Pakistan statutory reference
What Pakistani payroll actually owes, with the sources attached
Four figures decide most of a Pakistani payroll run. The published guides disagree with each other about three of them. Here is each one, the body that sets it, and — where it is genuinely unsettled — an honest blank instead of a guess.
Salary income tax
The eight slabs that decide what comes off a Pakistani salary in tax year 2026–27, and what the Finance Act 2026 changed.
Read the referenceEOBI
Who has to register with the Employees’ Old-Age Benefits Institution, what the contribution is, and the rule that catches employers who shrink.
Read the referenceProvincial social security
PESSI, SESSI and their counterparts. The rate is in the statute; the wage ceiling is not, which is why every guide quotes a different number.
Read the referenceMinimum wage
The figure that sets the floor on pay — and, because EOBI and social security are both computed on it, the figure that sets two of your contributions too.
Read the referenceWhy we built this
We went looking for the current EOBI threshold while building payroll for this product. One guide said five employees. Another said ten. A third did not say. The Act, when we finally read it, says ten — and adds a clause none of the three mentioned, which is that dropping below ten does not release you from the obligation.
That pattern repeated for every figure we checked. It is not that the guides are careless; it is that Pakistani statutory figures are set by a mix of statute and notification, the notifications are not reliably published, and a page written eighteen months ago looks identical to one written last week. So we read the primary sources, and we show them to you.
How to read the markings
- Read from the Act
- We obtained the statute, the Ordinance or the Board's own circular and read the clause. The link goes to that document, not to a summary of it. Where the source states its own arithmetic — as the FBR slab table does — a test in our build checks our copy against it.
- Corroborated
- Several independent accounts agree, but we could not obtain the gazette itself. Good enough to plan with, not good enough to argue with.
- Open question
- The sources disagree, or the figure rests on a notification we do not hold. We show the disagreement and tell you who to ask. We do not pick a side, and we do not round a rumour into a number — somebody files on these pages.
What this is not
It is not legal or tax advice, and it is not a substitute for your own adviser. It covers Pakistan only — we are not going to write a UK or US compliance page until the product supports those payrolls, because a reference page is a promise about what we know.
Sources were last read end to end on 23 October 2026. Every page carries that date, so you can see for yourself how stale it is getting.