Where Companies Send Their Taxes

Taxes Paid to Ireland $11.92B

Taxes Paid to U.K. $10.04B

Taxes Paid to China $6.22B

Today we continue our series on new corporate tax disclosures by asking a simple question: Which foreign countries receive the most tax payments from U.S. filers? 

As you might recall from our previous post, this year we’re starting to see a wave of new disclosures about corporate tax payments, courtesy of a new accounting standard that went into effect in 2025. U.S. filers must now report actual taxes paid to different jurisdictions around the world, so long as those individual amounts are at least 5 percent of total taxes the company pays that fiscal year. 

Calcbench tracks all this data (of course), which means that financial analysts can gain new insight into where the companies that you follow tend to pay the most taxes. 

Even better, Calcbench also tracks this data in aggregate, so we can get a macro-level view of which countries receive how much money in taxes from U.S. filers. 

Table 1, below, lists the 10 countries that received the largest amounts of total tax payments in 2025. Note that the “country” receiving the largest amount of taxes is no specific country at all; companies only have to identify a country by name if payments to it are at least 5 percent of all taxes the company pays. So the single largest destination is simply undefined.

   

Country	Firm Count	Total Taxes Paid
Unidentified	775	$58,186,631,533
Ireland	78	$11,918,387,000
United Kingdom	275	$10,038,387,246
Canada	311	$8,326,770,723
Mexico	166	$7,811,854,000
China	187	$6,221,367,000
Switzerland	71	$5,921,894,000
Brazil	129	$5,362,287,000
United Arab Emirates	2	$5,001,235,000
United States	70	$4,741,610,000

Interesting quirk No. 2: the United States itself ranks 10th on our list! How so? Because overseas businesses that are registrants on U.S. stock exchanges must comply with these rules too, and the United States is a foreign jurisdiction to them. Hence the United States shows up on our list too.

Information like this can help analysts understand how corporate financial performance intersects with economic policy around the world. For example, Ireland cut corporate tax rates years ago and revamped its intellectual property rules to lure large global businesses there. Sure enough, now the Emerald Isle is the corporate home to scads of global businesses, which in turn put nearly $12 billion into the Irish treasury last year. Should Ireland ever change its approach to corporate taxation, that could have big implications for some businesses domiciled there. (Pharmaceutical companies in particular.) 

If you delve deeper into the disclosures — say, by examining where a single company pays the most taxes — that could help you understand whether the company’s global footprint makes sense. Perhaps the company could revamp some operations to consolidate into a low-tax jurisdiction, for example; that might be an insight hedge fund activists would love to know, if they’re agitating for change.

Calcbench can bring those company-specific insights about tax payments to your computer screen in just a few fingertips. We’ll give more examples of how that works, and what you can learn from that analysis, in another post coming soon.