Interactive: Corporate America Paid Less Than Ever in 2025

Out of 706 profitable companies, 114 paid zero federal income tax in 2025.

Source: Federal Income Tax Rates for 706 Profitable Companies in 2025, Effective Federal Corporate Income Tax Rates on 706 Major Corporations, 2025

These 114 corporations are part of a larger sample of 706 profitable corporations which collectively paid federal corporate income taxes equal to just 10.4% of their reported profits.

Corporate tax subsidies – defined as anything allowing profitable corporations to pay less than the statutory corporate tax rate of 21% on their profits – totaled $198 billion in 2025 for the 706 companies included in this report.

These corporations saved another $263 billion from the decision made by Trump and Congressional Republicans to slash the statutory corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% in Trump’s first tax law.

Source: Corporations Gained Big Tax Breaks from Two Rounds of Trump's Tax Cuts

The 25 corporations in this report with the largest tax subsidies accounted for more than half of the total corporate tax subsidies identified here.

Source: 25 Companies With Largest Total Tax Subsidies in 2025

Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet each accounted for between $13 billion and $19 billion in corporate tax subsidies alone.

Source: More Than 50% of Total Tax Breaks in 2025 Went to Just 12 Companies

More than a third of these corporations paid less than 7% of their U.S. profits in U.S. taxes, meaning they paid an effective federal corporate income tax rate that was less than a third of the statutory federal rate of 21%.

Source: Federal Income Tax Rates for 706 Profitable Companies in 2025

In 1981, President Reagan’s tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy took effect. ITEP’s first corporate tax study found that the effective rate on profitable corporations plummeted from 17.3 to 11.2% in 1982 – less than a quarter of the 46% statutory rate at the time.

Source: Effective Tax Rates Reported by Profitable U.S.-Based Corporations in 2025 Reach a New Low

By 1986, Reagan had repudiated that approach. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 closed corporate loopholes that had provided tens of billions of dollars in tax breaks. By 1988 ITEP's survey of large corporations found the overall effective rate had risen to 26.5%, even though the reforms cut the statutory rate from 46 to 34%.

In the 1990s, corporations began finding ways around the 1986 reforms, aided by changes in tax law and tax-avoidance strategies developed by major accounting firms. ITEP's 2000 follow-up study found that the effective corporate tax rate fell to 21.7% between 1996 and 1998. According to ITEP's 2004 study, the rate declined further to 17.2% in 2002 and 2003, following corporate tax cuts enacted in 2002.

ITEP’s prior study of the pre-Trump corporate tax laws, covering 2008 through 2015, found an average effective rate of 21.2% – still far below the 35% statutory rate.

The 2017 corporate tax cuts reduced the statutory corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. In 2018, the first full year following their implementation, ITEP's study of corporate tax rates found that the effective rate had fallen to 11.3% — just slightly above the 11.2% rate that prompted President Reagan to support reforms aimed at closing corporate tax loopholes.

According to ITEP's 2026 study, profitable corporations paid an effective federal corporate income tax rate of just 10.4% in 2025, the lowest rate ITEP has documented in more than 40 years of research.

It is also the first time in the Trump corporate tax era that companies have collectively paid less than half the legal rate.

Accelerated depreciation lets a company write off the cost of equipment and buildings much faster than the accounting rules say they wear out. Trump’s 2017 law pushed this to its extreme, “expensing,” which deducts the full cost in the first year. The 2025 law made it permanent and extended it to certain structures.

A highly profitable company that keeps buying equipment and building factories can make it look like it has no taxable profit at all. These breaks cut the companies’ tax bills by at least $88 billion in 2025.

Source: How Trump's Policies Facilitated Corporate Tax Avoidance in 2025

The 2025 law also revived immediate write-offs for research spending, which the 2017 law had made companies deduct gradually. It even allows retroactive write-offs back to 2022 for smaller businesses, and in many cases lets large companies claim earlier years too. ITEP identified over $37 billion in 2025 tax breaks from this provision.

The research and development tax credit still works much as it did before Trump took office. It subsidizes research spending, even for “research” most Americans would not find especially valuable. The companies in the study saved $22 billion with it in 2025 – including about $121 million for Airbnb.

A longstanding break for executive stock options lets companies deduct the value of options granted to a handful of their highest-paid leaders, going far beyond the expense they report to investors. The benefit goes overwhelmingly to a small number of highly profitable tech companies. It cut tax bills by at least $22 billion.

Trump’s 2017 law created a special deduction for profits attributed to foreign sales of goods and services that use U.S.-held intellectual property, like patents and trademarks. The 2025 law renamed and slightly modified it (FDDEI). It taxes this income far below the 21% that would apply to domestic sales, and it cut the companies’ taxes by at least $18 billion – likely more, since many companies disclose little.

Motor vehicle companies paid an average of 2.7% in 2025, and energy companies 3.0%.

Source: Effective Corporate Tax Rates for 706 Corporations by Industry in 2025

General Motors paid 2.8%. Tesla’s federal income tax bill on $5.7 billion in U.S. profits was exactly zero.

Telecommunications companies averaged 6.7%.

Verizon paid 8.5%, AT&T 4.7% and T-Mobile just 0.4%. Depreciation breaks were the single largest contributor.

Aerospace and defense companies paid 7.6%.

Five of them – Huntington Ingalls, L3Harris, Parsons, Textron and V2X – paid nothing. More than half of the industry’s $3.9 billion in tax breaks came from the 2025 provision allowing immediate expensing of research.

Retailers averaged 8.7%, but that average hides a split.

Five internet retailers – Amazon, Chewy, Etsy, Expedia and Instacart – paid 1.3% on $91 billion of U.S. income. The other 50 brick-and-mortar companies paid 15.4% on $101 billion.

In dollar terms, no industry received more in tax breaks than big tech: about $68 billion in 2025, by paying an average rate of 10% instead of 21% on its outsized profits. An earlier ITEP analysis found that much of this came from accelerated depreciation breaks that the 2025 law turbocharged.

Your favorite chain restaurant may pay a lower tax rate than you do. Eight familiar chains used the 2025 law’s provision on tips, combined with other parts of the tax code, to shelter three-quarters of their U.S. profits from federal corporate income tax.

They rely on a single outdated break: a credit for the payroll taxes they pay on employees’ tips. It was meant to encourage companies to track cash tips, but credit-card tipping and a new personal tax deduction for tip income have made it mostly redundant.

Source: Restaurant Chain Tax Avoidance in 2025 Due to FICA Credit

The report counts only U.S. profits and U.S. taxes. Companies can make profits earned in the U.S. appear to be earned in offshore tax havens. Merck, for example, reported $21 billion of profit worldwide but claims it lost $5 billion in the U.S. Because the study excludes companies with a U.S. loss, Merck’s offshore tax avoidance is left out entirely.

Source: Offshore Breaks and Loopholes Likely Allow Tax Rates on U.S. Income Lower than the Rates Calculated in This Report

A tax created in 2017 on certain low-taxed foreign profits, known as GILTI, is supposed to limit offshore avoidance. But some companies do not report it in a way that separates it from the U.S. taxes counted here. They include four of the five most profitable corporations in the study: Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta.

Companies must also tell investors about tax breaks they claimed but believe would more likely than not be disallowed on audit. Amazon reported $1.22 billion of current federal income tax in 2025 but $1.29 billion of these uncertain benefits.

If they are mostly federal, Amazon’s real rate is closer to zero than the 1% counted here. Abbott Laboratories, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Lyft, Meta and Uber also reported more in uncertain benefits than in federal tax.

Source: Tax Breaks the Corporations Themselves Admit Are Probably Illegal

At the 35% rate that applied before Trump’s first tax law, these 706 corporations would have owed about $657 billion in federal income tax on their $1.88 trillion in 2025 U.S. profits.

Source: Corporations Gained Big Tax Breaks from Two Rounds of Trump’s Tax Cuts

Trump’s 2017 tax law cut the rate to 21%. That alone saved them $263 billion and brought the bill down to $394 billion.

Then special breaks and loopholes took off another $198 billion. What they actually paid: $196 billion.

In 2025, corporations paid an estimated $461 billion less in federal income taxes as a result of domestic corporate tax breaks and the corporate tax rate reduction enacted in 2017.