Nigerian businesses still crushed by multiple taxes despite reforms, CBN survey finds

Multiple taxation remains the single biggest obstacle for businesses in Nigeria, pushing ahead of insecurity and high borrowing costs, despite tax reforms introduced by the Federal Government earlier in 2026. The finding comes from the Central Bank of Nigeria's July 2026 Business Expectations Survey, which shows that 70.8% of responding firms identified high and multiple taxation as their leading constraint.

A stacked deck of problems

Insecurity ranked second in the same survey at 69.7%, while high interest rates followed closely at 66.3%. The numbers land in an environment where the CBN retained its Monetary Policy Rate at 26.5% in May 2026, keeping borrowing expensive for firms that are already complaining about an overload of taxes, charges, and levies imposed by different tiers of government.

The survey results are being read across the Nigerian business community as an early signal that the Tinubu administration's 2026 tax reform agenda has not yet produced meaningful relief on the ground. The complaint is structural rather than cyclical: businesses say they face overlapping demands from federal, state, and local authorities that cumulatively eat into margins, complicate compliance, and make scaling across state boundaries prohibitively difficult. For startups and small firms operating on thin cash reserves, each separate levy or fee — sometimes presented with little notice — represents an unpredictable cost that disrupts hiring plans, inventory decisions, and expansion timelines.

The depth of the problem

A World Bank paper on the issue previously noted that Nigerian businesses can face as many as 100 different taxes, fees, and levies in some cases, a patchwork that the federal reform push was explicitly designed to simplify. That complexity is especially punishing for the tech and digital sectors. A fintech startup operating across multiple states, for example, may encounter separate registration fees, local government levies, and state-level charges that duplicate what it already pays at the federal level. The result is a friction-heavy operating environment that raises the cost of serving customers and discourages the kind of regional expansion that investors typically want to see.

The July numbers are not an outlier. A June 2026 CBN business confidence report placed high and multiple taxation at 73.7%, while a September 2025 survey flagged similar complaints about bank charges and overlapping taxes, confirming that the problem predates the current administration's reform efforts and has persisted through multiple policy cycles. The repeated appearance of taxation at the top of these surveys despite shifting political and economic conditions suggests a deeply embedded governance challenge that federal policy instruments alone may struggle to reach.

The CBN is expected to publish the full July 2026 Business Expectations Survey report in the coming weeks, which may provide more granular detail on which specific tax categories and which tiers of government businesses identified as the most burdensome. For now, the headline figure stands as a sharp data point in the ongoing debate over whether Nigeria's business environment is genuinely improving or merely being repackaged through new policy announcements that have not yet translated into reduced compliance costs for the firms that generate the country's non-oil economic activity.