1,149 of Australia's biggest companies paid no income tax last year

Every year the Australian Taxation Office publishes the income and tax bill of every company that earns more than $100 million here. On 1 October it released the figures for 2024-25.

There were 4,299 of these companies. 1,149 of them paid no income tax at all.

Who they are

Foreign-owned companies, the local arms of multinationals, are the largest group after private Australian companies. That's where the tax office says it is looking hardest.

The biggest earners that paid nothing

Ranked by total income, these are the ten biggest entities in the ATO's data that had no tax payable for 2024-25.

"Nil" taxable income means the company reported zero or a loss: the law doesn't let the ATO publish amounts of zero or less, so those cells are blank in its data. Two of the top three, IAG and AGL, did report taxable income, of $600 million and $510 million, but still had no tax to pay. On the ATO's explanation, that happens when tax offsets cancel out the bill.

Further down the list, other well-known names with no tax payable include Hope Downs Marketing Company ($6.41bn in total income), Santos ($5.12bn), JBS Global Meat Holdings ($4.85bn), Mineral Resources ($4.81bn) and CSL ($4.76bn).

One of the ten is owned by taxpayers: NBN Co belongs to the Commonwealth.

The total bill went down

The companies in the report paid $87.5 billion in income tax, down $8.2 billion (8.6%) on the year before. Most of the fall came from mining, energy and water, which paid $12.5 billion less as commodity prices eased. The sector still paid the most, $35.9 billion, or 41% of the total.

"Doesn't automatically imply wrongdoing"

The ATO is careful to say that paying no tax isn't the same as breaking the law. A company can legitimately pay nothing if it made a loss, is using up losses from earlier years, or claimed tax offsets such as the research and development incentive.

"It's important to remember that a nil tax result doesn't automatically imply wrongdoing," ATO acting deputy commissioner Michelle Sams told the ABC. "Many large businesses legitimately pay no income tax but we continue to scrutinise these outcomes closely."

That's fair. But it also means more than a thousand companies, each turning over at least $100 million in Australia, contributed no company tax in a year when households were paying more for almost everything.

And the share is falling slowly. When the reports began in 2013-14, 36% of large companies paid no tax. Twelve years later, it's still more than one in four.

Where the tax office is looking

Ms Sams said the ATO runs 100 to 150 reviews and audits of large companies at any one time. Its focus for multinationals includes:

• Offshore financing: loans from a related company overseas, where the interest is deducted in Australia
• Offshore marketing hubs: selling Australian resources through a related company in a low-tax country such as Singapore
• Royalties paid offshore: payments to a related company overseas for the use of a brand, software or other intellectual property
• Data centres, cloud and AI businesses: "Where we see big payments to related party offshore, we want to look to make sure," she said

Each of those is a way to move profit out of Australia legally, unless the price charged isn't what unrelated companies would agree. We explain how it works in How to move a profit offshore.

The ATO's Tax Avoidance Taskforce, set up in 2016, says it has collected $36 billion in extra tax since then. That's money that would not have been paid if nobody had checked.

Why it matters

Company tax is a big part of the Budget. Every dollar that large companies don't pay is a dollar the government has to get from somewhere else: income tax, GST, or more borrowing on top of the national debt.

Your share: the $8.2 billion fall in large-company tax in one year works out to about $290 for every Australian.

Top photo: one of the Australian Taxation Office's buildings in Civic, Canberra (file photo, 2021). Photo: Nick-D, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.