Malta Statutory social-insurance contributions

What this value means

WHAT A PAYROLL ENGINE GETS WRONG IN MALTA. 1. MALTA DOES NOT HAVE A CONTRIBUTION PERCENTAGE. IT HAS A WEEKLY TABLE. The Tenth Schedule sets a weekly cash amount or a capped percentage by earnings class, and the class depends on THREE variables at once: the employee's age, the employee's DATE OF BIRTH, and the basic weekly wage. "10 % employee / 10 % employer" is true only inside Category C. In Categories A, B and D the published figure is a flat weekly sum. 2. THE BASE IS THE BASIC WEEKLY WAGE, NOT GROSS PAY. The Department states it in terms: "The basic weekly wage does not include allowances, bonuses, and/or overtime earned in a particular week." An engine that runs 10 % over gross remuneration over-collects on every employee who works overtime or receives a bonus or allowance, and it does so on both sides. This is the single largest structural difference between Malta and the rest of the EU, where the base is normally total remuneration. 3. DATE OF BIRTH SPLITS THE TABLE PERMANENTLY. Persons born up to 31 December 1961 cap at a basic weekly wage of €490.38 (€49.04 per side per week). Persons born from 1 January 1962 onwards cap at €559.30 (€55.93 per side per week). The gap is €6.89 a week per side, €358 a year per side. It is a cohort rule, not an age rule: it never converges, and an engine keyed on age rather than birth year will misprice everyone near the boundary. 4. CATEGORY B IS A FLOOR, NOT A BAND. An employee aged 18+ earning less than the €229.44 minimum wage still attracts €22.94 from each side — the contribution is computed on the minimum wage, not on actual pay. The employee (not the employer) may elect the pro-rata alternative of 10 % of actual basic weekly wage; the employer's €22.94 is unaffected. Pro-rata weeks also carry reduced weight on the contribution record, so the election trades cash for pension entitlement. 5. THE MATERNITY LEAVE FUND IS A REAL, SEPARATE, EMPLOYER-ONLY 0,3 %. It is levied on every employee regardless of sex or age and funds the Maternity Leave Trust, out of which the employer is refunded the first 14 weeks of maternity or adoption leave it has already paid. Omitting it understates employer cost; deducting it from the employee is unlawful. 6. CONTRIBUTIONS ARE WEEKLY, PAID MONTHLY, AND A YEAR IS 52 OR 53 WEEKS. "Social Security Contributions are paid in weekly rates, and each year of gainful occupation will carry 52 or 53 Social Security Contributions (depending on the annual number of Mondays)". Annual figures derived by multiplying the weekly cap by 52 are therefore an approximation that fails in 53-Monday years, and the caps are per-week and non-cumulative, so an annual cap cannot be applied to a year-to-date total. 7. THE PART-TIME ENTRY TEST IS HOURS, AND FAILING IT DOES NOT MEAN NOTHING IS DUE. "Part-time employees who are employed for less than 8 hours with the same employer in any 1 calendar week are not considered as being in insurable employment for Social Security Contribution purposes, however if their annual earnings from employment exceeds €910, self-occupied contributions shall be due." So the liability moves from Class 1 (payroll) to Class 2 (the individual, paid to the Commissioner of Revenue every four months) rather than disappearing. The 8-hour test is per employer per calendar week. 8. ONE INSURABLE EMPLOYMENT AT A TIME. "There can only be one insurable employment at the same time, and in case of more than one concurrent employment, the insurable employment will be that which provides the highest income or earnings." Multi-employer employees are not aggregated the way they are in most systems; the highest-paying job carries the Class 1 liability. A person with several part-time jobs may elect to contribute on more than one, up to a combined 40 hours, to buy a higher pension rate. 9. AGE LIMITS. Liability runs from 16 to state retirement age of 65. Under 18 the contribution is recorded as type UN (Underage) and priced in Category A or E; over 65 no Class 1 contribution is due even if the person continues working. 10. THE 2026 FIGURES MOVED. All Class 1 amounts and thresholds were uprated with effect from 1 January 2026. A record still carrying the 2025 table understates every flat amount and every ceiling. The uprating is annual and lands on 1 January — set the re-verify for the turn of the year and expect the Department to publish the new table in December. SUB-NATIONAL VARIATION: none. The Tenth Schedule is national and applies identically in Malta and Gozo. WHAT WE DO NOT PUT A NUMBER ON: THE STATE'S OWN SHARE — not stated. Malta's social security is tripartite and the Consolidated Fund contributes alongside employer and employee, but the published Class 1 table for employed persons prints only the employee, employer and combined columns, and I did not reach an instrument stating the current State proportion. It is in any event neither an employer cost nor an employee deduction. CLASS 2 AND CLASS 3 RATES (self-occupied and self-employed, categories SA/SB/SC/SP) — outside the scope of an employed-person record. They are assessed on the previous calendar year's net income and are paid by the individual to the Commissioner of Revenue in April, August and December, not through payroll. EXCEPTED EMPLOYMENTS — not enumerated. Part II of the First Schedule to Cap. 318 lists employments excepted from Class 1; an employee falling in that list is treated as self-occupied instead. The list is not reproduced here and an ordinary private-sector employee is not in it. ARTICLE 13(1) CONTRIBUTIONS — noted, not priced. A Malta-resident employed abroad under a foreign contract may elect to pay Class 1-equivalent contributions, but art. 13(1) provides that no contribution is payable by or on behalf of the employer, and the amounts are billed to the individual four-monthly. There is no employer payroll charge to model. OCCUPATIONAL INJURY — no separate branch. Injury benefit is financed out of the same Class 1 contribution; Malta has no risk-rated occupational-accident tariff. SOURCING CAVEATS: The complete 2026 Class 1 table, including every band boundary and the Maternity Leave Fund column, is read directly off the Department of Social Security's own published 2026 rate page and is quoted verbatim in the instrument fields. The statutory anchoring (art. 10 and Part I of the Tenth Schedule of Cap. 318, Part II of the First Schedule for excepted employments) is stated by the Department on its own Social Security Contributions page; I did not separately open the consolidated text of the Tenth Schedule, so the schedule's own wording for the 2026 uprating instrument is not quoted. The €490.38 and €559.30 weekly ceilings are derived from the published Category D cash amounts (€49.04 and €55.93 at 10 %) and from the Category C band tops, which agree exactly.

Get it programmatically

curl https://euroref.dev/v1/mt/social-contributions
# $0.005 per call — x402 on Base (USDC). No key, no signup.
# History:    curl https://euroref.dev/v1/mt/social-contributions/history?from=2020-01-01
# Provenance: curl https://euroref.dev/provenance/mt/social-contributions

Other Malta series: Policy interest rate · Value added tax (VAT) · VAT registration threshold · National minimum wage · Public holidays · Consumer price index (annual inflation, HICP) · Personal income tax brackets · Corporate income tax · Withholding tax rates · ECB main refinancing operations rate (fixed rate) · Late-payment interest (EU Late Payment Directive) · Statutory legal interest (Civil Code art. 1139)

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