Employment income tax (TAP)

A stepped progressive scale, computed on gross

Income from dependent employment in Albania is taxed by the employment income tax — Tatimi mbi të Ardhurat nga Punësimi, or TAP — on a stepped progressive scale. The first slice of pay is tax-free: up to 50 000 L a month no TAP is due at all. Above that the rate is 13% on middle incomes, and it rises to 23% on the part of a salary above 200 000 L. Because the tax-free floor sits exactly at the national minimum wage, a minimum-wage earner pays no income tax — only the contributions come off their pay.

The single fact that sets the Albanian system apart from most of its neighbours is the base the tax is charged on. Here the TAP is computed on the gross salary — not on gross minus the social and health contributions. The contributions and the tax are parallel deductions from the same gross figure, not a sequence where one is netted off before the other is worked out. Get that wrong and every estimate is off, so it is the first thing this calculator gets right.

Who withholds the tax, and when

As an employee you almost never hand the TAP over yourself. Your employer acts as a withholding agent: it calculates the tax on each payslip, deducts it at source, and remits it to the state budget. So the amount that lands in your account is already net — both the tax and the contributions have been taken off before you see a lek. The figure written into your contract, by contrast, is the gross: the number this calculator starts from.

A worked month

Take a gross monthly salary of 60 000 L. The two contributions come off in parallel — social insurance 5 700 L and health insurance 1 020 L, 6 720 L together. The TAP is worked out separately, on that same gross, and comes to 3 250 L. What remains — 50 030 L — is the take-home net. Separately, and never out of your net, the employer pays its own contributions on top, so the true cost of employing you is 70 020 L. Every figure here is the calculator’s own output for this salary; change the gross above and the whole breakdown moves with it.

The two transitional steps

The scale is not perfectly smooth. At two points — 50 000 L and 60 000 L — the function steps up slightly, because the amount subtracted before the 13% rate is applied changes from 35 000 L in the first taxed band to 30 000 L in the standard band. The practical effect is that net pay can dip a little as gross rises past one of these edges. This is not an error in the calculator: it is a real, and much-criticised, feature of the reform’s transitional design, and we reproduce it exactly rather than smoothing it away. The tax-scale page walks the bands one by one.

Allowances are an annual matter

Albanian law does allow certain deductions — for dependent children, for some education expenses, and for voluntary pension contributions. Important caveat: these are reconciled through the annual individual declaration (DIVA), not applied automatically to your monthly withholding. Unless they are declared at your primary employer, the standard month-to-month TAP does not reflect them — so this calculator follows the universal no-allowances monthly path, and treats a child allowance only as a note, not as a reduction to the monthly figure. Whether any of these can be taken monthly at source is one of the points still open.

Legal basis

The scale is set by Ligji nr. 29/2023 “Për tatimin mbi të ardhurat” (the income-tax law), neni 24, with the implementing Udhëzim nr. 26, datë 08.09.2023. TAP is uniform nationwide — there is no municipal or regional variation. The rates and thresholds shown here are those in force for 2026, taken directly from the primary law text, cited above.

This page is not legal or tax advice — the official authority’s own decision governs.