How Much Is Ghana PAYE Tax?
Ghana taxes the first ₵490 of your monthly pay at nothing, then in seven rising bands up to 35%. But PAYE is charged on your chargeable income — gross pay minus SSNIT and any reliefs — not your headline salary, which is why a quick guess rarely matches your payslip. This page computes your real monthly take-home to the pesewa, runs it backwards from a take-home you are targeting, and shows what the number actually covers in Accra. The bands and the SSNIT ceiling come from GRA and SSNIT and are verified; it is an estimate, not tax advice.
Tax-free
₵5,880/yr, 0% band
Top rate
above ₵605,000/yr
SSNIT
of basic, employee share
Tier 3 lever
of basic, pre-tax, cuts tax
Your take-home pay
Enter your monthly gross. The calculator applies SSNIT, any Tier 3, and the 2026 bands to give your real take-home — checkable against your payslip.
SSNIT and Tier 3 are charged on your basic, not gross. If your pay is all basic, leave it at 100%.
Monthly take-home
₵3,945.25
| Monthly gross | ₵5,000.00 |
| SSNIT (5.5% of basic) | −₵275.00 |
| Chargeable income | ₵4,725.00 |
| PAYE (income tax) | −₵779.75 |
| Net take-home | ₵3,945.25 |
Annual: ₵60,000 gross → ₵47,343 net · PAYE ₵9,357 · SSNIT ₵3,300.
An estimate, not tax advice. It excludes benefits-in-kind (a car or housing get valued and taxed), bonus and overtime concessions, and any employer-specific arrangement. NHIL is a consumption levy, not a payroll deduction, so it isn't here. See take-home in dollars on /cedi.
The 2026 tax bands
These apply to chargeable income — your pay after SSNIT and reliefs — not your gross salary. That is the single most common misunderstanding.
| Band | Annual chargeable | Monthly | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | First ₵5,880 | First ₵490.00 | 0% |
| 2 | Next ₵1,320 | Next ₵110.00 | 5% |
| 3 | Next ₵1,560 | Next ₵130.00 | 10% |
| 4 | Next ₵38,000 | Next ₵3,166.67 | 17.5% |
| 5 | Next ₵192,000 | Next ₵16,000.00 | 25% |
| 6 | Next ₵366,240 | Next ₵30,520.00 | 30% |
| 7 | Above ₵605,000 | Above ₵50,416.67 | 35% |
Effective 2026-01-01. Source: GRA. The ₵5,880 tax-free schedule (not the older ₵4,824) — verified against PwC and GRA.
How Ghana PAYE actually works
The single most common mistake is to apply a tax rate to your salary. Ghana does not tax your salary; it taxes your chargeable income, and it does so in slices. First, your 5.5% SSNIT contribution and any tax-deductible pension or relief come off the top — that money is never taxed.
What remains is your chargeable income, and it is fed through seven bands: the first ₵490 a month is taxed at nothing, the next slices at 5%, 10% and 17.5%, and only the portion above each threshold is taxed at the higher rate. This is why your marginal rate — the rate on your next cedi — is almost never your effective rate, the share of your whole income that actually goes to tax.
Someone on ₵5,000 a month sits in the 25% band at the margin but pays an effective rate closer to 16%. PAYE is also cumulative: your employer averages it across the year, so a mid-year raise or a bonus can make one month's deduction look oddly high. The calculator above does the slicing for you; the bands table below shows exactly where the cuts fall.
— accra.cool desk
Work it backwards: the negotiation tool
Got a take-home in mind for a job offer or counter-offer? This finds the gross you should ask for.
Gross to ask for
₵5,077/mo
That gross nets ₵4,000 after SSNIT ₵279 and PAYE ₵798 — an annual package of ₵60,927.
The negotiation number. Because tax is progressive, each extra cedi of take-home costs a little more in gross — which is why a counter-offer should be quoted in gross, not net. Assumes no Tier 3 or reliefs; both would lower the gross you need.
SSNIT, Tier 2, Tier 3 — and the ceiling nobody explains
Ghana's pension system has three tiers, and only one of them costs you a visible deduction. Tier 1 is SSNIT: 5.5% of your basic salary — not your gross, and not your allowances — matched by a much larger employer contribution. Note the word basic: if your ₵6,000 is ₵5,000 basic plus ₵1,000 allowances, your SSNIT is 5.5% of ₵5,000, not ₵6,000, a detail payroll systems sometimes get wrong.
Tier 2, another 5%, is a mandatory occupational scheme that in the standard set-up comes out of the employer's share, so it rarely shows on your payslip. There is also a ceiling: SSNIT only applies up to a maximum insurable salary, ₵69,000 a month in 2026, so very high basic salaries stop contributing above that. For almost everyone the ceiling never binds. Tier 3 is the interesting one, and it gets its own note below — it is the one lever an ordinary employee can pull to legally reduce the tax bill.
— accra.cool desk
Tier 3: the legal tax lever most people never use
If you want to pay less tax in Ghana, legally, Tier 3 is the tool. It is a voluntary contribution to an approved provident fund, and contributions up to 16.5% of your basic salary are deducted before tax is calculated — they reduce your chargeable income cedi for cedi.
Put ₵500 a month into an approved Tier 3 scheme and, if your marginal rate is 25%, the taxman effectively funds ₵125 of it: your take-home falls by less than the amount you save. The money is not gone — it is your retirement savings, and it grows tax-free — so unlike most tax planning this is not a trick, it is deferred pay with a discount attached.
The catch is a lock-in: Tier 3 is designed for the long term, and early withdrawals lose the tax benefit. Toggle the Tier 3 field in the calculator and watch the chargeable-income line and the PAYE line both drop. Very few employees claim it, which is exactly why it is worth knowing.
— accra.cool desk
Reliefs — and how to claim them
Reliefs reduce your chargeable income, but only if you register them with GRA (a ~15-minute job on the taxpayers' portal). Most eligible workers never do.
| Relief | Annual amount | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Marriage / responsibility relief | ₵1,200 | For a married person or one with dependants |
| Child education relief | ₵600 | Per child in a recognised school, maximum 3 children |
| Old age relief (60+) | ₵1,500 | For taxpayers aged 60 and above |
| Disability relief | formula | 25% of assessable income from employment or business |
| Aged dependant relative relief | ₵1,000 | Per dependant aged 60+, maximum 2 |
Take-home on common Accra salaries
| Monthly gross | SSNIT | PAYE | Take-home | Effective |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ₵3,000 | ₵165.00 | ₵386.88 | ₵2,448.13 | 12.9% |
| ₵5,000 | ₵275.00 | ₵779.75 | ₵3,945.25 | 15.6% |
| ₵10,000 | ₵550.00 | ₵1,961.00 | ₵7,489.00 | 19.6% |
| ₵20,000 | ₵1,100.00 | ₵4,323.50 | ₵14,576.50 | 21.6% |
All basic, no Tier 3 or reliefs. Computed live from the same engine as the calculator — sanity-check a row against your own slip.
Take-home on common Accra salaries
It helps to see the shape of the thing. On a ₵3,000 gross with basic equal to gross, SSNIT takes ₵165, chargeable is ₵2,835, and PAYE is modest — you keep the large majority. On ₵5,000, SSNIT is ₵275, and PAYE rises to about ₵780 as the top of your income crosses into the 25% band, leaving roughly ₵3,945 in hand — an effective rate around 16%.
At ₵10,000 the effective rate climbs toward the low twenties, and by ₵20,000 you are giving up a bit over a quarter of gross once SSNIT and PAYE are counted. The pattern is the point: because the bands are progressive, doubling your salary more than doubles your tax, but your take-home still rises meaningfully at every step — the marginal rate is a ceiling on the pain, not the whole bill. Every figure here comes straight from the calculator above; put your own basic and any Tier 3 in and the numbers move with you.
— accra.cool desk
How bonuses and overtime are taxed
Two kinds of pay get special treatment. A bonus is taxed gently up to a point: the first 15% of your annual basic salary paid as a bonus is taxed at a flat, concessional 5%, and only the excess above that threshold is added to your income and taxed at your normal graduated rates. So a modest bonus is lightly taxed; a very large one is not.
Overtime for eligible junior staff is similar in spirit — up to half of your monthly basic in overtime is taxed at 5%, the excess at 10% — a deliberate protection for lower-paid workers who rely on the extra hours. Both are concessions worth checking on your slip, because payroll software sometimes taxes a bonus as ordinary income and quietly overcharges you.
Neither changes the core salary calculation, which is why we keep them as separate add-ons; the main calculator models your regular monthly pay, and these rules sit on top of it when they apply.
— accra.cool desk
Salary benchmarks by role
Indicative Greater Accra monthly gross, for sizing an offer. Run any figure through the calculator for the take-home.
| Role | Sector | Monthly gross (low–high) | Median |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry-level graduate | general | ₵2,500–₵4,500 | ₵3,200 |
| Teacher (public, trained) | education | ₵3,000–₵5,500 | ₵4,000 |
| Bank teller | banking | ₵3,500–₵6,000 | ₵4,500 |
| Nurse (public) | health | ₵3,500–₵6,500 | ₵4,800 |
| Civil servant (mid-grade) | government | ₵3,500–₵7,000 | ₵5,000 |
| Accountant (mid) | finance | ₵6,000–₵12,000 | ₵8,500 |
| Marketing manager | general | ₵8,000–₵16,000 | ₵11,000 |
| Software developer (mid) | tech | ₵8,000–₵18,000 | ₵12,000 |
Indicative market estimates, not payroll data — a starting point for negotiation, not a quote.
Payslip errors worth checking for
Because PAYE is checkable against your own slip, it is worth knowing the errors that actually happen. The commonest is SSNIT computed on gross instead of basic — if your allowances are being hit with the 5.5%, you are over-contributing.
The second is NHIL: the 2.5% health levy is a consumption tax charged when you buy things, not a payroll deduction, and it must not reduce your chargeable income or appear on your salary slip — some old spreadsheets still subtract it, which is wrong. Third, reliefs you are entitled to — marriage, child education, old age — reduce your chargeable income but only if you register them with GRA, and most eligible workers never do.
Fourth, bonuses are often over-taxed by payroll systems that miss the concessional 5% rate on the first slice. And the COVID-19 levy, repealed from January 2026, should no longer appear anywhere. If your slip and this calculator diverge by more than a rounding cedi or two, one of these is usually why — that, or a benefit-in-kind (a car, housing) being valued and taxed, which we do not model.
— accra.cool desk
What a take-home actually covers
A number in hand only means something against the cost of living. Here is what ₵3,945.25 — the take-home on a ₵5,000 salary — is up against in Accra today.
Common questions
- The first ₵490 of your monthly pay — ₵5,880 a year — is taxed at 0%. Personal relief is built into this zero-rate band, so there is no separate personal allowance to claim.
Have a question we should answer? Email hello@accra.cool.