Stamp duty catches a lot of new founders off guard. It is a real cost of registering a company, but CAC never mentions it on its own invoice.
Stamp duty is separate from CAC's own fee
CAC charges you to register the company, ₦10,000 for every ₦1 million of share capital or part of it for a private company. Stamp duty is a different charge again, under tax law rather than CAC's own regulations.
Nobody at CAC collects it for you. It sits alongside your registration as a separate item, not a line on the same invoice.
The rate professional advisers quote
Professional advisers such as PwC put the rate at 0.75% of the share capital. This is a figure from professional commentary, not one this article can confirm directly from the tax authority's own text.
Treat it as a starting point for your budget, not a final number. Ask an accountant to confirm the rate that applies to your company before you commit to a share capital figure.
What the duty is charged on
Advisers describe the duty as applying to a company's share capital at incorporation, and again whenever new shares are issued later. The exact wording of the current tax law was not something this article could check line by line.
This matters because CAMA itself speaks in terms of issued share capital, while some commentary on stamp duty refers to authorised share capital instead. The two are not always the same figure. An accountant can tell you which one your stamp duty bill is based on.
The window to get instruments stamped
Advisers describe a short window, counted in days, for getting the relevant instrument stamped after it is executed. This article cannot confirm the exact number of days with confidence, since the current tax law was not fully checked for this piece.
Ask an accountant for the deadline that applies to your paperwork, and get the instrument stamped promptly once you have it. Leaving it unstamped can cause problems later, for instance if the document needs to be produced in court or relied on for a transaction.
Why to confirm the figure with an accountant
Two things changed recently enough to matter here. The tax rules that now cover stamp duty came from the same 2025 tax acts that reshaped VAT and income tax, and CAC's own incorporation fee structure changed too, from 1 Oct 2025.
Because of that, do not carry a stamp duty figure forward from an old registration or an old article, including this one, without checking it again. An accountant working from the current text of the law is the safer source.
Once you know the full cost, including stamp duty, our guide to how CAC calculates your incorporation fee covers the CAC side of the bill, and you can start your CAC company registration when you are ready.