CAC Annual Returns Compliance Checker Nigeria 2026 (Fees & Penalties)

Every business registered with Nigeria's Corporate Affairs Commission, whether a business name, a private company, or an incorporated trustee, has one recurring statutory obligation that outlasts the excitement of registration itself: filing annual returns. Unlike tax returns, which report income and go to the Nigeria Revenue Service, annual returns go to the CAC and confirm something narrower but still important, that the entity is still active and that its core records, directors, shareholders, registered address, are accurate. Miss enough of them, and the consequences move from a modest late fee to a genuine risk of losing the company's legal existence entirely. The mechanics differ by entity type, and getting them mixed up is the single most common source of confusion. Business names, which cover sole proprietorships and partnerships, are expected to file annually by 30 June, with a filing fee of ₦3,000 per filing under the CAC's official fee schedule. Private companies limited by shares face a different clock: the statutory deadline is technically within 42 days of the company's Annual General Meeting, but in practice, for the many companies with a 31 December financial year-end, that translates to a working deadline around 30 June of the following year, and the filing fee is ₦5,000 per filing, whether the company qualifies as a CAMA "small company" or not, the base fee is identical either way. Public companies pay more, ₦10,000 per filing. A newly incorporated company gets some breathing room before any of this applies, generally around 18 months from incorporation before the first annual return is due, so a company registered late last year is unlikely to be overdue for anything yet even if it feels overdue. Where company size actually matters is the penalty for defaulting, and the structure here surprises a lot of people: it is not a single flat fee charged once per missed year. The official schedule sets out two separate components. First, a daily default penalty that accrues for every day an entity stays out of compliance, ₦250 a day for a CAMA-defined small company, ₦500 a day for a private company that doesn't qualify as small (or a company limited by guarantee), ₦1,000 a day for a public company, and ₦150 a day for a business name. Second, on top of that, a flat one-off penalty, ₦5,000 for a small company or a business name, ₦10,000 for a larger private company or company limited by guarantee, ₦25,000 for a public company. Run the daily component out even a single year and it dwarfs the one-off amount, which is precisely why a company that has drifted several years behind can end up owing far more than the headline fee figures suggest. It is worth being precise here about a separate wrinkle: CAMA's "small company" threshold, turnover of no more than ₦120,000,000, net assets of no more than ₦60,000,000, directors collectively holding at least 51% of the shares, and no foreign shareholder, is not the same test as the "small company" definition used for tax exemptions under the Nigeria Tax Act 2025, which uses entirely different turnover and asset figures. A company can be small under one test and not the other, so the two should never be assumed interchangeable. One caveat worth stating plainly: while the daily penalty is genuinely on CAC's official published fee schedule, several compliance firms that handle CAC filings regularly report inconsistent day-to-day enforcement of it in practice, meaning the figure a company is actually asked to pay at the point of filing sometimes falls short of what a strict daily calculation would produce. The one-off penalty, by contrast, is reported far more consistently as actually charged. Anyone budgeting for a genuinely overdue filing should treat the daily-penalty portion of an estimate as an upper bound rather than a certainty, and confirm the actual amount owed directly with the CAC or a chartered secretary before assuming the worst-case number is what will be demanded. The real risk sits further out than any individual penalty calculation. Under CAMA Section 692(3) and (4), the CAC has the power to strike a company off the register entirely once it has failed to file annual returns for ten consecutive years. This is not a hypothetical power the Commission keeps in reserve. In recent strike-off exercises, the CAC has published lists running into the tens and even hundreds of thousands of company names, sending public notices with a short compliance window, typically around 90 days, for affected companies to file all outstanding returns and confirm their beneficial ownership details before being permanently delisted. A struck-off company loses its legal status outright: it cannot sign contracts, its bank accounts become unusable, and restoring it afterward requires a formal court order, on top of paying every fee and penalty that accrued in the meantime. If a company has gone quiet for a decade or close to it, checking its status on the CAC's public search portal is worth doing sooner rather than later, and definitely before assuming everything is fine simply because no letter has arrived. None of this replaces professional advice. The figures above come from CAC's own published fee schedule rather than third-party summaries, which is a meaningfully more reliable source, but the schedule itself can still be revised, and this tool has no live connection to CAC's systems. Before paying anything, confirm the current figure directly on the official CAC portal, and for anything beyond a straightforward, recent filing, a chartered secretary or a firm that regularly handles CAC compliance will save far more in avoided mistakes than their fee costs.