Malta Tax Refund: How the 6/7 Claim Really Works (2026)

Malta's 6/7 tax refund is claimed by the shareholder, not the company, after the company has paid its 35% tax, filed its return and distributed a dividend backed by audited accounts. The law then gives the tax authority 14 days to pay. Mine arrived within days. Reaching that point took 16 months.

That gap is the whole story of this page. The corporate tax guide explains why 35% becomes 5% and walks through the numbers. This page is only about the procedure: who files what, in which order, which documents the tax unit will ask for, and where a first-time claimant loses a year without noticing. I went through it for the first time between early 2025 and June 2026, with a Maltese trading company owned by a Cyprus holding, and I would have saved most of that time with the checklist below.

The refund timeline at a glance

Step	Who does it	Earliest it can happen	What usually blocks it
Register the shareholder for refunds	Your tax practitioner	At incorporation	Nobody put it on the list
Close the year, audit the accounts	Auditor	Two to four months after year-end	Auditor KYC, a long first accounting period
File the company tax return	Accountant	Nine months after year-end (e-filing extensions apply)	Waiting for the audit
Pay the 35% tax	Company	With the return, or earlier	A DDT10 determination pushes the deadline to 18 months
Declare the dividend, issue the dividend warrant	Directors	Once the audited accounts exist	Nothing, if the accounts are done
Sign the claim pack	Shareholder (or its director)	After the dividend is declared	Corporate-shareholder documents, paper originals by post
Refund paid	MTCA	Within 14 days of a complete claim with tax allocated	Amendments requested by the tax unit

What has to be true before the refund falls due

Four conditions, all of them, before the clock starts. The company's tax return must be filed and correct. The tax on the distributed profits must be fully paid. The dividend must appear in audited financial statements. And the shareholder must be registered for refunds and must have filed a complete, proper claim. Malta's Income Tax Management Act then requires the refund to be paid within 14 days of the day it falls due, as Chetcuti Cauchi's guide to the Maltese company tax system summarises it, in the same currency as the company's share capital.

The claims are handled by a specific desk inside the Malta Tax and Customs Administration, the International and Corporate Tax Unit (usually shortened to ICTU in every email you will get from your accountant). They check the pack, run beneficial-ownership checks, and if anything is off they come back with a request for amendments rather than a refusal. My claim got one such round, which I will come back to.

Who claims the refund, and where the money goes

The refund belongs to the shareholder. If you own the Maltese company personally, it lands in your personal account. If a holding company owns it, the refund is paid to the holding company's bank account, and the Maltese trading company never sees that money. In my case the shareholder is a Cyprus holding, so the refund was wired to the holding, not to the operating company that paid the tax. That matters for cash planning: the trading company is permanently out the 35%, and the 30% comes back one level up.

Before any of this, the shareholder must be registered for refund purposes with the Commissioner. The Malta Institute of Taxation's course material on the refund system describes it as a one-time registration to be done before the company's first tax payment deadline, with the Commissioner to be notified of any later change of shareholders. The registration form asks for the company's capital structure, every direct shareholder with its tax residence and, behind a corporate shareholder, the ultimate individual beneficiaries with their percentage entitlement. Your practitioner files it electronically.

Do this at incorporation, while the KYC pack is already open on your provider's desk. It is the item most often discovered missing when the first dividend is on the table, which is why the starting a business guide lists it among the week-one registrations.

The documents, in the order you will be asked for them

Here is the pack as it was assembled for my first claim, plus what the rules require in general. Your accountant prepares almost all of it; your job is to sign it correctly and fast.

From the company side, before anything else:

1. Audited financial statements for the year, showing the profit and the dividend. Malta introduced an audit exemption for small companies in 2025, but a refund claim still needs audited accounts in practice, so a refund-system company keeps auditing. The costs are in the company accounting guide.
2. The filed company tax return for the year of assessment, with the profits allocated to the right tax account (the 6/7 applies to the Maltese Taxed Account and the Foreign Income Account only).
3. Proof that the tax is paid, and more precisely that the payment has been allocated by the tax department to that year. Paid and allocated are not the same day; the refund clock runs from the latter.
4. A board resolution declaring the dividend and a dividend warrant. The warrant is a formal certificate the company must give the shareholder on every dividend. It states the gross taxed profits by tax account, the Malta tax charged on them, any double-tax relief, the net dividend, and the years the profits come from. The dividend can remain payable in the company's books rather than being wired, according to the same Malta Institute of Taxation material, though mine was actually paid to the holding a few weeks before the tax.

From the shareholder side:

5. The refund claim form, with details of the company, the shareholder, the ultimate beneficial owners and the dividend being claimed on.
6. A UBO declaration, signed by the shareholder or its director.
7. Bank details for the account the refund goes to. Read them yourself. In my pack the pre-filled IBAN was an old account of the holding, and I only caught it because I read every page before signing.

Extra items when the shareholder is a company:

8. A certificate of incumbency of the holding company (a recent official document listing its directors, shareholders and registered office). The tax unit wants a current one, so ask your holding company's corporate secretary for a fresh certificate when the claim is being prepared, not one from incorporation.
9. A passport copy of the director who signs the claim and the UBO declaration on behalf of the holding.

On format: for my claim the tax unit asked for the claim form and the dividend warrants as three signed paper originals sent by post, while the UBO declaration was accepted as a scan. I would not treat that as a permanent rule; the point is that part of the pack still travels on paper, so build courier time into your plan and sign every copy in the same sitting.

The order that avoids losing a year

For a company with a 31 December year-end, the sequence that gets the money back the following summer instead of the summer after looks like this.

Register the shareholder when the company is formed. Then, as soon as the year closes, get the audit started: it gates everything else, and auditors in Malta run their own KYC on the directors and shareholders (mine asked for a fresh proof of address, which is a small thing that still costs a week when you are abroad). With audited accounts in hand, the accountant files the tax return, typically by the autumn under the e-filing extensions described in the corporate tax guide.

Now the step that decides the whole timeline: pay the tax when you file, not when the deadline says you must. The refund cannot start until the tax on those profits is paid and allocated. If the company has no reason to hold on to the cash, paying with the return puts the refund a few weeks away. If instead you let the payment slide to the last permitted day, you have chosen to wait that long for the 30%.

With the tax paid, the directors declare the dividend and issue the warrant, the shareholder signs the claim pack, the practitioner files it with the tax unit, and the 14-day clock starts. In my case, the company paid its tax in June 2026, and once the tax department had allocated that payment, the refund reached the holding within a few days.

Why my first refund took 16 months, and then arrived in days

My company was incorporated in August 2023 and, as the Companies Act allows for a first accounting period of six to eighteen months, closed its first year on 31 December 2024. Sixteen months of trading were bundled into that first year, and no refund was possible on any of it until the year had been audited and taxed. Nothing wrong with that, but it pushed the entire cycle out from the start.

In February 2025 I asked my accountant how to pay the 2024 dividend to the holding and claim the 6/7. The audit was quoted in April, the tax return went in on 22 September 2025, and I assumed the claim would follow within weeks. It did not, and the reason is the one I most want you to take from this page.

The company holds a DDT10 determination. I explain what that is in the next section, but the effect was that no provisional tax had been paid during the year and the tax itself was not due until 30 June 2026, eighteen months after year-end. My accountant confirmed the mechanics in October 2025: the refund is only released once the company's tax is paid, and paying earlier means claiming earlier. In plain words, the company had paid no tax for a year because of the deferral, so the refund cycle slid by a year, into the following summer, by which time the next audit was already under way. The tax was paid on 19 June 2026, the department allocated it, and the refund followed within days.

Around that main cause, the paperwork added its own friction. In November 2025 the pack needed a certificate of incumbency for the holding, plus the claim, the dividend warrant and the UBO declaration to sign, and it was while reading those that I found the wrong IBAN. The signed originals reached the accountant in December. In March and April 2026 the tax unit came back asking for amendments: the holding had changed director in the meantime, so the claim and the UBO declaration had to be re-signed by the new director with a copy of their passport, and the claim and dividend warrants had to be resent as three paper originals. The net dividend was wired from the Maltese company to the holding in early April, the tax in June, and the refund right after.

None of those individual steps took long. Each cost two or three weeks of waiting for a document, a signature or a courier, and they sat in series, not in parallel. If the shareholder is a company, freeze its board during the claim if you can, and get a fresh certificate of incumbency before the pack is drafted rather than after the tax unit asks.

The DDT10 trap: deferring your tax also defers your refund

A DDT10 is a determination issued by the tax authority under article 47 of the Duty on Documents and Transfers Act to companies whose business is essentially outside Malta, typically more than 90% of it, with non-resident owners. Its headline benefit is an exemption from stamp duty on transfers of the company's shares. Its side effects are what matter here: a company holding one pays no provisional tax instalments during the year, and its deadline for paying the tax moves from nine months after year-end to eighteen, as Mondaq's Malta corporate tax comparative guide and CSB Group's note on corporate tax returns both set out. Determinations are valid for three years and must be renewed, or the extension lapses.

Corporate service providers apply for it as a matter of course for international clients, because free cash-flow deferral looks like an obvious win. And it is, for a company that wants to hold on to its cash. For a company on the refund system that wants its 30% back, it is a trap with no warning label: nothing in the deferral forces you to pay, nothing reminds you that the refund is waiting on the payment, and a first-time claimant reads "tax due in 18 months" and files it under good news.

The fix is a decision, not a form. Tell your accountant which of the two you want: pay at the deadline and keep the cash, or pay with the return and claim the refund at once. You cannot have both.

The same logic applies to the first accounting period. If your company starts trading late in the year and will earn real profit in its first months, ask whether a short first period to the coming 31 December beats a long one to the following year: the first refund arrives a year earlier, at the price of one extra audit.

Does Malta have withholding tax on dividends?

No. Malta imposes no withholding tax on dividends distributed by Maltese companies, whether the shareholder is resident or not. The PwC tax summary for Malta, reviewed in February 2026, puts it simply: no further tax is due on a distribution because the only tax is the one charged on the company's profits. That is the full imputation system, and it is why a dividend to a foreign holding company leaves Malta whole, with the 6/7 refund following it.

There is one exception. A distribution out of a company's untaxed account (profits that were never taxed in Malta, for instance exempt income) to a Malta-resident person other than a company suffers a 15% withholding, per the same PwC summary and Mondaq's comparative guide. A trading company paying tax at 35% on its profits does not have this problem; its dividends come from taxed accounts.

Interest and royalties paid to non-residents are also exempt from Maltese tax, subject to conditions such as the income not being connected to a Maltese permanent establishment of the recipient. So for a standard structure, the outbound flow from Malta carries no Maltese withholding at all.

What is the dividend tax rate in Malta?

There is no separate dividend tax rate. Under full imputation, a dividend from a Maltese company arrives with a credit for the 35% tax the company paid. A Malta-resident individual includes the grossed-up dividend in their return and sets the credit against their liability. Because 35% is also the top personal rate, the credit covers the whole bill, and no further tax is due; a shareholder taxed at a lower marginal rate can even get the excess credit back through their personal return.

A non-resident shareholder pays no Maltese tax on the dividend at all. What happens next depends entirely on the shareholder's own country: the dividend, and in most countries the 6/7 refund as well, are taxable there under local rules, subject to whatever the double tax treaty with Malta says. The corporate tax guide covers why this pushes most people towards a holding company, and the personal tax guide covers the position of a Malta resident non-dom receiving foreign dividends.

One nuance that surprises people: the refund itself is designed for non-resident shareholders. A Malta-resident individual who claims it is taxed at the full 35% on the net dividend and on the refund received, per the Malta Institute of Taxation material above, which cancels the benefit. If you live in Malta and own your company directly, the fiscal unit is the route that gives you the 5% without a refund at all. If you are resident but not domiciled and your company is held through a non-resident holding, ask your advisor: the rules allow the ultimate beneficial owner to claim in some of those setups.

What claiming the refund costs

The refund is free to claim, but it is not free to earn. It requires the audit that a small company could otherwise skip since 2025, and an accountant who prepares the tax return, the dividend documentation and the claim pack. The accounting guide and the first-year budget in the starting a business guide give the ranges I work with; the audit is the larger line, and both recur every year you claim. Against a refund worth 30% of the company's profit, the fees are a rounding error for any company earning enough for the 5% rate to matter.

So, is the 6/7 refund worth the paperwork?

Yes, and the paperwork is lighter than its reputation once you know the shape of it. The system does what the law says: complete pack, tax paid, money back within days. The delays are all on your side of the counter, and each one is avoidable by a decision you can take before year-end.

Three of them cover most of it. Register the shareholder for refunds on day one. Decide, in writing to your accountant, that the company pays its tax with the return rather than at the DDT10 deadline. And if the shareholder is a company, get its certificate of incumbency and its signing director lined up before the claim pack is drafted, then read the bank details yourself.

If you would rather not run this cycle every year, Malta offers two exits, both covered in the corporate tax guide: a Maltese holding company plus a fiscal unit, which nets the 5% at source with no claim, or the 15% flat tax election for companies that value simplicity over the last ten points. For a foreign holding structure like mine, the refund route stays the right answer, and after one full cycle the second claim is mostly a calendar reminder.