The UK comparison: a self-employed electrician versus a global online retailer

A sole-trader electrician in England, turning £75,000 of profit in 2025/26, pays an all-in effective tax rate of 26.9%. One of the world's largest online retailers reported a global effective tax rate of 13.5% in its filed 2024 accounts. The electrician pays roughly twice the rate of the giant. Here is the arithmetic, line by line, and the two caveats that keep it honest.

The small business: the working

Sole trader, England, 2025/26, net profit after expenses of £75,000. No pension contributions, no capital allowances, no reliefs modelled. This is the baseline an unplanned sole trader actually faces.

The multinational: a global online retailer

The retailer's FY2024 Form 10-K reports an income tax provision of $9,265 million on pre-tax income of $68,614 million. That is a global effective tax rate of 13.5% (9,265 ÷ 68,614 = 13.50%), pinned to its own filed accounts: Amazon FY2024 Form 10-K, income tax note, on SEC EDGAR (https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=AMZN). The company name appears here only because this is the firm's own public filing, the documented-record exception; everywhere else on the page it stays "a global online retailer." This is a worldwide blended figure. It is not the company's UK rate, which we do not have and do not claim.

The comparison

Caveat A, the measure. The 26.9% is an all-in rate. It includes National Insurance, which is a social-security charge on the person, not a tax on company profit. The retailer's 13.5% is corporate income tax only. So strip the NIC out: the electrician's income-tax-only rate is 23.24% (£17,432 ÷ £75,000). That is still about 1.7 times the retailer's 13.5%. The "twice the rate" headline rests on the all-in figure; the "1.7 times" holds on income tax alone. Both are true, and we show both.

Caveat B, the scope. The retailer's 13.5% is global, blended across every country it operates in. The correct framing is: a UK electrician pays 26.9%, while the retailer reports a global rate of 13.5%. Not "it pays 13.5% in Britain."

A note on the bands used. England, Wales and Northern Ireland bands are used here. Scotland sets its own income tax bands, with higher rates (for example a 42% intermediate-to-higher band and a 45% advanced band), so a Scottish electrician on the same profit would face a different, higher figure. The working above is the rest-of-UK position.

A note on the periods. The small firm's figure is for 2025/26 and the retailer's is for its FY2024. They are different periods, and we disclose that deliberately, the same way we disclose the scope mismatch. We use the latest settled small-business year and the retailer's latest filed accounts; neither side is cherry-picked to widen the gap.

Why the electrician cannot get there

The retailer's rate is driven down by tools that need international scale: intellectual property held in low-tax jurisdictions, financing flows between group companies, profit allocated by transfer pricing across borders. The electrician has one company, one country, one set of books. There is nothing to route, nowhere to shift. The gap is not a reward for the giant's effort or a penalty for the electrician's. It is what the rules produce when one taxpayer can use the international system and the other cannot. All legal.

Key facts

• UK sole-trader electrician, £75,000 profit, 2025/26: income tax £17,432 + Class 4 NIC £2,757 = £20,189, an all-in rate of 26.92%.
• Income-tax-only sub-rate: 23.24%, still about 1.7x the retailer's global rate.
• The retailer's global ETR 2024: 13.5% ($9,265m ÷ $68,614m, per 10-K).
• All-in multiple: 2.0x. The figure is the rules working as written, not anything illegal.
• Class 2 NIC abolished April 2024; Class 4 at 6%/2% for 2025/26.