Pesa Sahihi
Reference · for the person who runs the payroll
Kenya payroll deadlines.
Four statutes, four remittances, and in practice one date on the calendar: the 9th of the following month. This page is the operating rule, the exact statutory wordings behind it — including the one place KRA’s own pages disagree with each other — and a calendar file so nobody has to remember it.
Add the deadline to your calendar (.ics) — one recurring event on the 9th, with a reminder two days before. No sign-up, nothing tracked.
The date, per statute
| Remittance | Due | Where |
|---|---|---|
| PAYE | By the 9th of the following month | iTax — file the return and pay together |
| Affordable Housing Levy (both halves) | Within nine working days after month end | iTax, to KRA as collector |
| NSSF (both tiers, both sides) | By the 9th of the following month | NSSF employer portal |
| SHIF | By the 9th of the following month | SHA employer portal |
“The 9th” or “9 working days”?
KRA’s own pages carry both wordings: the PAYE FAQ says a return should be filed “on or before the 9th day of the following month”, while the PAYE guidance page says remit “within 9 working days after the end of the month” — and the Housing Levy notice uses the working-days form too. Nine working days can only land on or after the 9th calendar day, never before it. So the operating rule that satisfies every wording at once is simple: pay by the 9th calendar day and the question never matters. That is the date the calendar file carries.
What lateness costs
The one figure we have verified against the Act itself: the Housing Levy charges 3% of the unpaid amount for each month it remains unpaid — section 9, Affordable Housing Act 2024. The penalty asymmetry is why our engine takes the conservative side on the levy’s one open definitional question (the reasoning).
Late PAYE, NSSF and SHIF each carry their own penalty and interest under their statutes. Figures for those are widely quoted from practitioner summaries; we print statutory figures only once we have read them in the instrument, and those three are still in verification — this paragraph will grow the numbers when they clear, dated. Until then the operating rule stands on its own: the 9th is a hard date, not a target.
The month, as the app runs it
Lock the payroll month, generate the outputs, remit by the 9th: the home page walks the whole loop. The iTax CSV, the NSSF and SHIF return files and the payment totals report all come out of one locked run — the deadline work is assembling those files, and that is the part the app makes a non-event.
Statutory positions on this page last verified against the Acts and KRA notices on 10 August 2026, by XELQ Ltd. Rates themselves are printed by the payroll engine, so they move with it.