Big companies often pay less tax than your small business. Here is how, and why it is legal.

A profitable small company in the UK pays corporation tax of up to 25%. Some of the largest companies on earth pay a far smaller share of their profits, and most of them do it without breaking a single law. This site shows how, in plain numbers, and points the finger where it belongs: not at the companies, at the rules.

We are not here to shout. We are here to do the arithmetic.

A limited-company electrician on a healthy profit pays an all-in effective tax rate of about 27% once corporation tax and the tax on taking the money out are counted. That all-in figure includes the personal tax on drawing the money out; on corporation tax alone the small company sits nearer 23%. One of the world's largest online retailers reported a global effective tax rate of about 13.5% in 2024 in its own filed accounts, a worldwide blended figure, not a UK one. The six largest US tech firms averaged an effective corporate income tax rate of about 18.8% over the decade to 2024, against an average statutory rate of 29.7% combined US federal-plus-state and about 27% worldwide. We always show both sides on the same measure and label the scope, because mixing an all-in personal rate with a corporate-only global one is exactly the trick we are here to expose. The gap is not down to effort or cleverness. It is down to access to a set of tools that only exist at a scale a normal business will never reach.

This is not hypothetical. It is on the public record. In 2012, a Parliamentary committee found that a global coffee chain had paid around £8.6m in UK corporation tax across 14 years of trading, on billions in sales, by routing royalties and coffee-buying through lower-tax countries. In 2022, French authorities and a global fast-food chain agreed a judicial settlement of about EUR 1.245bn relating to its tax structure. Neither was found to have broken the law. That is the whole point.

Start here:

• Is it fair? - the verdict across six countries, the decade-long gap, and what it could have paid for.
• Why your small business pays a higher rate than a multinational - the arithmetic, side by side.
• How they do it - the methods, decoded in plain English.
• The league table - what each country loses, and what it inflicts on others.
• The structures, A to Z - the Double Irish, the Dutch Sandwich, and the rest, explained.
• By the numbers - every headline figure, with its source.

And where the arithmetic does not support us, we say so. India is the exception on this site: its personal tax system is light enough that a small business owner usually pays a lower rate than a large company, the reverse of the pattern everywhere else here. We computed it to the same standard as the rest and show the reversal in full, because a site that only published the cases that suited it would not deserve your trust on the ones that do.

We sell nothing. We collect nothing. There is no newsletter to join, no account to make, no tracker following you around. The work is free because the point is for you to have it, not for us to harvest you. You can check every figure on this site against its original source. That is the deal.