Last reviewed: September 2026. Fees and procedures change; confirm current figures with the relevant authorities before you budget.
Registering a company in Tanzania is not difficult. What costs foreign companies months is not the registration itself but the order in which things are done: applying for permits after arriving instead of before, filing incomplete ownership declarations, or incorporating the wrong type of entity and having to start again.
This guide sets out what actually happens, in the order it should happen. It is written for a company outside Tanzania that has decided to establish a presence here, whether to sell products, run a project, or invest.
You have three realistic options, and the choice determines everything that follows.
A local company (subsidiary). A company incorporated in Tanzania under the Companies Act. A company counts as local regardless of whether its shareholders are Tanzanian or foreign, so a wholly foreign-owned subsidiary is still a Tanzanian company. The company register issues a Certificate of Incorporation. This is the right choice for almost every company that intends to trade, employ people, import, or hold contracts here. It is a separate legal person, so the parent company's liability is limited.
A branch of a foreign company. The foreign company registers itself rather than creating a new entity, and the company register issues a Certificate of Compliance. The parent carries the liability directly. Branches suit a short project with a defined end, or a representative presence, but they are harder to bank and less suitable for long-term trading.
A business name or sole proprietorship. Registered with the company register, but with no separate legal personality and no liability protection. This is not appropriate for a foreign business.
A note on sectors: some activities require approval or a licence from a sector regulator before or alongside incorporation, and mining and petroleum licences come from the mining and energy authorities rather than the general business route. Check your sector first, because discovering a pre-approval requirement after incorporation is one of the most common causes of delay.
The company register handles company registration through its online registration system. Filing runs entirely online once an account is created, but the account creation, document formatting, and the sequence in which items are submitted are where applications most often stall.
What you need before you start:
Documents from outside Tanzania generally need to be notarised, and in many cases apostilled or legalised, before filing. This is frequently the slowest part of the whole exercise, because it happens in the client's own country and cannot be hurried from here. Start it first.
Timeline. With complete documents, incorporation typically takes around two to three weeks end to end. The registration itself can be quick; the preparation is what takes time.
Cost. The company register charges three things: a registration fee based on the nominal share capital declared in your Memorandum, a filing fee, and stamp duty. The filing fee runs at roughly TZS 15,000 per document for the core forms, so about TZS 45,000–60,000 for a standard application. At the lowest capital band, below TZS 1 million, the registration fee sits around TZS 95,000, and practitioners report a realistic overall range of TZS 150,000–600,000 or more depending on declared capital. A branch of a foreign company is charged in dollars: USD 750 registration, USD 220 for filing any document delivered to the Registrar, and USD 220 for filing balance sheets and accounts — and these recur, since a branch files its parent's accounts. All in, including stamp duty, notarisation, legalisation abroad and professional fees, a straightforward private limited company usually lands between USD 1,000 and USD 5,000. Because the exact figure depends on the capital you declare, we confirm it against your specific numbers and give you a firm budget before you file, rather than a published table you would have to interpret yourself.
Incorporation alone does not let you trade. Four things follow it, and they are not optional.
Taxpayer Identification Number. A person who becomes liable to tax by carrying on business, investment or employment must apply for a TIN within 15 days of commencing. File returns from then on, even nil returns if trading has not started. A newly registered taxpayer has instalment tax deferred for six months from the date the TIN was issued. Every director and shareholder also needs a personal TIN, including foreign ones, and this often surprises clients. There is no charge for it. You will also register for VAT once your turnover passes the threshold, and for PAYE as soon as you employ anyone.
Business licence. Tanzania splits licences into two schedules. Schedule A licences cover larger operations and specified sectors and are issued centrally, through the company register or the relevant ministry. Schedule B licences are issued by the local government authority where you operate. Which one applies depends on your activity and scale, and the fee varies accordingly.
Statutory registrations. Register with the social security fund, the safety and health authority and the workers’ compensation fund. These matter from your first employee, and inspectors do check.
Bank account. Open a corporate account with a Tanzanian bank using the Certificate of Incorporation or Compliance, the TIN, and a board resolution authorising the account and its signatories. Banks apply their own compliance checks on foreign-owned companies, which can add a week or two, and they will want to understand the source of funds and the beneficial owners. Prepare that story before you walk in.
Investment promotion and special economic zones are now handled by a single body, the investment board, which brought together the former investment centre and the export processing zones authority. It runs a one-stop facilitation centre.
The thresholds. Facilitation is available to projects worth at least USD 100,000 for Tanzanian investors and USD 500,000 for foreign investors. Below that level you simply operate as a normal registered company, which is perfectly legal and is how most trading businesses start.
What registration gives you. A Certificate of Incentives, which carries import duty and VAT exemption on project capital goods and access to the duty drawback scheme, plus facilitation on company registration, licences, land access, work and residence permits, safety certification, product certification and environmental approval through one office rather than ten.
When it is worth it. If you are importing significant plant or equipment to set up a factory, an assembly line, a solar installation business or a mining operation, the duty and VAT exemption on capital goods alone can be worth far more than the effort of applying. If you are a trading company importing goods for resale, the benefit is limited, because stock for sale is not capital equipment.
One practical point: the certificate also matters for immigration. A company holding one is in a stronger position when applying for investor permits, and an investor who does not qualify through the investment board may be asked by the immigration department to show bank proof or assets of around USD 300,000 to obtain a Class A residence permit.
This is where most foreign companies get confused, so it is worth being precise. There are two separate permits, issued by two different authorities, and you need both. A work permit authorises a person to work; a residence permit authorises the same person to live in Tanzania. Guide 2 covers this in full — classes, fees, documents and timing.
Sending people first, paperwork second. Permits are applied for from outside the country. Arriving on a visitor’s visa to begin work creates a problem that is expensive to unwind.
Treating beneficial ownership as a formality. Disclosure requirements are enforced more tightly than they were, and incomplete declarations get filed applications rejected.
Choosing a branch because it sounds simpler. It is simpler to file and harder to live with: the parent carries the liability, and banking and licensing are more awkward.
Using a nominee shareholder to look local. Tanzanian law does not require local shareholding for most sectors, so there is rarely a reason to do it, and where local participation genuinely is required, a fronting arrangement is exactly what the rules exist to catch.
Budgeting only for government fees. The real costs sit in legalising documents abroad, professional fees, the office address, and the weeks in which you are paying people while waiting.
We would rather tell you where the ground moves than pretend it does not. Three things in this guide should be confirmed at source before you budget or file: registration fees, which are published inconsistently across sources and depend on entity type and share capital — we confirm the current schedule directly with the company register; form numbers and templates, since the declaration of compliance form has been referred to by different numbers in different guidance — use the form the online system presents at the time of filing, not one copied from an article; and anything about age, capital minimums or timelines you read elsewhere — many guides still state that directors must be between 21 and 70, but the retirement age restriction for directors was removed by amendment in 2021. Old guidance survives online long after the law has changed.
One rule that is easy to miss and does catch companies: a transfer or transmission of shares must be notified to the Registrar within 28 days, supported by a tax clearance certificate.