Guam Bookkeeping Services

Guam has no general sales tax — which is exactly why mainland bookkeeping setups go wrong here. Instead of a tax added at the register, Guam levies the Business Privilege Tax on your gross receipts, monthly, whether or not you ever collected a cent of it from a customer. The rate has moved twice since 2025, and a 4% use tax applies to goods you bring in — including from the US mainland.

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On This Page

• Guam’s small-business tax landscape
• The tax is on you, not your customer
• The rate moved twice — check what yours is set to
• Use tax catches mainland shipments
• Mirror code: federal rules, Guam treasury
• Guam villages we serve
• Guam FAQs

Guam’s Small-Business Tax Landscape

Guam Business Privilege Tax Law (11 GCA Chapter 26), Use Tax (Chapter 28), Hotel Occupancy Tax (Chapter 30) and the Guam Department of Revenue and Taxation, checked 5 October 2026. The published licence fee schedule dates from 2013 and the BPT rate has changed twice recently — confirm current rates and fees with DRT or your CPA before relying on them.

The Tax Is on You, Not Your Customer

This is the single most important thing to get right about Guam bookkeeping, and the thing a mainland-configured accounting file almost always gets wrong.

A sales tax is collected from the customer and held in trust — it is a liability on your balance sheet that was never your money. The Business Privilege Tax is the opposite. The statute levies it on the person, on account of their business, measured by gross proceeds of sales or gross income. There is no reduction for cost of goods sold, and no reduction for any other expense.

Practically, that means two things. First, it is your expense, not a pass-through, so it belongs in the books as a tax expense accrued on revenue — not in a sales-tax-payable account that a mainland chart of accounts would create by default. Second, you can price it into what you charge, but doing so does not change who owes it. If a customer disputes the line, the liability is still yours.

Books that record it as a collected sales tax will understate expenses and misstate liabilities, and the error compounds every month until someone reconciles it.

The Rate Moved Twice — Check What Yours Is Set To

Guam’s BPT rate stepped down from 5% to 4.5% effective 1 October 2025, and the same amendment provides for a further reduction to 4% beginning 1 October 2026.

That is two changes inside twelve months, both landing on 1 October rather than 1 January. A tax rate hard-coded in an accounting file in 2024 is now two steps stale. One updated to 4.5% last year went wrong at the start of this fiscal year.

Because the rate changes mid-calendar-year, any annual accrual or forecast built on a single rate is also wrong for part of the year. The bookkeeping requirement is a rate that is dated, not assumed — so that October onward is computed differently from the months before it, and prior-period accruals are not quietly restated at the new rate.

Legislative rates move again. We flag the change and recompute from the effective date; whether a particular reduction has been re-enacted for a given fiscal year is a question for DRT or your CPA.

Use Tax Catches Mainland Shipments

Guam applies a 4% use tax to the landed value of property imported into Guam for business use. “Imported” includes goods shipped from the US mainland, which is where businesses used to state-level sales and use tax get caught.

On the mainland, an interstate purchase from a vendor with no nexus creates a use-tax obligation that many small businesses quietly ignore and rarely get asked about. In Guam the goods physically arrive through a port, and the landed value — not the invoice total — is the base.

The bookkeeping requirement is that inbound shipments are captured with their landed value, not just the vendor invoice, so the use-tax base can be computed rather than estimated. It is reported on the same monthly return as the Business Privilege Tax, which means a missed shipment is a defect in a filed return, not a loose end.

Mirror Code: Federal Rules, Guam Treasury

Guam’s income tax is the Guam Territorial Income Tax — the federal Internal Revenue Code applied with Guam substituted for the United States, under section 31 of the Organic Act of Guam. The rules are federal; the money goes to Guam.

The practical consequence is that bona fide Guam residents file their income tax return with the Government of Guam, not the IRS, while employment taxes stay federal. Wages are reported on Form W-2GU. US-based filers allocating tax to Guam use IRS Form 5074.

One concrete payroll trap: Form 941-SS was discontinued after the fourth quarter of 2023. Guam employers now file the standard Form 941 with the IRS. A payroll configuration still pointed at 941-SS has been filing nothing for over two years.

We are a bookkeeping company, not a CPA firm. We keep the books so that whoever prepares your returns has a clean set to work from, and we tell you when a filing route has changed.

Guam Villages We Serve

We serve businesses in Hagåtña, Tamuning, Dededo, Mangilao, Barrigada, Yigo, Sinajana and every other village on the island — all remotely, with overnight turnaround across the time difference. Our nearest sister territory page is the Northern Mariana Islands. Browse all locations.

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Guam Bookkeeping FAQs

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