Prime Minister James Marape announced the exemption of Goods and Services Tax (GST) on 13 essential household items including rice, tinned fish and chicken by July 1, 2025.
Prime Minister Marape said the government will be eliminating the 10% GST on 13 essential household items. These items include, rice, tinned fish, tinned meat, chicken, tea, coffee, biscuits, noodles, flour, cooking oil, womens’ sanitary items, soap, and baby diapers.
“By 1st July next year, you will not pay 10 percent GST on these essential household items. We have the tax exempted on these items to ease the burden on families throughout Papua New Guinea,” Prime Minister Marape said.
He said that in order to exempt essential items from GST, K100 million is being allocated to the Internal Revenue Commission for the purchase of a Goods and Services Monitoring System (GMS) designed to collect tax at the point of sale.
This system will be installed on all electronic cashier machines in all the shops and will be used in this new exercise. “We are also not increasing any tax for items including cigarettes and alcohol. We are paying school fees from elementary to university and colleges, and we are giving tax rebates to private education school fees,” said the Prime Minister.
Treasurer Ling-Stuckey, announced that the new GST Monitoring System will not charge this tax by 1 July 2025. This exemption is expected to last until 30 June 2026, with plans for extension included in the 2026 budget.
