E-Invoicing Is Now Law in Nigeria. Your Deadline Depends on How Big You Are.
Most tax reforms arrive with noise and little follow-through. This one is different.
The Nigeria Revenue Service has released a binding, turnover-segmented enforcement timeline for its E-Invoicing and Electronic Fiscal System and for finance leaders still treating this as a future concern, the window to prepare is closing faster than it appears.
This isn’t a consultation. It isn’t a pilot extension. It is a statutory mandate, anchored in Section 23 of the Nigeria Tax Administration Act and Section 15B of the Nigeria Tax Act, with enforcement dates already on the calendar.
Where Your Organization Stands
If your company turns over ₦5 billion or more, enforcement begins in April 2026. The pilot phase is done. The post-go-live review wraps in March 2026, which means any unresolved integration gaps, reconciliation issues, or reporting misalignments need to be closed now, not after the first enforcement notice lands.
For organizations in the ₦1 billion to ₦5 billion range, the official go-live is July 1, 2026, with enforcement following in January 2027. That timeline feels comfortable until you account for what has to happen inside it: vendor selection, ERP integration, process redesign, and staff readiness. The engagement phase running through March 2026 is not orientation, it is your build window.
Smaller businesses below ₦1 billion have until July 2027 to go live, with enforcement expected in early 2028. The longer runway is deliberate, but it is not an exemption. Manual invoicing, informal processes, and disconnected systems are being structurally phased out across the entire economy.
What This Actually Changes for Finance
E-invoicing shifts tax administration from periodic reporting to real-time visibility. The NRS will have transaction-level data as it happens, which compresses the space for post-period adjustments, retrospective corrections, and the kind of reconciliation flexibility that manual systems have historically allowed. VAT exposure becomes harder to obscure and easier to audit. The organizations with clean, integrated, automated records will navigate this with minimal disruption. Those without them will find enforcement far more costly than compliance ever would have been.
The Decision In Front of You
The NRS has signaled that timelines may flex based on operational readiness , but the direction will not. E-invoicing is the floor, not the ceiling, of where Nigerian tax administration is heading.
For CFOs, the practical question is no longer whether to comply, but how much technical debt and process fragmentation your organization is carrying into a regime that has no tolerance for either. An honest assessment of your current invoicing infrastructure, what’s automated, what isn’t, and what the gap to full NRS compliance looks like, is the starting point. The organizations doing that work now will be positioned. The ones waiting for the enforcement notice will be managing a crisis instead.
The deadlines are set. The law is clear. The cost of delay compounds from here.
If you want to see exactly how your operations map to the new requirements, the DigiTax Platform is built for this transition.
Request a demo directly at firs-si@namiri.tech , and see what compliance looks like before enforcement makes the decision for you.
In a system built on real-time data, the advantage belongs to businesses that clear their backlog, before pressure arrives.