Kazakhstan: who will pay the 15% income tax rate from 2026, expert explains

From January 2026, Kazakhstan has applied a second personal income tax (IPN) rate of 15%. The higher rate does not apply to all salaries, only to income above a set threshold, so most employees will continue to pay 10%. Economist Ruslan Sultanov explained this in a post on the Telegram channel 'Ekonomicheskiy likbez', as reported by Nur.kz.

According to Sultanov, the 15% rate applies when annual taxable income exceeds 8,500 monthly calculation indices (MRP), which equals 36,762,500 tenge in 2026, or about 3,064,000 tenge a month. Income tax is calculated after mandatory pension and health contributions and the basic tax deduction are subtracted, so the effective threshold for gross monthly salary is about 3.59 million tenge. The average nominal wage in the second quarter of 2026 was 486,000 tenge, and the median was 348,000 tenge.

In his example, a person earning 4 million tenge a month would pay an extra 223,625 tenge a year, about 18,600 tenge a month on average. That is less than 0.5% of annual gross pay. Sultanov stressed that the 15% rate applies only to the part of income above the threshold.