How does Lagos earn its money?

Aug 31, 2022|Adesola Afolabi

It is no secret that Lagos is no state’s mate when it comes to income and that Lagos earns the bulk of its revenue from taxes is also pretty common knowledge. In previous articles, we’ve analysed if all the income generated within the state is worth it for Lagos residents.

Key takeaways:

Lagos has consistently generated the highest internal income among Nigeria’s states. For instance, the value of Lagos’ income in 2020 alone was higher than the total IGR for Ekiti, Oyo, Ondo, Ogun, and Osun from 2019 to 2021
The primary sources of this income growth are tax and non-tax income. However, tax income contributes over 80% of total IGR yearly, and PAYE, a more stable income tax source, provides the yearly boost to tax income.
But with barely five million people in the tax net, of which only 16% are tax compliant, Lagos needs to do the work needed to improve tax compliance, widen its tax net and make its MDAs more productive.

It isn’t. Infrastructure growth from transportation to education is happening too slowly compared with Lagos's wealth level, taking away the delight of living or working in Lagos.

Yet, year after year, there has been a steady growth of tax payments in Lagos, which has boosted the state’s impressive revenue growth.

In the last 22 years, Lagos’s IGR has multiplied almost 30 times from ₦15 billion in 1999 to nearly ₦500 billion in 2021, going by records from the Lagos state and National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).