Form NXP and export proceeds: the 180 day rule

Form NXP is how Nigeria tracks your export money. It is free to process, and non oil proceeds must come home within 180 days, with no extensions.

Form NXP is the document that turns an export into a transaction the Nigerian government can see, and the deadline it starts is the one that catches exporters who negotiated soft payment terms. Non oil export proceeds must reach your domiciliary account within 180 days of the bill of lading date, and since January 2025 that deadline has had no extensions. This page is the form, the clock and the practical consequence for how you sell.

What is Form NXP? #

The Nigeria Export Proceeds form. You complete it and your commercial bank processes it, before the goods leave. It records what is being exported, to whom, for how much, and it is how the Central Bank monitors that the foreign exchange earned by Nigerian exports comes back into the Nigerian banking system.

Every commercial export needs one. Your bank's trade desk handles it; First Bank, among others, publishes its own description of the process.

What does it cost? #

Nothing to process. Under the Central Bank's 2026 Foreign Exchange Manual, which took effect on 1 June 2026, Form NXP processing is free of charge. That is a change worth knowing about, because charges used to vary by bank.

The 180 day rule #

Here is the part to build your contract around.

Export proceeds must be repatriated to the exporter's domiciliary account within 180 days of the bill of lading date for non oil exports, and 90 days for oil and gas. Agricultural exports are non oil, so 180 days is your number.

And then the change that made it real: from January 2025 the Central Bank stopped authorised dealer banks approving further extension requests beyond those windows, as Nairametrics reported on 9 January 2025 and as trade lawyers Stren & Blan explained in February 2025. Before that, an exporter whose buyer was slow could ask the bank for more time. Now the deadline is fixed.

On penalties, the 2026 manual is reported to charge the exporter one percent of the naira value of outstanding proceeds, with a separate charge on banks that fail to enforce. We have that from trade press rather than from the Central Bank's own document, so treat the percentage as indicative and ask your bank for the current position in writing.

Why this should change how you sell #

Work backwards from 180 days.

The bill of lading is issued when the goods are loaded. Sea freight from Lagos to a Chinese port takes weeks. The buyer inspects on arrival. If your contract says payment 90 days after arrival, and the voyage took six weeks, and the buyer takes another two weeks to inspect, you are already at about four months before the payment term even starts running.

That is how an exporter with a perfectly respectable buyer ends up in breach of a Central Bank rule.

So: for a first shipment to a buyer you do not know, use an irrevocable letter of credit payable at sight or at a short usance, not open account, not payment on arrival, not "we will settle after we sell it". Our getting paid page explains each instrument and what confirmation costs.

Can I be paid in yuan? #

Possibly, but not as simply as the headlines suggest. The Central Bank of Nigeria and the People's Bank of China have a bilateral local currency swap of 15 billion yuan, renewed on 27 December 2024 for three years. The Central Bank has publicly confirmed it remains valid.

However, the Central Bank itself noted in May 2025 that Nigerian importers and exporters still transact predominantly in US dollars rather than yuan, partly because Nigeria's exports to China are dominated by raw commodities generating limited yuan inflows. The swap operates between central banks and authorised dealers; it is not a facility a private exporter switches on for one shipment.

The practical answer: ask your bank whether it can settle your particular transaction in yuan, and if the answer is unclear, price in dollars.

What you need before the bank will process it #

• Your NEPC exporter's certificate, covered on our NEPC page
• A registered company, a tax identification number and an export domiciliary account
• The commercial invoice and the contract or purchase order
• Details of the buyer and the destination
• Whatever your bank's trade desk asks for, which varies

Ask the trade desk for their checklist before you need it, rather than in the week of loading.

The sequence, with the clock marked #

1. Register: CAC, TIN, domiciliary account, NEPC certificate
2. Register the facility with Chinese customs if you are exporting food, via our GACC page
3. Find and check the buyer, using our finding buyers page
4. Agree terms that pay inside 180 days of loading
5. Open Form NXP at the bank
6. Inspection, quarantine certificate, certificate of origin, per our documents page
7. Load. The bill of lading date starts the 180 days.
8. Present documents, get paid, and make sure the money lands in the domiciliary account, not somewhere else

That last point is not pedantry. Proceeds paid into an account outside Nigeria do not satisfy the rule, however genuinely you were paid.

The short version #

Form NXP is free and quick. The 180 days behind it is neither negotiable nor extendable, and it is the single strongest argument for insisting on a letter of credit rather than trusting a new buyer's goodwill. Our step by step export guide puts it in the wider sequence.

First published 20 Sep 2026. Last checked 20 Sep 2026 by The ChinaBridge desk. Something here out of date? Tell us in the comments and we will fix it.