According to the Financial Times, based on Apple's latest reporting prepared in line with new EU rules for large companies, the corporation paid $17 billion in corporate income tax in Ireland in 2025. This amount represents 40% of the company's total global tax payments, which reached $43 billion. As a result, the Irish arm has become a cornerstone of the global tax structure of one of the world's largest technology players.
Scale of Payments and Ireland's Role
As the outlet notes, in the year ending in September 2025, roughly a quarter of Apple's global pre-tax profit flowed through its Irish entities. Meanwhile, in the country that hosts the corporation's European headquarters, only about 3% of its workforce is employed — around 5,575 people. It is precisely thanks to the low corporate tax rate, currently standing at 12.5%, that Ireland reaps significant benefits from hosting major IT companies on its territory: according to 2024 data, just three companies — Eli Lilly, Apple, and Microsoft — paid nearly half of all corporate taxes collected in the country.
Court Dispute and "State Aid"
It is important to note that the figure in question includes tax liabilities arising from a protracted EU dispute. In 2024, the bloc's top court ruled that Ireland had provided Apple with illegal state aid, upholding the order requiring the country to recover up to €13 billion in unpaid taxes. This precedent remains one of the most high-profile in the history of European tax regulation and directly affects the company's current payment structure.
Disproportion Between Profit and Staff
The Financial Times highlights the stark contrast in the efficiency of tax payments across different jurisdictions. In Ireland, pre-tax profit amounted to $6 million per employee, whereas in Germany, where the company employed 4,089 people and paid $153 million in taxes (0.3% of the total), the figure was just $51,000 per employee. This gap clearly demonstrates how the allocation of assets and functions among subsidiaries determines the geography of tax payments.
Contradictory Data
Apple disputes the full picture painted by the Financial Times. In a statement to the outlet, the company noted that the figures cited focus on corporate income taxes tied to the location of assets and do not reflect the full volume of taxes paid in various countries. In particular, the company draws attention to other types of taxes, such as VAT, which are levied based on the location of customers rather than the jurisdiction of the assets. Thus, the FT's version of a 40% concentration of payments in Ireland and Apple's version of the incompleteness of such data represent two sides of the same debate over the methodology for accounting for the tax payments of multinational corporations.
The Significance of the New EU Rules
The publication of detailed reporting became possible thanks to the new EU rules for large companies, which tighten requirements for the transparency of tax practices. For observers, this opens up an unprecedented level of detail: for the first time, in such a clear form, the link between the location of registered assets, the size of the local workforce, and the scale of tax payments is visible. Amid the ongoing review of global corporate taxation, the Apple case in Ireland is becoming one of the key test cases for the European regulator.
