2024/2025 National Budget : Changes to taxes and duty

Get ready to pay more for alcohol and cigarettes as excise taxes on these items will increase by 5 percent.

Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Finance, Professor Biman Prasad says from 1st August 2024, the departure tax will increase from $140 to $170, and return to the pre-pandemic rate of $200 from 1st August 2025.

The 3 percent duty on the importation of raw materials in the last Budget has been removed.

To support construction and bring down building costs, the fiscal duty on prefabricated buildings will reduce from 32 percent to 5 percent while fiscal duty on steel structures or articles of iron will be maintained at 5 percent.

For our hotel incentives, we are extending the SLIP tax holiday to investors who acquire existing hotels and undertake renovations and refurbishments of more than $50 million. This will support major investments like Crowne Plaza and Wananavu resort. At a time when we need more capacity in the tourism sector, we encourage investors to take advantage of this.

In addition, the standard allowance for renovations and extension of hotels will be reduced from 50 percent to 25 percent, similar to pre-COVID levels.

The water resource tax rate will increase from 1 cent per litre to 5 cents per litre, for producers who extract between 0 to less than 10 million litres per month. The rate for producers extracting over 10 million litres per month remains unchanged at 19.5 cents per litre which was increased from 18 cents per litre in the last Budget.

A 200 percent deduction will be allowable for donations over $10,000 towards the 2031 Pacific Games. Similar to the tax incentive provided to Fijian Drua, a 13-year tax holiday, duty concessions on imported sports equipment and 200 percent tax deduction will be extended to Fiji National Rugby League.

The 2024-2025 Budget is set with a total expenditure of $4.552 billion and a total revenue of $3.917 billion.

The fiscal deficit is set at $635.5 million, or 4.5 percent of GDP.

Professor Prasad says the debt to GDP ratio is projected to decline further to around 77.8 percent by the end of July 2025.

He says the FRCS is expected to exceed the $3 billion dollar mark in tax collections for the first time this year.

For the 2024-2025 Budget, tax collections are estimated at $3.3 billion while non-tax revenue collections are budgeted at $618 million.