Company income tax: for limited companies only
Once a year, tax on the profit of a limited company, filed federally. Small companies often owe nothing — but the return still has to go in. Not a company? Read personal income tax instead.
Only if you're incorporated
CIT applies to limited companies. If you trade as a business name, a partnership or with nothing registered, this isn't your tax — your profit is taxed as your own income, by your state. That's the personal income tax guide.
BizBrada asks how you're registered in your tax profile and shows you whichever of the two applies.
What it's charged on
CIT is charged on profit, not on money that passed through your account. Sales, minus the costs of running the business, is what gets taxed.
Which is another way of saying: every legitimate expense you never recorded, you paid tax on.
Small company relief
Companies under the turnover threshold pay nothing on profit. That's real, and a lot of BizBrada users sit there.
It doesn't remove the filing. A nil return still has to be filed, and not filing is what turns nothing owed into something owed.
Your financial year end
You set this during onboarding. It's the date your books close, and the CIT return covers the twelve months to it.
Pick it once and leave it. Changing it mid-stream makes the year's figures hard to compare.
A yearly return needs signed accounts
Under s.11(5) of the Nigeria Tax Administration Act 2025, a yearly return goes in with a statement of accounts somebody has stood behind — audited accounts, or, for a small company or an individual, your own signed attestation.
So a yearly return isn't just printed and posted the way a monthly VAT return is. If the accounts are still with your auditor, BizBrada parks the return as waiting on the accounts and you record who signed them when it comes back.
Leave time for it. Auditors rarely turn accounts round in a few days, so we start reminding a month before the date, not a week.