Lagos Just Raised Land Transaction Fees by 300 Percent. If You Are Buying From Abroad, Budget for It Now

One consequence flows directly from this. When land that already has a formal title changes hands, the transfer needs the governor's approval to be valid. That approval is called Governor's Consent. Without it, a sale of titled land is not legally perfected, which means the transfer can be challenged and may not stand up in court or be recognised by the land registry. Governor's Consent is not paperwork you can treat as optional. It is the step that turns a private agreement into a legally recognised change of ownership.

Because Governor's Consent is mandatory, the fee attached to it is a real and unavoidable cost of buying titled property in Lagos. When the state raises that fee, it raises the true cost of every affected purchase.

How much more this could cost

The increases are large, and they scale with the value of the property, because the fees are calculated against the state's assessment of what the land is worth. Officials have given a concrete example. In Lekki Phase 1, one of the most expensive parts of Lagos, consent fees that sat between about ₦12 million and ₦18 million under the old 2015 benchmarks are expected to rise to between about ₦40 million and ₦90 million under the new schedule. That is because the assessed value of land in that area has climbed from around ₦250 million in 2015 to somewhere between ₦800 million and ₦1.5 billion today.

Not every property is Lekki Phase 1, and your figure will depend on your plot's assessed value and location. But the direction is clear: on a mid to high value Lagos property, the consent and associated fees can now run into millions of naira more than they did before May.

Why the state says it did this

The government's stated reason is that the benchmarks used to calculate these fees had barely moved between 2005 and 2015, even as property prices in Lagos rose sharply. In other words, the old fees were being calculated against out of date land values. Officials say the aim is to bring statutory fees in line with present day realities and to improve transparency, not only to raise revenue. Lagos has also been moving its land and building approval processes toward digital systems, including a shift to digital building permit approval from April 2026.

Whether or not you accept that rationale, the practical effect on your budget is the same.

What to do about it as a diaspora buyer

Treat statutory fees as a real line in your budget, not an afterthought. On many international purchases, buyers plan for the price of the property and forget the transaction costs that sit on top of it. In Lagos those costs have just gone up.

Ask your lawyer for a written estimate of the full closing costs before you commit. That estimate should include Governor's Consent, stamp duty, registration, and any other statutory charges, calculated against the property's current assessed value under the 2026 schedule, not an old figure someone quotes from memory.

Confirm who is paying the consent fee, and get it in writing. In some deals the seller expects the buyer to bear it. Clarify this before you sign, because on a high value property it can be a large sum.

Do not be tempted to skip perfecting the title to save money. The higher fee makes it tempting to leave Governor's Consent undone. Resist that. Unperfected titled land is exactly the kind of weak claim that leads to disputes and losses later, and it can be far more expensive to fix than the fee you avoided.

Bektu (https://bektu.com) is a transparency and research platform that tracks the delivery history of Nigerian developers. It is not a marketplace and not a brokerage. Understanding the real, current cost of completing a purchase properly is part of the same discipline as checking who you are buying from.

The higher fees are unwelcome news for buyers, but the underlying lesson is an old one. In Lagos, a purchase is not finished when you pay the seller. It is finished when the transfer is properly consented, stamped, and registered, and as of May 2026, that final step simply costs more.