Apple paid $17bn in taxes to Ireland after court ruling on back levies

Apple paid Ireland $17bn in taxes last year, representing 40 per cent of its worldwide total, according to filings that offer new insight into the iPhone maker’s global tax liabilities.

The $17bn payment was significantly boosted after the EU’s top court in 2024 ordered Apple to pay €13bn in back taxes. The court ruled that Ireland had granted the tech giant “unlawful aid”, resulting in a tax rate of less than 1 per cent. Apple paid $43bn in corporate income taxes worldwide last year.

Ireland has reaped big windfalls due to its low corporate tax rate, which is 12.5 per cent at present. In 2024, just three companies — widely believed to be Eli Lilly, Apple and Microsoft — paid almost half of all corporation tax collected in the country.

Companies were lured to Ireland by a tax system that allowed them to route profits to tax havens through a structure known as the “double Irish”. The loophole was abolished in 2015 but the country retained many large US companies that had set up significant operations there.

A quarter of Apple’s global pre-tax profits in the year to September 2025 were booked through its Ireland entities, where it employs about 3 per cent of its workforce, according to the filings.

The latest figures were published under new EU rules that require large companies to break down revenues, profits and corporate income taxes for every jurisdiction in the bloc as well as designated tax havens.

Apple booked pre-tax profits of $6mn per employee in Ireland, compared with just $51,000 per employee in Germany, where it paid $153mn in cash taxes, or 0.3 per cent of its total. Apple employs 5,575 people in Ireland, which is home to its European headquarters, and 4,089 in Germany.

New tax disclosure measures are providing campaigners with fresh ammunition to push big businesses to boost their contributions to public finances.

Companies, however, have complained that the latest rules paint an incomplete and misleading picture of the contributions they make to individual countries.

Apple said it was “consistently one of the world’s largest taxpayers”.

It sought to draw a distinction between the corporate income taxes reported in the new filing, which it said are paid in jurisdictions where assets are held, and consumption taxes such as value-added taxes, which are paid where consumers are based.

Microsoft in June revealed that it had booked 38 per cent of its global pre-tax profit in Ireland last year, equivalent to more than $7mn per employee.

Procter & Gamble reported $115mn in profit and no tax in Luxembourg, where it had just one employee. The consumer goods group said it had ceased operations in the country and that it had paid no tax because it had offset profits last year with losses from previous years.

Beyond the EU, Australia is expected to release similar country-by-country breakdowns later this year, while new US accounting rules are forcing listed companies to specify in annual reports whether and how their overseas operations reduced their US tax bills.

In a sign of its concern, Microsoft accompanied its report with a blog post that acknowledged “strong views about whether companies are paying enough”.

It said a cash payment recorded from France’s tax authority “reflects a one-time refund of tax overpaid” and was “a good example of why a single line can look unusual without context”.

The National Foreign Trade Council, a Washington-based lobby group, cautioned that the EU rules could result in double counting of revenue when subsidiaries sell products to one another.

Additional reporting by Chris Cook