Guyana Statutory social-insurance contributions

What this value means

WHAT A PAYROLL ENGINE GETS WRONG IN GUYANA. 1. THE CEILING HAS NOT MOVED SINCE JANUARY 2020 — DO NOT INDEX IT. GYD 280,000 per month has stood for six years and is still what the Scheme publishes and what the Guyana Revenue Authority restated for the 2026 income year. Guyana upratings run on the BENEFIT side, not the contribution side: the January 2025 adjustment raised the minimum Old Age and Invalidity Pension to GYD 43,075 and the minimum Survivor's Pension to GYD 21,537, and left the ceiling alone. An engine that indexes the ceiling annually, or that assumes a change because a "rate adjustment" notice was published, will be wrong. Equally, do not assume it is permanently frozen — a ceiling this old in a fast-growing economy is a live candidate for change, so re-verify at each Budget. 2. THE SPLIT IS 40/60, NOT 50/50. Employee 5.6%, employer 8.4%. Engines that mirror the employee rate to the employer under-charge the employer by exactly 2.8 percentage points. 3. CONTRIBUTION LIABILITY STOPS AT 60, NOT 65. Guyana's NIS pension age is 60, and both the employee deduction and the full employer rate stop there — but a 1.5% employer charge for industrial cover continues, and the same 1.5% applies to employees under 16. Employees in those age classes must still be reported, in their own class, on the Scheme's return. 4. THE WEEKLY CEILING IS A PUBLISHED FIGURE, NOT A CONVERSION YOU MAKE. GYD 64,615 per week is what the Scheme publishes (280,000 x 12 / 52 = 64,615.38, rounded down). Use the published weekly figure for weekly-paid employees rather than deriving one, and never apply a monthly ceiling to a weekly payroll. 5. THE RETURN REQUIRES ACTUAL AND INSURABLE EARNINGS SEPARATELY. The Scheme's contribution schedules have paired columns for every pay period — actual earnings and insurable earnings — and the summary demands total actual and total insurable earnings plus a headcount split by age class. A payroll system that stores only the capped figure cannot produce a valid Guyanese return. 6. NIS IS DEDUCTED BEFORE INCOME TAX, AND THE TAX SIDE HAS ITS OWN CAP. The Guyana Revenue Authority allows the employee's NIS contribution as a deduction in computing chargeable income, expressed as "a ceiling of $15,680 monthly or 5.6% of gross income up to $280,000 monthly". So the PAYE base is gross less NIS less the personal allowance, and the NIS relief itself caps out at GYD 15,680 a month. An engine that taxes gross and then deducts NIS from net will overstate PAYE for every employee. 7. THE SCHEME'S OWN FAQ PAGE IS STALE AND CONTRADICTS ITS OWN CONTRIBUTIONS PAGE. The FAQ still states the ceiling as "$59,262.00 and $256,800.00" weekly and monthly — the pre-2020 figures. The Contributions page and the current electronic schedule carry GYD 64,615 / GYD 280,000. Where two pages of the same authority disagree, the Contributions page and the current schedule are the operative ones, and the GRA's 2026 income-tax notice independently confirms GYD 280,000. 8. USE THE CURRENT-YEAR ELECTRONIC SCHEDULE. The Scheme publishes a dated electronic schedule workbook each year and reminds employers to "download a fresh copy of the electronic schedule which has the updated insurable earnings and ceilings". Filing on a prior-year workbook is a common rejection cause even when the rates are unchanged. 9. REMITTANCE DEADLINE IS THE 15TH, WITH A STATUTORY SURCHARGE. The Scheme's return states that schedules must be returned "not later than the 15th day of the month following that to which payment relates" and that failure to submit schedules AND remittances by that date incurs a surcharge under the Regulations. Both the money and the schedule must arrive; a paid-but-unfiled month still attracts the surcharge. SUB-NATIONAL VARIATION: none. The rate, the ceiling and the age rules are uniform across all ten regions. There is no regional, municipal or industry differentiation, and no separate assessment for hazardous industries — employment-injury cover is inside the single 14%. WHAT WE DO NOT PUT A NUMBER ON: I put no number on the following, deliberately. THE SELF-EMPLOYED (12.5%) AND VOLUNTARY CONTRIBUTOR (9.3%) RATES — recorded in the branch notes for completeness but not modelled as employee branches, because neither involves an employer share and the assessment base differs (declared income; and, for voluntary contributors, insurable earnings based on the last two years of employment). A BRANCH-BY-BRANCH SPLIT OF THE 14% — none is published. The Act runs a single fund and the Scheme states a single rate; any allocation between pensions, short-term benefits and industrial benefits would be invented. SOURCING CAVEATS, STATED PLAINLY: the rates, the ceiling and the age rules are taken from the administering Scheme's own current published pages and its own statutory return form; the 1.5% industrial-only rate is read off the printed rate on that form and corroborated by the Scheme's statement that out-of-age-range employees are "covered, but for Industrial Benefits only". The National Insurance and Social Security Act, Chapter 36:01 is named as the parent statute and Regulation 14 as the collection provision on the Scheme's own authority; neither the Act nor the amending regulation that set the January 2020 ceiling was individually opened, and no statutory-instrument number is cited for that ceiling because the Scheme's notice does not give one. The effective date of the ceiling is served as 1 January 2020 on the Scheme's own wording; note that the Scheme publishes that wording under a heading referring to 2025, alongside a separate block of pension changes expressly effective 1 January 2025, so the notice reads ambiguously on its face — the January 2020 date is what the ceiling paragraph itself states, and the Contributions page independently labels the current ceiling "January 2020".

Get it programmatically

curl https://latamref.dev/v1/gy/social-contributions
# $0.005 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History:    curl https://latamref.dev/v1/gy/social-contributions/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://latamref.dev/provenance/gy/social-contributions

Other Guyana series: Bank of Guyana Bank Rate (rediscount rate) · Value-Added Tax standard rate · VAT registration threshold · National Minimum Wage (private sector) · Public holidays · CPI inflation (year-on-year) · Corporation tax standard rate (non-commercial company) · Withholding tax rates · Statutory interest on debts and damages · Personal income tax rates

The same figure elsewhere: Honduras · Jamaica · Mexico · Nicaragua · Panama · all 22