The Bahamas VAT rate

What this value means

RATE HISTORY: 7.5% from 1 Jan 2015; 12% from 1 Jul 2018; 10% from 1 Jan 2022 under the Value Added Tax (Amendment)(No. 2) Act, 2021, whose section 1(2) sets commencement at 'the 1st day of January, 2022' and whose section 6 amends the standard rate of tax throughout the Act and subsidiary legislation (official Bill text: https://bahamasbudget.gov.bs/media/filer_public/83/e0/83e0c758-d929-4ae4-bfda-df44d1a54ed5/value_added_tax_amendmentno_2_bill_2021_-_31_october_2021_4.pdf). The 10% headline has not changed since. UNPREPARED FOOD IS EXEMPT, NOT ZERO-RATED — THIS IS THE TRAP. Several tax newsletters reported the April 2026 change as zero-rating. It is not. The Value Added Tax (Amendment) Act, 2026 (commencement 1 April 2026) carries the long title 'A BILL FOR AN ACT TO AMEND THE VALUE ADDED TAX ACT TO EXEMPT QUALIFYING UNPREPARED FOOD ITEMS AND CERTAIN IMPORTED GOODS FROM VALUE ADDED TAX, AND FOR CONNECTED PURPOSES', and clause 3 amends the SECOND SCHEDULE — which is the exempt schedule — not the First Schedule, which is the zero-rated schedule (section 6(1)(a) charges zero percent on supplies 'specified in the First Schedule'). Specifically: Second Schedule Part I (Exempt Supplies) gains a new item (19), 'The wholesale and retail supply of goods referred to under Part III if sold unprepared by a food store'; Part II (Exempt Imports of Goods) gains a new item 10, 'The import of goods referred to under Part III by a food store'; and a new Part III inserts the tariff-code list (bovine/swine/sheep/goat/poultry meat and offal, dairy, fruit, vegetables, grains, spices, selected coffee and tea, waters and non-alcoholic beverages, vinegar, etc.). WHY THE DIFFERENCE MATTERS: an exempt supply is outside the tax, so the food store CANNOT RECOVER INPUT TAX attributable to it — VAT on its electricity, rent, refrigeration, shrinkage and other overheads becomes a cost embedded in the shelf price. A zero-rated supply is taxable at 0% and input tax IS recoverable. So the consumer-price relief from an exemption is strictly smaller than headline '0% VAT' implies, and registrants must apportion input tax. Also note the exemption is conditional twice over: the goods must be sold UNPREPARED (defined by the 2025 Act as goods remaining in original purchased state, not altered by cooking, heating or food preparation by the supplier) AND supplied or imported by a FOOD STORE (defined by the 2025 Act as a business where at least 10% of its 2024 business-licence turnover was from sale of unprepared food for human consumption, or a business licensed to operate as a pharmacy). Restaurants and takeaways are unaffected. OTHER RATES: zero rate (First Schedule) — exports, international transport and others; REDUCED RATE OF FIVE PERCENT (Fourth Schedule) on essential non-food goods including baby and adult diapers, feminine hygiene products, medications and medical supplies, introduced by section 3 and section 8 of the Value Added Tax (Amendment) Act, 2025 (Date of Assent 31 March 2025, in force 1 April 2025, Extraordinary Official Gazette: https://inlandrevenue.finance.gov.bs/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/VALUE-ADDED-TAX-AMENDMENT-ACT-2025.pdf). The 2026 Act clause 2 deletes the words 'if sold unprepared in a food store and' from section 6(1)(b), which EXTENDS the 5% reduced rate from food stores only to ALL VAT registrants from 1 April 2026; clause 4 restructures the Fourth Schedule accordingly (deletes Part I, renumbers Part II as Part I, and inserts the chapeau 'The following wholesale and retail taxable supplies and taxable importations shall be chargeable at the reduced rate of five percent (5%)'). ACCESS: laws.bahamas.gov.bs serves the 2026 amendment as a 69-page text-layer PDF at http://laws.bahamas.gov.bs/cms/images/LEGISLATION/BILLS/2026/2026-0005/2026-0005.pdf (readable with a PDF text extractor, not with an HTML-to-markdown fetcher). As at confirmation the ENACTED gazette reprint of the 2026 Act had not been posted on inlandrevenue.finance.gov.bs (guessed /wp-content/uploads/2026/{03,04,05}/ paths all 404), so the cited authority for the food change is the official legislation-portal text plus the Government's own press release of 12 Mar 2026 on the debate (https://www.bahamas.gov.bs/news-press-release/removal-of-vat-from-non-cooked-food-to-relieve-burden-on-bahamians). www.bahamas.gov.bs and its subdomains return HTTP 403 to scripted fetchers and must be read through a real browser.

Earlier values

Get it programmatically

curl https://usaref.dev/v1/bs/vat
# $0.001 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History:    curl https://usaref.dev/v1/bs/vat/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://usaref.dev/provenance/bs/vat

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