KRA’s Six-Month Tax Amnesty Is Open: Who Qualifies and How to Claim It

The Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) has opened a six-month tax amnesty that runs from 1 July to 31 December 2026. In plain terms, it lets people and businesses with old tax debts settle what they actually owe without paying the penalties, interest and fines that piled up on top. You pay the original tax. The extra charges are cancelled.

The programme was created by the Finance Act 2026, which President William Ruto signed into law. It works by amending an existing part of the law called Section 37E of the Tax Procedures Act. KRA runs it under Commissioner General Adan Mohamed, who took charge of the authority in May.

Here is what the amnesty is, who it covers, and the exact steps to use it.

What a tax amnesty actually is

A tax amnesty is a limited period in which the taxman agrees to forgive the penalties and interest attached to a debt, as long as you clear the main tax itself. That main amount is called the principal.

Say you owed KES 100,000 in tax from a past year and never paid it. Over time, KRA adds a late-payment penalty and then charges interest month after month. By now the balance on your ledger might read KES 180,000 or more. Under the amnesty, you pay the KES 100,000 principal and the roughly KES 80,000 in penalties and interest falls away. The relief is a full 100 per cent waiver of the penalties and interest, not a discount.

One point matters above all others. The amnesty does not forgive the tax you owe. It only forgives what was added on top. If you never pay the principal, you get nothing.

Who qualifies

The amnesty covers tax debts that relate to periods up to 31 December 2025. Anything from 1 January 2026 onwards is excluded and stays fully payable, penalties and all.

Within that cut-off, there are three common situations:

If you had already paid all your principal tax by 31 December 2025, KRA waives the leftover penalties and interest automatically. You do not need to apply.

If your only problem is a late-filing penalty, such as the common KES 2,000 charge for filing an income tax return late, and you owe no principal, you file the missing returns and the penalty clears automatically.

If you still owe principal tax from before 2026, you have to pay it in full during the amnesty window. Once the principal is settled, the penalties and interest tied to it are written off.

Two limits are worth knowing. The relief is once-only: the law grants a qualifying taxpayer this waiver a single time, so there is no second bite later. And penalties for tax avoidance under Section 85 of the Tax Procedures Act are excluded from the waiver.

How to claim it

Everything happens on iTax, KRA’s online tax portal. You do not need to visit a KRA office. The steps are straightforward:

1. Log into iTax using your KRA PIN and password.
2. Open your tax ledger and check what you owe, split into principal, penalties and interest.
3. If you owe principal, pay it in full through iTax. If you cannot pay at once, apply for a structured payment plan.
4. If you use a payment plan, the whole principal must still be cleared by 31 December 2026. Miss that date and the waiver is lost.
5. If your only issue is late-filing penalties, simply file the outstanding returns.
6. If your debt is tied up in an active dispute or court case, KRA says to use its Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) process to settle the principal first.

Two practical catches

First, iTax has to actually work. In the opening days of July, several taxpayers reported that the amnesty option had not been switched on inside iTax, and KRA asked people to be patient while it issued implementation guidance. That is a problem, because some taxpayers found they could not pay principal on its own until the amnesty feature was live. Check that the option is available before you build a plan around it. This is the same iTax that buckled on the final day of the 2025 filing season and forced two extensions, so leaving your December run to the last minute carries real risk.

Second, for businesses, the amnesty interacts with eTIMS. From 2026, expenses that are not backed by valid eTIMS invoices can be disallowed, which raises your taxable income and therefore the principal tax you must clear before any waiver applies. We have already explained how KRA has wired eTIMS deep into everyday transactions. The practical effect is that a business should reconcile its records first, because the principal it needs to pay may be larger than the figure sitting on its ledger today.

Why KRA is doing this now

This is the third amnesty of its kind. The first, under the Finance Act 2023, ran from September 2023 to June 2024 and collected about KES 43.9 billion from more than 2.6 million taxpayers. A second round, under the Tax Procedures (Amendment) Act 2024, extended the relief to June 2025 and widened it to cover debts up to the end of 2023. KRA says the two rounds together recovered KES 80.9 billion in principal. It separately reported waiving around KES 140 billion in penalties and interest under the 2024 round.

The timing is not accidental. By the end of March 2026, KRA had collected KES 2.038 trillion against a target of KES 2.122 trillion, a shortfall of roughly KES 84 billion. An amnesty pulls in money stuck in dormant or disputed accounts without introducing a new tax, which the government is keen to avoid heading into an election year. Budget documents earmarked the current amnesty to raise about KES 30 billion.

For an individual or a small business carrying years of penalties, the maths is simpler. If the extra charges have grown larger than the tax itself, this is the cheapest moment to clean the record. The same Finance Act 2026 also reworked the annual filing deadlines, which we will cover separately. For now, the amnesty window closes on 31 December 2026, and after that the penalties and interest on any unpaid debt become payable in full again.