Vanuatu levies no corporate income tax, personal income tax, capital gains tax, inheritance tax, or wealth tax for local or International Companies alike; International Companies can be exempt from most taxes for 20 years, paying a flat USD 300 annual fee instead. Vanuatu's tax revenue is instead built primarily around its 15% standard VAT, administered under Vanuatu's revenue legislation.
Per the Department of Customs and Inland Revenue's own official guidance, VAT returns are filed monthly, due on the 27th of the following month (or the next working day if the 27th falls on a weekend or public holiday) - given the absence of corporate or personal income tax, this VAT filing cycle is Vanuatu's primary recurring tax deadline.
0% - no corporate income tax for local or international companies; International Companies can be exempt from most taxes for 20 years, paying a flat USD 300 annual fee instead.
0% - no personal income tax, capital gains tax, inheritance tax, or wealth tax.
15% standard VAT (the principal source of government tax revenue); registration required above VUV 4 million annual turnover.
Individual tax residency is available for people who live in Vanuatu for more than 183 days a year, though this has limited practical consequence given Vanuatu's zero-rate treatment of individuals regardless of residency status. Vanuatu law makes no distinction between resident and non-resident individuals, or between foreign and local employees, for tax purposes - both categories are equally exempt from personal income tax. Companies not doing business in Vanuatu (offshore/International Companies) and their shareholders are exempt from all taxes on income, profits, capital gains, and distributions.
A foreign company conducting business in Vanuatu, whether through a fixed place of business or otherwise, remains subject to Vanuatu's zero-rate corporate income tax treatment, consistent with the jurisdiction's overall absence of corporate income tax for any company, local or international; the operative distinction for International Companies is instead whether they are doing business in Vanuatu at all, since companies not doing business in Vanuatu and their shareholders are exempt from all taxes on income, profits, capital gains, and distributions.
Vanuatu has no Controlled Foreign Company rules.
Not a meaningful question in Vanuatu's case: there is no corporate income tax, capital gains tax, or withholding tax on companies at all, so there is no interest-deductibility base against which a thin capitalization rule could operate. No such rule was identified in available sources.
Vanuatu classifies entities under its own domestic company legislation rather than offering an elective check-the-box system, and no ATAD2-style anti-hybrid mismatch regime addressing double-deduction or deduction-without-inclusion outcomes has been identified, consistent with Vanuatu having no Controlled Foreign Company rules. Vanuatu International Companies are commonly used in cross-border structuring as disregarded or pass-through entities under a foreign owner's home-country check-the-box election, a classification choice made under the foreign owner's own law rather than Vanuatu's, and Vanuatu remains on the EU list of non-cooperative jurisdictions as of February 2026 per available sources.
No domestic FBAR-equivalent regime requires Vanuatu residents to separately disclose foreign financial accounts. Vanuatu is a CRS participating jurisdiction and exchanges financial account information with partner tax authorities, notwithstanding its otherwise minimal direct-tax base and its continued presence on the EU list of non-cooperative jurisdictions. US persons remain independently subject to FinCEN Form 114 (FBAR) and potentially Form 8938 regardless of Vanuatu's own rules.
Not a meaningful question in Vanuatu's case in the way it would be elsewhere: there is no corporate income tax or capital gains tax on companies at all, so dividends and capital gains from a subsidiary are already outside the Vanuatu tax base entirely, achieving a more complete practical effect than a conventional participation exemption regime would provide.
Not a meaningful question given Vanuatu's zero corporate income tax rate: with no domestic corporate tax base against which foreign tax paid could be credited, a foreign tax credit mechanism has no practical function; Vanuatu's single comprehensive double tax agreement (with New Zealand) and its roughly 13 to 14 Tax Information Exchange Agreements instead serve information-exchange and treaty-relief purposes for the narrow categories of income where Vanuatu tax could otherwise apply.
Vanuatu has 1 comprehensive Double Tax Agreement, with New Zealand. This is a genuinely narrow network; Vanuatu has not signed comprehensive DTAs with most other countries, consistent across multiple independent sources. Separately, Vanuatu maintains a network of roughly 13-14 Tax Information Exchange Agreements (TIEAs) - narrower information-exchange instruments, not treaties providing double-tax relief - with Australia, Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Finland, France, Greenland, Grenada, Iceland, Ireland, Korea, New Zealand, Norway, San Marino, and Sweden, per GSL and a Lowtax/offshore-law compilation (source counts vary between 13 and 14 depending on whether a given agreement is still counted as active). The earlier "19 treaties" figure conflated TIEAs with comprehensive DTAs and does not hold up against the New Zealand government's own primary confirmation of a single DTA; it is not relied on here. Vanuatu remains on the EU list of non-cooperative jurisdictions as of February 2026 per available sources, which creates practical banking and treaty-access friction independent of the underlying DTA count.