PAYE, explained the way you have to apply it every month.

Who withholds, and on what

PAYE is not a tax you pay. It is a tax you deduct from someone else's pay and remit on their behalf, and the obligation sits with you as the employer.

Every employer with employees on a payroll withholds PAYE.

If you pay employment income in Ghana, you register with the Ghana Revenue Authority, deduct tax from each employee's pay, and remit what you deducted. It applies whether you have four employees or four hundred.

You need a TIN for the business and a TIN for each employee.

A missing employee tax identification number does not stop you paying that person — it stops you filing a clean return for the month, which is a slower and more expensive problem.

PAYE is computed per employee, per month.

It is not a flat percentage of the payroll and it is not an annual figure divided by twelve. Each employee has their own chargeable income and moves through the bands on their own.

The return and the payment are due by the 15th of the following month.

The GRA requires the employer to submit the PAYE return, and remit the tax, by the 15th of the month after the deduction was made. Registration is with the GRA, and it is the GRA that sets the penalty position for late remittance — check its current guidance rather than relying on a figure here.

What the tax is computed on

The bands are applied to chargeable income, not to gross pay. Getting chargeable income right is most of the work; the bands themselves are arithmetic.

Start with total taxable earnings.

Basic salary plus taxable allowances, taxable benefits and any taxable back pay for the month.

Subtract the employee's SSNIT contribution.

The employee's 5.5% first-tier contribution is deducted before tax. The employer's 13% is not the employee's income and never enters this calculation.

Subtract the employee's approved personal reliefs.

Reliefs are per employee and only apply once the GRA has approved them for that person.

What is left is chargeable income.

The graduated bands below are applied to that figure, band by band, and the parts are added together.

Some items are taxed outside the bands.

Qualifying overtime and qualifying bonus are taxed at concessionary flat rates up to a threshold, and only the excess above the threshold joins chargeable income. Both are covered further down.

Beyond this, individual employers add their own taxable and deductible items — rent elements, employer schemes, third-tier contributions above the exempt limit. Those are configuration, not statute, and they differ from one company to the next.

The graduated bands

Seven bands, applied in order. Only the part of chargeable income that falls inside a band is taxed at that band's rate.

The last row is a running total, not a separate charge: an employee with chargeable income of exactly GH₵3,668.00 in the month pays GH₵521.50, which is the first four bands added together. The calculator shows the same breakdown for any figure you enter.

Personal reliefs

Reliefs reduce chargeable income before the bands are applied. They belong to the employee, not to the job, and they only apply once the GRA has approved them for that person.

Marriage or responsibility relief.

For an employee supporting a spouse or a stated number of dependants.

Child education relief.

For an employee with children in a recognised registered educational institution, claimable up to a limited number of children.

Aged dependant relief.

For an employee supporting a dependant relative above a stated age, subject to a limit on the number claimed.

Disability relief.

For an employee who has a disability, applied against income from employment.

Old age relief.

For an employee who has reached the qualifying age.

The cedi amount of each relief.

On the GRA schedule the annual amounts are: marriage or responsibility GH₵1,200; child education GH₵600 per child (up to three children); aged dependant GH₵1,000 per relative (up to two relatives aged 60 or over); old age GH₵1,500 (age 60 or over); disability 25% of income from employment or business. Factura HRMS does not hold these as statutory constants — they are entered as an approved monthly figure per employee.

In Factura HRMS a relief is not a checkbox. Each employee carries an approved monthly relief amount, and the engine subtracts that amount from chargeable income on every run until you change it. That keeps the responsibility where it belongs — on the approved GRA position for that employee — and leaves an auditable record of what was applied in which month.

Overtime and bonus

Both are taxed outside the graduated bands up to a threshold, then inside them.

Qualifying overtime is taxed at 5%, then 10%, as configured in the engine’s overtime component.

For a qualifying employee, overtime up to half of the employee's monthly basic salary is taxed at 5%; overtime above that is taxed at 10%. This is a final tax on that amount — it does not also pass through the graduated bands.

Who qualifies is set by a salary threshold.

The GRA limits the overtime concession to a qualifying junior employee: a junior staff member whose employment income for the year does not exceed GH₵18,000. The engine applies that as GH₵1,500 a month — once total monthly pay passes it, the overtime is added to chargeable income instead. The engine tests the pay ceiling only; it does not separately check that the employee is junior staff.

Bonus up to 15% of annual basic salary is taxed at 5%.

The GRA taxes bonuses paid in a year at 5% up to 15% of the employee's annual basic salary. The engine does the same, and adds any bonus above that limit to chargeable income to be taxed through the bands in the normal way. Whether the concession is switched on is a per-company configuration.

A worked example

An employee on GH₵4,500 basic and GH₵800 in taxable allowances, with no approved reliefs, no overtime and no bonus in the month.

The employee is paid GH₵5,300.00, less GH₵247.50 SSNIT and GH₵867.63 PAYE, so take-home is GH₵4,184.87. You remit the PAYE to the GRA and the SSNIT contributions — the employee's 5.5% and your own 13% — to SSNIT and the second-tier trustee. Change the numbers in the calculator to see the same breakdown for your own case.

Filing the monthly return

The return is a schedule of every employee, what they earned, what was deducted and what you are remitting. The arithmetic above has to reconcile to it line by line.

1. Close the pay runThe schedule is produced from a closed run, not from a working copy. Anything still being edited is not a figure you can file.
2. Clear the blockers firstMissing employee TINs and unresolved identifiers are what turn a return into a correspondence. They are worth finding before you produce the file, not after.
3. Produce the schedulePer employee: gross, the taxable components, SSNIT, reliefs applied, chargeable income and PAYE deducted, with company totals.
4. File and remit to the GRAFiling happens on the GRA's own channel. Factura HRMS produces the return-ready schedule; it does not file on your behalf and it does not move money.
5. Keep the run that produced itIf a figure is queried a year later, the answer is the closed run and its audit trail — not a spreadsheet someone rebuilt.

The GRA requires the PAYE return and payment by the 15th of the month following the deduction.

Questions employers ask