the 2026 PAYE bands explained, and for the rest of this series, the PAYE and state tax hub. Keeping a few months of payslips together makes any pattern, rather than a one-off error, easier to spot.