Payroll in Mauritius: PAYE, CSG & NSF

Run Mauritian payroll with automatic PAYE, CSG and NSF, generate payslips and PDFs, and prepare the MRA remittance.

What Mauritian payroll in Qontab is

Payroll in Qontab turns each employee’s salary into a compliant Mauritian payslip and the matching accounting entry. From the gross you set, Qontab automatically computes the statutory deductions every Mauritius employer must withhold — PAYE income tax, CSG and NSF — credits the net pay to your bank, and parks what you owe the MRA on liability accounts until you remit it. It produces payslips you can hand to staff as PDFs and a remittance summary you can read off when filing.

This page documents how the software works. It is not tax advice — the brackets and rates Qontab applies follow the MRA schedule, but your obligations depend on your own circumstances.

PAYE, CSG & NSF — computed for you

For every payslip, Qontab works out the statutory amounts from the gross so you don’t have to keep a spreadsheet of rates:

PAYE — monthly income tax on the progressive MRA brackets (0% up to the exemption threshold, rising in steps to 15%), derived from the annualised gross.
CSG (Contribution Sociale Généralisée) — 1.5% employee and 3% employer on the monthly gross.
NSF (National Savings Fund) — 1% employee and 2.5% employer on the monthly gross.
HRDC training levy — 1.5%, employer-only, on the basic salary; it rides along on the same monthly MRA return.

The employee portions are deducted from gross to give net pay; the employer portions are an extra cost on top of gross, booked as your charge.

Monthly runs vs. one-off payslips

There are two ways to produce a payslip, depending on whether you’re paying a team or a single person:

Monthly payroll run — pick a month and Qontab drafts a payslip for every active employee in one batch, computing PAYE/CSG/NSF for each. You review, choose the bank account, and process the whole run together. This is the normal monthly cycle.
Standalone payslip — a one-off slip you build line by line, for an ad-hoc payment or an employee outside the batch. It posts its own journal entry the moment you finalise it.

Each employee carries an employee TAN (the 8-digit MRA Tax Account Number that prints as “TAN of Employee” on the payslip) and a separate NIC / ID number (the national identity number). They are different identifiers — Qontab stores and prints both correctly.

How a run posts to your books

Processing a run is what commits it: Qontab writes one balanced journal entry and posts it straight to the general ledger. The legs are:

Debit the expense — gross goes to 5200 Salaries & Wages, or to 5210 Director’s Fees when the employee’s compensation type is a director’s fee.
Credit the statutory payables — PAYE to 2130, CSG to 2140, NSF to 2330 (the HRDC levy to its own payable). These are what you’ll later remit to the MRA.
Credit the bank — the net pay hits the bank account you selected, matching the cash that actually leaves.

Because everything posts through the normal journal, payroll shows up in your financial reports like any other entry, and the net leg is ready to reconcile against your bank statement.

Tip

Keep your chart of accounts intact — Qontab finds 5200/5210 and the 2130/2140/2330 payables by code. If you’ve renamed or deleted them, the run can’t post until they exist again.

The MRA remittance report

Withheld PAYE, CSG and NSF don’t leave your books when you pay staff — they sit on the liability accounts 2130 / 2140 / 2330 until you remit them to the MRA. The MRA remittance report aggregates those balances so you can see, for any period, exactly how much income tax and social contribution is due.

Read the figures off the report when you prepare the monthly return, pay the MRA, then record that payment against the payables to clear them. For the wider VAT and corporate-tax picture, see VAT & MRA returns.

Need the payslip as a document? Qontab renders each one to PDF through a headless-Chromium (Gotenberg) sidecar, so the file is byte-for-byte the same layout you see in the app — ready to send to the employee or attach to the run.

Run payroll with AI (MCP)

Connected to an AI assistant through the Qontab MCP connector, payroll becomes a conversation. The assistant can open a monthly run with create_payroll_run, commit it (posting the journal entry) with process_payroll_run, and build a one-off slip with create_payslip. To review, it reads back with list_payroll_runs, list_payslips and get_payslip.

Ask your assistant

“Create the payroll run for this month, show me the PAYE, CSG and NSF totals, then process it against the main MUR bank account.”

FAQ

Does Qontab calculate PAYE, CSG and NSF for me?

Yes. From each employee's gross, Qontab computes monthly PAYE on the progressive MRA brackets, the 1.5% employee / 3% employer CSG, and the 1% employee / 2.5% employer NSF — plus the 1.5% employer-only HRDC training levy on basic salary. You enter the salary; Qontab does the statutory maths.

What's the difference between a director's fee and a salary?

It's the employee's compensation type. A salary posts to account 5200 (Salaries & Wages); a director's fee posts to 5210 (Director's Fees). Both still run through the same payslip with the same statutory deductions — only the expense account differs, so your P&L separates payroll from director remuneration.

Where does the net pay go, and what do I still owe the MRA?

Net pay is credited straight to the bank account you choose for the run, so your cash matches what left the account. The PAYE, CSG and NSF withheld sit on liability accounts (2130/2140/2330) until you remit them — the MRA remittance report shows exactly what's still owed.