Abuja, Aug. 10, 2026 – Nigeria’s tax revenue has risen to N27.1 trillion as of July 2026 from N12.3 trillion in 2023.
The Nigeria Revenue Service (NRS) disclosed this in an internal report on the state of the Nigerian economy.
It attributed the sharp increase in the revenue to the digitisation of the tax system, the enactment of four new tax reform laws, the transformation of the revenue service and an executive order intended to close the loopholes in the tax system.
The NRS said the reforms had helped the Nigerian economy to move decisively from acute macroeconomic distress toward a more stable and increasingly resilient economy.
It attributed the country’s previous economic problems the four distortions inherited from the previous administrations.
NRS listed the problems as the fuel subsidy regime the government could no longer afford, a foreign exchange system that scared away investors because it lacked transparency, an oil sector that was not producing as much as it should, and a tax system that was collecting far less revenue than its potential.
It stressed that the Nigerian economy had now moved decisively from acute macroeconomic distress toward a more stable and increasingly resilient footing due to the economic reforms of the current administration.
The report also said that with the economic reforms, crude oil production had also risen considerably during the period as Nigeria’s oil production had risen rose from about 1.2 to 1.3 million barrels per day in 2023 to 1.73 million barrels per day by July 2026, a level equivalent to 104 per cent of the country’s quota under the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).
It said Nigeria had also become a net exporter of petroleum products for the first time in decades assisted by a naira-for-crude arrangement between the government, the Dangote Refinery and other local refineries, under which crude oil is exchanged for naira instead of dollars.
The report said the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio had also fallen from 38 per cent in 2023 to 35.5 per cent in 2025 before dropping further to 32.3 per cent in 2026.
It described this steady slide in the debt-to-GDP ratio as the first sustained decline in the ratio in more than a decade.
The report said the cost of debt servicing had also become lighter on government finances with debt servicing as a share of revenue falling from 68 per cent to a projected 53 per cent, according to the International Monetary Fund.
