The Doctor's BIR Deadline Calendar

The dates that matter

Here's the full calendar a self-employed doctor faces. The right-hand column tells you whether it applies to everyone or only to doctors on graduated rates.

Deadlines as of 2026. When a due date falls on a weekend or a holiday, filing and payment move to the next working day, so confirm the current year's official BIR calendar.

What happened to the January registration fee?

If an older checklist told you to renew your BIR registration every January and pay ₱500, that step is gone. The ₱500 annual registration fee was abolished by the Ease of Paying Taxes Act (RA 11976), effective January 22, 2024, so there's no more January registration renewal and no more Form 0605 for it. Your Certificate of Registration stays valid even if it still shows the old fee line printed on it. What does still happen in January is the books-of-accounts housekeeping, and only for certain book types: manual books are registered once and only re-registered when the pages are used up, while loose-leaf and computerized books have annual submission deadlines (January 15 and January 30).

The 8% calendar versus the graduated calendar

The single biggest difference in your year is whether you file percentage tax. Doctors on graduated rates file the 3% percentage tax on Form 2551Q every quarter, four times a year. Doctors on the 8% option don't file 2551Q at all, because the 8% already stands in place of the percentage tax. Both groups file the same three quarterly income tax returns and the same annual return. So electing 8% doesn't just often lower your tax, it also removes four filings from your year.

Why there's no Q4 quarterly income tax return

The fourth quarter of income tax is folded into the annual return, which is why April 15 is the heaviest date on the calendar. It settles the whole prior year, reconciles every Form 2307 (the withholding certificate each hospital or HMO gives you), and finalizes the consequences of your rate election. Percentage tax, by contrast, does have a fourth-quarter return, the 2551Q due January 25, because it isn't reconciled annually the way income tax is.

Your quarterly income tax is cumulative

A detail that trips up first-time filers: the quarterly income tax return isn't a standalone snapshot of one quarter. Each 1701Q is filed on a year-to-date basis, so your second-quarter return reports your income and credits from January through June, then subtracts what you already paid and credited in the first quarter, and the third-quarter return does the same through September. The practical effect is that a mistake in an early quarter follows you through the year until the annual return trues everything up. It's also why you can't just file one good quarter and ignore the rest: the quarters build on each other.

A two-list system that actually holds

The doctors who never miss a date usually reduce the whole calendar to two short lists. List one is the fixed filing dates above, dropped into a calendar with reminders set two weeks early. List two is the paperwork each filing needs, mainly the 2307s for that period and a running total of receipts, kept in a single folder that you add to the moment a certificate arrives rather than hunting for it the night before a deadline. The dates are the easy part. It's the gathering that eats time, and a duty roster has no respect for a filing deadline. Build the two lists once, in January, and the rest of the year mostly runs itself.

Make the calendar work for you

Set reminders two weeks before each date, not on the date itself. The work that precedes a filing, gathering receipts and 2307s, is what actually takes time, and it's what slips during duty weeks. A doctor who registered mid-year picks up every deadline that falls after the registration date, and the first filing may cover only a partial period. If tracking all of this during a 36-hour shift sounds impossible, that's the honest reason many doctors hand it off entirely.

Frequently asked questions