Mauritania taxes residents on worldwide income and non-residents on Mauritania-source income only. Mauritania operates a self-assessment system for corporate tax, with the domestic tax authority conducting post-filing review.
Mauritania's tax year is the calendar year.
Mauritania's headline corporate income tax (CIT) rate is 25%.
The headline personal income tax (PIT) rate is 40%.
The standard VAT/GST (or equivalent consumption tax) rate is 16%.
Both Mauritanian nationals and foreigners are taxed on Mauritanian-source income; non-Mauritanian nationals are also taxed on salary paid outside Mauritania for work actually performed within the country. Mauritanian companies are taxed on the territoriality principle. Both resident and non-resident companies are subject to corporate tax only on Mauritania-source activity - a fully territorial system that does not distinguish tax base by residence status, a pattern shared with several other Francophone West African jurisdictions on this site.
A non-Mauritania-resident entity has a Mauritania permanent establishment through a fixed place of business or a dependent agent habitually concluding contracts in Mauritania on the entity's behalf, following the OECD Model Treaty definition as applied under Mauritania's domestic law and any applicable tax treaty.
No CFC-style attribution provision exists in Mauritania's General Tax Code. Where a Mauritanian enterprise is dependent on or controls a foreign enterprise (or vice versa - the dependency test applies symmetrically whether the Mauritanian or the foreign entity holds control), profits indirectly transferred abroad through price manipulation or other means are reincorporated into taxable results, with the arm's-length principle applying to related-party transactions generally. A World Bank technical assessment separately confirms Mauritania's transfer pricing legislation is built on international (OECD-aligned) standards centered on Article 40. This is a transfer-pricing framework, not a CFC regime, consistent with Mauritania's broader territorial approach to corporate taxation.
No statutory thin capitalization ratio is identified in available sources for Mauritania.
Mauritania does not use an elective check-the-box classification system; entity classification generally follows the entity's actual legal characteristics under the French-derived legal tradition shared across the region. Mauritania does not have a comprehensive ATAD2-style anti-hybrid regime.
No foreign bank account or foreign financial asset reporting regime exists requiring residents to separately disclose foreign accounts; foreign income is reported through the standard annual tax return.
Mauritania does not provide a broad participation exemption for foreign dividends in the European sense, consistent with the transfer-pricing-focused (rather than exemption-focused) anti-avoidance framework already confirmed elsewhere on this page; relief from double taxation is available primarily through Mauritania's foreign tax credit system where one exists.
Mauritania has a foreign tax credit mechanism for foreign tax paid on foreign-source income also taxed domestically, capped at the domestic tax otherwise due on that income; specific provisions are not extensively documented in public sources for Mauritania and should be confirmed directly with the Direction Generale des Impots before relying on them.
Mauritania has entered into double tax treaties with France, Senegal, and the states of the Arab Maghreb Union (Algeria, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia) - six named partner countries in total. Under the France and Senegal treaties specifically, royalties and remuneration paid to a non-resident for services rendered in Mauritania are taxable in the beneficiary's state of residence rather than in Mauritania; permanent-establishment profits are taxable in the treaty country where the PE is located; and interest is generally taxable in the beneficiary's state of residence, subject to domestic source-state withholding where the source state's law provides for it.