The Financial Times reports that new tax disclosures showed Apple paid Ireland $17 billion in corporate income taxes in 2025, accounting for 40% of its worldwide total. Here are the details.
Apple says figures don’t tell the full story
According to The Financial Times, Apple’s tax payments to Ireland reached $17 billion last year, as disclosed in reports required under new EU rules for large companies.
The $17 billion total includes back taxes from a long-running EU dispute that ended in 2024, when the bloc’s top court ruled that Ireland had granted Apple unlawful state aid, and upheld an order requiring the country to recover up to €13 billion in unpaid taxes.
The FT added that according to the new filings, “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.”
From the FT:
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.
Throughout Apple’s dispute with the EU, the company denied receiving unlawful state aid and argued that it had complied with Irish tax law. Apple said the profits at issue were attributable to intellectual property developed in the US and should therefore be taxed there.
However, the EU’s top court sided with the European Commission, which argued that two Irish tax rulings allowed Apple to allocate most of the profits recorded by Apple Sales International and Apple Operations Europe to “head offices” that had no employees or physical premises.
Back to today’s report, Apple told the FT that it is “consistently one of the world’s largest taxpayers,” and argued that the new disclosures don’t capture the full scope of what it pays across different countries.
Apple said that the figures focus on corporate income taxes tied to where assets are held, rather than other taxes (such as VAT), which are collected based on where customers are located.
To read the FT’s full report, follow this link.
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