Belize corporate tax rate
Belize does not impose a corporate income tax on company profits. Since basis year 2020, section 6(2) of the Income and Business Tax Act, Cap. 55, charges income tax ONLY on the chargeable income of employed persons; companies and all other non-employed persons are outside the income-tax charge entirely. Companies instead pay 'business tax' under Part XI of the same Act — a turnover levy on gross receipts at schedule rates, with no deduction for costs and no relationship to profit.
| Current value | structured — see the API |
|---|---|
| In force from | 2020-01-01 |
| Official source | Income and Business Tax Act, Cap. 55, section 6(2) as repealed and replaced by section 3 of the Income and Business Tax (Amendment) Act, No. 40 of 2024 (assented 11 Dec 2024, gazetted 14 Dec 2024, in force 1 Jan 2025): 'Commencing from the first day of the basis year 2020 and for each subsequent year, no tax shall be charged upon the chargeable income of any person other than an employed person.' Business tax is imposed separately by s.106 at the rates in Schedule IX per s.107(1) |
| Last verified | 2026-07-23 |
| Verification | primary — No verification limitation recorded — read from the official source cited. |
| Provenance | source fingerprint |
What this value means
STRUCTURAL NULL, POSITIVELY ESTABLISHED FROM THE STATUTE. The operative words are s.6(2) of Cap. 55 as replaced by Act No. 40 of 2024, quoted verbatim in the source field: no income tax is charged on any person other than an employed person. A company is not an employed person, so no company pays income tax on profit. The old 25% charge on non-employed persons in s.21(1) of the pre-2019 Act was removed by the Income and Business Tax (Amendment) Act No. 25 of 2019 with retroactive effect to basis year 2020; Act No. 40 of 2024 carried that forward into the rewritten s.6 and, for good measure, REPEALED the old ss. 20, 21 and 22 and replaced s.21 with a provision headed merely 'Excess of business tax'. There is no headline CIT rate to serve — value: null is correct. WHY THE BUSINESS TAX IS NOT A CIT — do not substitute it. Section 106(1) levies 'business tax ... on all receipts, whether received in Belize or elsewhere', and s.107(1) applies the rates 'set out from time to time in Schedule IX'. Four reasons it fails to be a corporate income tax: (1) BASE. It is charged on GROSS RECEIPTS/turnover. There is no deduction for cost of sales, wages, interest, depreciation or any other expense, so it is payable in full by a loss-making company. A CIT is charged on net profit. (2) NO SINGLE RATE. Schedule IX is a sectoral SCHEDULE, not a rate: 0.75% (radio, on-air television and newspaper business; service-station fuel sales); 1.75% (other trade or business, domestic airline, non-fuel service-station sales, insurance companies, electricity supply, real-estate sales/leases); 3% (rents, royalties, premiums and other receipts from real property; IFSC-licensed international financial services); 5% (annual net gain; certain company receipts under s.108A(2)); 6% (professions, vocations and occupations; unit trusts; commingled IFSC receipts); 8% (casinos/gaming premises with more than 50 machines); 15% (commissions, royalties, discounts, dividends, lottery/slot/table winnings — 5% where commissions are under $25,000 p.a.; interest on loans to non-residents; receipts of licensed financial institutions, 12% within a PIC Group); 19.5% (real-time voice telecommunications); 25% (management fees, plant rental and technical-service charges paid to a non-resident). Building contractors: 6% on the first 40% of contract price and 1.75% on the remaining 60%. There is no rate that could honestly be published as 'the Belize corporate tax rate'. (3) IT IS A DIFFERENT PART OF THE ACT. Income tax sits in Parts I–VIII and business tax in Part XI, with its own imposition (s.106), rates (s.107), exemptions (s.108) and returns (s.109) provisions. (4) THE ACT ITSELF TREATS THEM AS DISTINCT. New s.21 (inserted by Act No. 40 of 2024) provides that business tax paid 'shall count as a CREDIT towards the income tax payable' — a creditability rule only makes sense between two separate taxes, and it is a legacy provision, because since basis year 2020 there is no income tax for a company to credit it against. Only two profit-basis income-tax rates survive anywhere in the Act, and both are carve-outs from the employed-person charge in s.6(3), not general company rates: 40% on chargeable income from PETROLEUM OPERATIONS (payable in US$), and 3% on the net chargeable income of an approved Designated Processing Area operator under the Designated Processing Area Act, Cap. 280. Neither is a headline CIT and neither should be served as one. Aggregator trap: PwC/Deloitte-style country summaries and tax blogs frequently print '25%' or '1.75%' as 'Belize corporate tax'. The 25% is the personal/employed-person rate (see income-tax series) or the non-resident management-fee business-tax rate; the 1.75% is one line of Schedule IX. Both are wrong as a CIT. Statutory sources are directly fetchable from nationalassembly.gov.bz (amending Acts) and agm.gov.bz (consolidated Cap. 55, R.E. 2020: https://www.agm.gov.bz/uploads/laws/63976e6032352_Cap_55_Income_and_Business_Tax_Act.pdf) — note the agm.gov.bz consolidation predates Act No. 40 of 2024 and still prints the repealed ss. 20–22, so it must be read together with the 2024 amending Act.
Get it programmatically
curl https://latamref.dev/v1/bz/corporate-tax
# $0.001 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History: curl https://latamref.dev/v1/bz/corporate-tax/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://latamref.dev/provenance/bz/corporate-taxOther Belize series: policy interest rate · VAT rate · minimum wage · public holidays · inflation rate (CPI) · income tax rates