The Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) has eased the way salaried workers in the country file their returns. In the new filing method, the taxman has done away with manual tax filing which involved inputting all salary, tax and deductions on the iTax platform. Now, salaried workers will now only require an identification number (ID) for automatic tax filing.
Once the ID number has been keyed in, the system will automatically fill in the taxpayer’s annual income details such as their gross pay and taxes. Up until the new method, taxpayers have been lifting details of their income from P9 forms that are provided by employers.
The forms contain information summarizing the gross pay, allowances, benefits and Pay As You Earn (PAYE) taxes.
“We want to see how we integrate various data systems both internally and externally so that we don’t have silo systems, but integrated systems. We want to get a point where if you are purely an employed person or a nil filer, you don’t have to file your returns, but we will be able to prepopulate and present that position to you so that you just validate and we keep it that simple,” KRA Commissioner-General Humphrey Wattanga told the media.
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According to the taxman, salaried workers whose source of income is employment and workers with tax-free income of below Sh24,000 per month, and Kenyans who file nil returns will be able to use the new filing method.
At the same time, KRA has announced that it is currently upgrading its income tax and customs systems to meet the increased traffic during the January to June 30 tax filing season.
This follows downtimes that were experienced in the last days of the filing season in June 2025 that forced KRA to extend the deadline beyond June 30.
