Lagosculture & etiquette

The route starts with your employer, who obtains an expatriate quota position from the Federal Ministry of Interior. What happens after that is in transition. The long-standing process was a Subject To Regularisation (STR) visa from a Nigerian mission abroad, regularised into a CERPAC residence permit inside a 90-day window after landing. The Nigeria Visa Policy 2025, in force 8 May 2025, introduced a pre-arrival e-CERPAC — an entry permit valid 30 days — expressly to remove that two-step, and the NIS's public visa listing no longer shows an STR class; but the NIS still publishes its STR/R2A employment visa page and people already holding STR visas are being handled as regularisations. Confirm the current sequence with the mission you will actually apply through rather than with a guide, including this one. What has not changed: a business visitor visa cannot be regularised into a residence permit. People who arrive on one because the employer was in a hurry end up flying out, applying properly and flying back — a five-figure mistake in dollars and several weeks lost. Visa-on-arrival was discontinued on 1 May 2025 when the e-Visa system launched, so the older workaround is also gone.

The Lagos commute is not measured in kilometres. Ikoyi to Victoria Island is a few minutes off-peak and can be an hour at 8am. Mainland to island crossings funnel through three bridges, and the Third Mainland Bridge closing for maintenance reorganises the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. If your office is on Victoria Island or in Lekki, living on the Mainland to save rent will cost you three to four hours a day. Almost every newcomer underestimates this and moves within the first year.

Nigerian electricity customers are graded into bands by the hours of supply their feeder actually delivers, with Band A promising twenty hours or more a day at the highest tariff and the lower bands promising much less. The band is a property of the feeder, not the flat, so two buildings on the same street can differ. A Band A address costs more per unit and saves you far more in diesel. Note too that since December 2024 the Lagos electricity market is regulated by the Lagos State Electricity Regulatory Commission rather than by NERC — one of the first devolutions under the Electricity Act 2023.

The Lagos State Tenancy Law 2011 makes it unlawful to demand or pay more than one year's rent in advance from a yearly tenant, or six months from a monthly one, with penalties on both sides. But section 1(3) of that same Law expressly excludes Apapa, Ikeja GRA, Ikoyi and Victoria Island — precisely the four districts where the foreign professional market sits. In those areas two years upfront is a normal opening ask and is not unlawful. Everywhere else it is unlawful and still routinely demanded.

Nigeria's personal income tax is administered by the state of your residence, so an employee living in Lagos has PAYE remitted to the Lagos State Internal Revenue Service. The Nigeria Tax Administration Act 2025 keeps that state-of-residence principle. It matters practically: LIRS is the most digitised state authority in the country and issues the tax clearance certificate you will need for a great many things, and if you live in Ogun and work in Lagos your tax follows your home address, not your desk.

Lagos has a real regulator for estate agency — the Lagos State Real Estate Regulatory Authority, created by the Real Estate Regulatory Authority Law 2021 — and it maintains a public database of licensed agents and firms. Rental fraud against newcomers is a genuine industry here, and the single most effective defence is checking the agent's registration on LASRERA's own site and refusing to transfer anything to a person who is not on it. Take that step before viewing, not after.