Understanding Your Payslip in Sudan (2026)

Sudan has no legally mandated payslip, but you do have a right to a breakdown

This surprises people. The Labour Act 1997 does not oblige your employer to hand you a formatted monthly payslip the way some countries do. What it does give you is narrower and, used properly, just as useful.

Section 35(8) of the Act says wages must be paid to the worker personally or to their proxy, that no cuts are authorised except cuts made under the Act or another Act, and that where cuts are made the employer shall, upon the worker's request, provide a statement showing details of those cuts. That last clause is the one to memorise. If money has come off your pay and you do not understand why, you are entitled to ask for the detail in writing, and the employer is obliged to give it.

Section 65 backs this up from the record-keeping side. Every employer must keep a file on every worker stating the conditions of the employment contract, including the wage, the deductions made, and annual and sick leave with their dates. That file must be kept for at least one year after the contract ends, and the employer must produce the information to the competent authority on request. So even where no payslip was ever issued, a record of what you were paid and what was taken off is supposed to exist.

In practice, formal employers in Sudan do issue payslips, and they tend to follow a common shape: a block of earnings at the top, a block of deductions below, and a net figure at the bottom. The rest of this guide walks that shape line by line.

The earnings block, and why "basic" is the number that matters

The Labour Act defines "wage" broadly. It is the total of the basic wage and all other benefits paid by the employer, including the cash value of food, fuel or housing provided to the worker, overtime payments, and special benefits paid for performing a job. It expressly excludes employer contributions made on your behalf to a social security project, life insurance, or special expenditures the employer bears.

A typical Sudanese earnings block therefore splits into:

• Basic wage, the contractual core figure.
• Cost-of-living allowance, often the largest single addition, and often adjusted more frequently than basic pay during periods of rapid price increases.
• Housing, transport, food or fuel allowances, sometimes paid in cash, sometimes provided in kind and valued on the slip.
• Overtime, shown separately.
• Bonuses and incentives, irregular by nature.

Here is why the split matters far more in Sudan than the size of the gross figure suggests. Several of your most valuable entitlements are calculated on basic salary alone, not on the gross:

• Overtime is paid at the equivalent of one and a half hours' wage for each hour worked on a normal day, and two hours' wage for each hour on an official or weekly holiday. Section 71(4) then states plainly that the overtime wage is calculated on the basis of the basic salary.
• Severance pay under section 60 is calculated on the last basic salary. A worker with three to ten years of continuous service is entitled to one month's basic wage for each year of service. Beyond ten years the multiplier rises, and the total is capped at 36 months' basic wage.
• Repayment of a salary advance is capped as a percentage of basic salary, covered below.

An employer that keeps basic pay low and loads the rest into allowances is, whether deliberately or not, shrinking your overtime rate and your eventual severance entitlement at the same time. When you are negotiating pay or reviewing an offer letter, the split between basic and allowances is a real term of the deal, not presentation.

Personal income tax: what your employer is legally obliged to do

Sudan operates employer withholding for personal income tax, and the Taxation Chamber sets out the employer's duties explicitly.

Your employer must deduct personal income tax from all employees in accordance with the laws and regulations governing salaries, wages, allowances, bonuses and other cash and in-kind benefits, and remit what was deducted to the personal income tax account on or before the 15th of the following month. Separately, the employer must send detailed payroll statements to the tax office showing employee names and salaries for each month, make annual adjustments and remit any difference, keep payroll records for five years and allow the Secretary-General or a delegate to inspect them, and deduct applicable tax from the entitlements of employees who die or leave.

Where the employer fails to file, the Chamber's stated sanction is one hundred Sudanese pounds for each day of the omission, capped at 5% of the total tax due.

Two practical consequences follow. First, the tax line on your payslip is not discretionary and not negotiable with your manager. It is a statutory withholding your employer answers for. Second, because the employer must keep five years of payroll records and file monthly statements naming you, there is a paper trail. If you later need proof of employment income, whether for a lender assessing you for murabaha home or vehicle finance, for a visa application, or for a pension claim, that trail is where it comes from.

On tax rates, be careful. The Taxation Chamber's own income tax page sets out the employer's obligations in detail but states no rates or bands at all. The rate tables you will find on international payroll and tax-calculator websites are aggregator content, not law, and the pound thresholds attached to them long pre-date the currency's devaluation. A threshold that once represented a meaningful monthly salary may now be worth very little. Do not plan around them. If you need to know the current bands, or whether a tax-free threshold applies to you, confirm directly with the Sudan Taxation Chamber.

Social insurance: the deduction that is supposed to buy you a pension

The second statutory deduction most formal employees will see is the social insurance contribution, administered by the National Pension and Social Insurance Fund under its 2016 Act. It covers old age, disability and survivors, and work injury, and it applies to public and private sector employees and to self-employed people who register. Household workers, family labour, home-based workers, farmers and unpaid apprentices sit outside it, and coverage across the labour force as a whole has historically been thin, reaching only a small minority of workers even before the war.

The split most commonly reported in the international compilations of Sudan's social insurance law is 8% of earnings from the employee and 17% from the employer. If that holds, then where your slip shows an 8% deduction, roughly twice that amount is also being paid on your behalf without ever appearing as an earnings line. Treat those percentages as a working expectation rather than a settled fact, and confirm the current figures with the Fund before relying on them, because both the rates and the base they apply to have been subject to change.

What you should not rely on at all is any published figure for minimum or maximum insurable earnings. The floor and ceiling quoted in the standard reference works were set before the pound's devaluation and are, in today's money, close to meaningless. A ceiling that once capped only high earners may now sit below an ordinary monthly wage. If the arithmetic on your slip does not match your gross pay, an out-of-date or recently revised ceiling is one of the likelier explanations, and it is a fair question to put to your payroll department in writing.

The contribution is worth understanding rather than resenting. It is the only formal old-age provision most Sudanese employees have. But it is also thin cover, which is why building savings of your own alongside it matters. Our guide to comparing profit-sharing savings accounts walks through how the returns on those accounts are actually determined, and the savings calculator lets you project what regular contributions build up to over time.

Zakat, union dues and the other lines you may see

Beyond tax and social insurance, Sudanese payslips commonly carry a small number of additional deductions:

• Zakat. Sudan administers zakat through a statutory Zakat Chamber, and it is common for employers to deduct zakat on salaries at source for employees whose pay exceeds the applicable threshold. The rate and the threshold are matters for the Zakat Chamber, and the figures circulating online are unreliable. Several are quoted in foreign currency, which makes them useless after the devaluation. If the line appears on your slip and you want to check it, the Zakat Chamber is the source, and your employer should be able to tell you which basis it applied.
• Trade union subscriptions, where you belong to a union.
• Health insurance contributions, where your employer participates in a scheme.
• Repayment of an advance or a staff loan, covered in the next section.
• Absence deductions. Section 36 provides that a worker is not entitled to wages for periods of absence, except in the cases the Act protects: interruption of the lines of transportation, natural disasters or accidents preventing the worker from attending, being summoned by a court or other authorised public authority, the death of a spouse, child, parent or sibling, and any other reason the employer accepts. After three months of continuous service, those protected absences are paid. Given how routinely transport is interrupted, this provision matters more now than it did when it was drafted.

Anything else, whether it is described as a processing fee, a penalty that no rule provides for, or a charge for equipment, should be questioned. Section 35(8) permits only cuts authorised by the Labour Act or another Act.

Advances and staff loans: the 15% rule, and why they must be interest-free

Section 37 is one of the more useful provisions for an employee under pressure, and it is not widely known.

Employers may pay advances to workers. Two conditions attach. First, such advances must be without any interest. The employer may only ask the worker to bear a reduced percentage of the expenses relevant to the advance. Second, the periodical cuts from the worker's wage to pay off the advance may not exceed 15 per cent of the basic salary.

That 15% cap is the protection. It stops repayment of an advance from swallowing a month's pay, and it is calculated on basic salary, so once again the basic-versus-allowances split determines how much can actually be taken.

The interest-free requirement also sits naturally with how credit works everywhere else in the Sudanese system. Every licensed bank in the country operates on Islamic principles, so a salary advance from your employer, a murabaha facility from a bank and a microfinance facility are all structured without conventional interest, though in very different ways. Our explainer on Islamic banking basics sets out the underlying contracts and what "profit" means in each of them.

Timing, cash, and what happens when pay is late

The Act is specific about when money must reach you.

Wages are paid in cash, though allowances for food, fuel, housing, transport or clothing that are calculated within the wage itself may be provided in kind. Pay may be daily, weekly or monthly as agreed between the parties. A worker on a daily wage is paid by the end of the day, at the workplace, during working hours. For everyone else, wages are payable weekly, fortnightly or monthly at the workplace during working hours, and it is forbidden to delay payment later than the third day from the date on which it falls due.

That three-day rule is the clearest statutory answer to the question "my salary is late, what can I do?" It is not a grace period the employer sets. It is a limit the Act imposes.

If your employment ends, section 35(7) requires that you receive all of your entitlements within one week of termination. That includes accrued leave and, where you qualify, severance under section 60.

Where pay arrives by bank transfer rather than in cash, the practical problems have less to do with the law than with access: whether your branch is reachable, whether the transfer lands when it should, and whether you can withdraw once it does. If you do not yet have an account, how to open a bank account in Sudan covers what is currently required. Employees paid partly or wholly in foreign currency should read foreign-currency accounts and their rules before assuming they can hold or convert those earnings freely.

A worked example, in percentages rather than pounds

Because the pound's value has moved so far and so fast, a payslip example built on specific amounts would mislead within months. So work it in proportions instead. Call your basic wage B.

Suppose your slip shows basic wage B, a cost-of-living allowance of 0.6B, a transport allowance of 0.2B, and ten hours of overtime worked on ordinary days.

• Overtime is calculated on basic salary at one and a half times the hourly rate. If your basic monthly hours are H, your overtime pay is 10 x 1.5 x (B divided by H).
• Gross pay is B + 0.6B + 0.2B, which is 1.8B, plus that overtime amount.
• Social insurance is deducted as a percentage of the insurable earnings base. Confirm both the rate and the base with the Fund, and check whether a ceiling caps it.
• Personal income tax is withheld by your employer on salary, wages, allowances, bonuses and in-kind benefits, at whatever rates the Taxation Chamber currently applies.
• Any advance repayment may take at most 0.15B, no matter how much you owe.
• Net pay is what remains.

Two checks fall straight out of this. First, if the deductions leave you with less than you expected, work out whether an advance repayment has exceeded 15% of B. That is a bright-line breach, not a matter of judgement. Second, if your overtime looks small relative to the hours you actually worked, check what figure it was calculated on. Overtime computed on a shrunken basic wage is the single most common quiet underpayment on a Sudanese payslip, and it compounds, because the same shrunken basic figure will later drive your severance.

Note also that the tax and social insurance deducted from your pay are not the whole cost of employing you. The employer's own social insurance contribution sits on top and never appears on your slip. And separately from payroll altogether, the money you take home is spent in a system where value-added tax is charged at 17% on most goods and services. Our guide to how VAT works on everyday purchases explains where it does and does not apply, and the VAT calculator will strip it back out of a price for you.

What to do when the numbers do not add up

Work through it in this order.

1. Ask for the statement of cuts in writing. Cite section 35(8) of the Labour Act if you need to. You are entitled to a statement showing the details of the deductions made, on request.
2. Check each deduction against a legal basis. Tax, social insurance, zakat, union dues, court-ordered attachments and advance repayments all have one. A charge invented by the employer does not.
3. Check the advance repayment against 15% of basic. This is arithmetic, not argument.
4. Check what your overtime and any severance were calculated on. Both must use basic salary.
5. Check the timing. Payment more than three days after it was due is a breach on its face.
6. Keep your own record. Photograph or file every slip you receive. The employer's file must be kept only one year past the end of your contract, and in current conditions employers close, relocate and lose records. Your own copy may end up being the only surviving one.
7. Escalate in order. Raise it with payroll in writing first, then with the labour office. Where the dispute is about money that reached a bank rather than about the payroll calculation itself, how banks handle a customer dispute sets out that separate route.

If you are the one running payroll rather than receiving it, the same rules read as obligations. And if your business also sells goods or services, how a small trader registers for VAT covers the other half of your compliance. More general guidance sits in our money section.

Frequently asked questions

Is my employer legally required to give me a payslip in Sudan? Not in the sense of a mandatory monthly document. But section 35(8) of the Labour Act 1997 requires the employer, on your request, to provide a statement showing the details of any cuts made to your wage, and section 65 requires the employer to keep a file recording your wage, the deductions made, and your annual and sick leave. Between them you can obtain the substance of a payslip even where no payslip is routinely issued.

How much of my wage can be deducted to repay a salary advance? No more than 15 per cent of your basic salary per pay period, under section 37(1)(b). The advance itself must also be interest-free. The employer may only recover a reduced percentage of the expenses relating to it.

What are the current income tax rates on salaries in Sudan? Confirm them with the Sudan Taxation Chamber. The Chamber's own guidance on employer withholding sets out the obligations in detail but publishes no rate table there, and the bands circulating on international payroll websites carry pound thresholds that pre-date the devaluation and are no longer meaningful. What is established is the mechanism: your employer withholds the tax and must remit it by the 15th of the following month.

How much is deducted for social insurance? The split most often reported is 8% from the employee and 17% from the employer, under the National Pension and Social Insurance Fund's 2016 Act. Confirm the current percentages and the earnings base with the Fund directly. Do not rely on any published insurable-earnings floor or ceiling, because those figures date from before the devaluation.

My salary is two weeks late. What does the law say? Section 35(6) forbids delaying payment later than the third day from the date it falls due, so two weeks is a breach. Raise it in writing, keep the correspondence, and take it to the labour office if it is not resolved. If your employment has ended rather than continued, section 35(7) requires all of your entitlements to be paid within one week of termination.

Why does my overtime look lower than I expected? Almost certainly because it was calculated on basic salary rather than on gross pay, which is what section 71(4) requires. If a large share of your pay sits in allowances rather than in basic, your overtime rate is correspondingly lower. That is lawful, but it is also a good reason to negotiate the basic-versus-allowance split rather than only the headline total.

Reviewed 4 September 2026. Legal provisions cited from the Sudan Labour Act 1997; employer withholding obligations from the Sudan Taxation Chamber. Tax rates, social insurance percentages and zakat thresholds change, and should be confirmed with the Taxation Chamber, the National Pension and Social Insurance Fund and the Zakat Chamber respectively before you rely on them.

This article is general information, not financial or legal advice. Your own contract, sector and circumstances determine what applies to you.