GST or TGST: which rate your business charges
8% for most businesses, 16% for tourism. Which one you are, what changed in January 2023, and what to do about invoices from before it.
There are two GST rates in the Maldives, and which one applies to you is not a choice — it follows from what your business does.
8%
GST
Shops, wholesalers, contractors, clinics, workshops — every business that is not selling to tourists.
16%
TGST
Resorts, guesthouses, hotels, safari vessels, diving and excursions, and the businesses supplying them as tourism goods.
Which one you are
TGST is the tourism rate. If you run a resort, a guesthouse, a hotel, a safari vessel, a dive school or a tour operation, you charge 16% on what you sell. Everybody else charges 8%.
The edge that catches people is supply into tourism. A business selling goods or services to a resort may fall under TGST for those supplies even though the rest of what it does is at 8%. If most of your sales go to resorts, that is a question worth putting to MIRA directly rather than inferring.
The rate you charge is not the rate you claim
This is the part that trips people up on an input tax statement. The rate on your registration governs what you charge your customers. What you claim is whatever your supplier charged you.
- A guesthouse charging 16% buys paint from a hardware shop. The shop charges 8%. The guesthouse claims 8% — the supplier’s rate.
- A wholesaler charging 8% supplies a resort as a tourism good and charges 16%. The resort claims 16%.
So a single filing can hold lines at both rates, and there is nothing wrong with that. The statement has a column for each precisely because they mix.
6% and 12%, and why they still exist
Until the end of 2022 the rates were 6% for general GST and 12% for TGST. Both rose on 1 January 2023 — general GST to 8%, TGST to 16%.
You will still meet the old rates in two places: an amended return for a period before 2023, and an invoice dated late 2022 that surfaced long after the fact. That is why the statement keeps columns for them and why Tax Flow will still read an invoice at 6% or 12% without complaint. They are history, not a choice.
Filing either one
Whichever rate you are on, the input tax statement works the same way: one line per supplier invoice, the GST in the column for the rate that supplier charged. The columns are here, and filing a quarter start to finish is here.