Inside Tunisia's new wealth tax: A progressive levy with no clear path to enforcement

Tunisia is about to roll out a wealth tax it almost certainly can’t enforce. The trick is going to be enforcing it. Starting June 30, Tunisia residents with more than TND 3 mn (USD 1 mn) in assets will be required to disclose their assets to the government as part of the coming imposition of a wealth tax — a 0.5% tithe on the wealth of residents with net assets of TND 3-5 mn and 1% for those worth more than TND 5 mn.

If it sounds a bit familiar, it’s because … it is. The 2023 version of the same wealth tax was narrower, applying only to real estate assets. The new version throws in securities, crypto, vehicles and other so-called “movable assets,” per article 88 of the 2026 Finance Act. There are some exemptions, including for primary residences, assets that are actively used in business activity, and real estate that hosts active business operations.

Some critics will object to the wealth tax on principle, but there’s a bigger problem: Nobody can tell what has already been taxed under the 2023 wealth tax. Tunisia has had a wealth tax since 2023, which collected a tithe on real estate valued at TND 3 mn or more. “Since that tax was enacted, we haven’t seen it reflected in the budget,” Sahar Mechmech, who manages the inclusive economies program at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, told EnterpriseAM. “It was supposed to already be in effect in the last couple of years, but looking at the tax revenues mentioned in the finance law for 2024, 2025, and 2026, we haven’t seen what revenues that tax has generated or not. We’re not even sure if it came into effect or if the Finance Ministry is actually collecting it, let alone how many people it’s collecting it from.”

That blind spot is why parliament nixed the government’s first bid to expand the wealth tax. Lawmakers shut down the Finance Ministry’s bid to extend the tax beyond real estate back in November 2025. Their objection, as Mechmech relays it: “You’re asking us to [expand the scope] of a tax when we have no visibility over its actual revenue or implementation.” The expansion passed only on a second attempt when it was folded into the broader Finance Law.

The political objections were loud while the law was still being written. During the November parliamentary fight, MP Tarek Mahdi, a member of the assembly’s Strategic Planning Committee, argued the pool of wealthy Tunisians was too small to bother taxing and that the state should be reviving investment and loosening the foreign exchange rules instead. He also warned the tax would backfire, pushing the rich to conceal their assets rather than declare them.

SOUND SMART- A wealth tax is an annual levy on what you own — net assets — not what you earn. That makes it administratively harder to manage than income tax: the state has to find, value, and re-value illiquid things like stakes in unlisted companies and property every single year. It’s why most of Europe, home to some of the most progressive tax jurisdictions, has abandoned the experiment in favor of narrower versions on specific asset classes — only Norway, Spain, and Switzerland still levy a true net wealth tax, and France narrowed its own version in 2018 to only real estate holdings.

A squeeze on those who’ve already gone legit

Tunisia’s trouble starts with the shape of its economy. With so much activity off the books, a tax on net worth falls hardest on the people already inside the system, argues Jalel Ben Romdhane, an independent expert in alternative finance and financial markets. “Since informal assets can’t really be measured or taxed, the burden lands mostly on the formal sector — the entrepreneurs who keep proper books, the investors who declare their holdings, and the bigger companies — that already pay a lot,” he says.

The real risk, in his view, is what the tax does to that base over time. “The real dilemma isn’t whether these people should contribute — they already carry most of the state’s finances,” Ben Romdhane said. “The question is whether constantly squeezing this compliant group actually expands the tax base, or whether it just makes the formal sector smaller over time.” The practical obstacles are legion: What’s the market price for a family-owned firm? What about owners whose personal and business capital blur together? How about the asset-rich, cash-poor factory owner who “might show millions in assets, but struggle with daily cash flow because everything is tied up in machines, inventory, or buildings”?

Mechmech's reading criticizes the tax by pointing at wider contradictions in the overall tax system. People with assets of TND 3 mn or more are too high-profile to be informal, she notes — “I don’t think that those groups of taxpayers are going to be in the informal economy. The informal economy is more so related to small and micro businesses.” Mechmech also bridles at the cost of Tunisia’s tax incentives, which she said are at roughly 12% of revenues or about 1.5x the budget of the Health Ministry. There’s a “huge cost coming from tax incentives that we’re not sure are actually generating the benefits that they are supposed to generate,” she says.

Does Tunisia have the bureaucracy to pull it off?

The deeper constraint is institutional and human: Whatever the law says on paper, someone has to value the assets and chase the money — and Tunisia’s tax bureaucracy is, in Mechmech’s word, “severely underfunded and under-resourced.”

Mechmech argues that there’s an enforcement gap that already sees the taxman struggle to collect what it is lawfully due. Mechmech points to a 2023 report by the Tunisian investigative group Inkyfada comparing listed companies’ statutory and effective tax rates. Across 80 listed companies, Inkyfada found an effective average tax rate of 11.6% against the 20% to 35% the law prescribes; the financial sector came in around 26%, and industrial groups at just 8% against a statutory 15%.

If officials struggle to collect from public companies at the headline rate, can they be expected to identify harder-to-trace personal fortunes, Mechmech wonders. “Does the Tunisian tax administration have the technical and human and material resources to actually enforce those taxes if they're not collected voluntarily?”

Still, she’s careful not to write the state off entirely. Since Inkyfada report in 2023, the government has leaned harder on enforcement, and the result showed up fast: There’s been a c. 25% rise in revenues since 2024 from corporate income tax on non-petroleum companies. “When there is political will to mobilize more resources, we’ve seen a result of that,” she notes. “But we haven’t seen that political will now translated to the wealth tax, which was supposed to come into effect in 2023.”

Tunisia taxes consumption

Tunisia’s ratio of taxation to GDP is high, Mechmech says, but is biased heavily toward consumption taxes: “Most of it is coming from indirect taxation — VAT and consumption taxes — which are borne mostly by consumers,” Mechmech says.

In perspective: While Tunisia’s tax-to-GDP ratio runs at double Egypt’s, the latter’s tax-to-GDP ratio is already very low compared to the region and trails several Africa jurisdictions. “The more honest benchmark is Morocco, [with which] Tunisia has a rate that is comparable,” Mechmech says. For perspective, Egypt’s tax-to-GDP ratio sat at 14.2% in 2022, below the 36-country African average of 16%. Tunisia’s is at 33.5%, close to the OECD average of 34%.

It’s also a story of the budget

Tunisia’s central bank has already started rationing hard currency and has banned importers from borrowing to pay for imports — they instead need to use their own FX reserves to bring goods into the country. Anyone who has followed the Egyptian economy in the past decade can name that tune…

Among the sources of stress: Tunisia’s 2026 budget was written with oil priced at USD 60 / barrel oil — a number the market hasn’t seen since the start of the war in the Gulf — and the budget deficit is now set to exceed the 6% of GDP planned in this year’s document.

So, what actually fills the gap? The printing press. The 2026 law authorizes up to TND 11 bn in zero-interest central bank lending to the treasury, repayable over 15 years with a three-year grace period. The result? Direct pass-through to inflation.

What’s next?

Watch for three things, Mechmech says:

• Can the Finance Ministry produce data on who has already declared assets and what the state collected?
• Does the central bank impose more import restrictions? Do we see a return of the water and electricity rationing seen in 2023, which would signal the budget is under even more pressure.
• Is there open public discontent? Mechmech flags a rise in protests over the past six months as “an indicator that the standards of living are deteriorating and that people’s patience with the current system is also deteriorating.”

The bottom line: Tunisia has written itself a more progressive tax on paper while leaning harder than ever on the central bank in practice. As Ben Romdhane puts it, the real challenge is “to find a balance between the state’s urgent need for money and the need to keep incentives for investment, risk-taking, and moving activities into the formal economy.” Until the state can answer the simplest question about its own wealth tax — who paid it, and how much — the rest of it is academic.