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“At Least 88 Big US Corporations Paid $0 in Federal Income Tax Last Year,” Common Dreams, Stephen Prager

Dozens of America’s most profitable corporations avoided paying any federal income taxes in 2025, according to an analysis out on Tuesday from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

What Companies Paid Zero Federal Income Tax in 2025?

The companies avoiding all federal income tax in 2025 represent a broad cross-section of the U.S. economy, from manufacturing to services.

• The automaker Tesla reported zero federal income tax paid on almost $5.7 billion of U.S. income in 2025.
• Southwest Airlines avoided all federal income tax on $561 million of income last year; its competitor United Airlines achieved the same zero-tax result on almost $4.3 billion of U.S. income.
• The entertainment company Live Nation Entertainment paid zero federal income tax on $98 million of U.S. income.
• Yum! Brands, the parent company of the fast-food chains KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut, paid no federal income tax on over $1 billion of U.S. pretax profits last year.
• Three tech companies that specialize in digital payments—PayPal, Toast, and Block—collectively paid zero federal income tax on $3.2 billion of U.S. income.

The 88 companies include Tesla, Southwest Airlines, Live Nation, Palantir, Citigroup, and many others listed in the S&P 500. In total they brought in a collective $105 billion in pretax income last year.

ITEP found that 2025 saw a spike in corporate tax avoidance, enabled in part by new loopholes created by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed by President Donald Trump and by his 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which reduced the corporate tax rate to 21% from its previous 35%.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act is expected to hand the wealthiest 1% of Americans $117 billion in tax cuts this year, while those in the bottom 95% are set to pay more in taxes while facing across-the-board cuts to social safety net programs like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

It also allowed multimillion- and billion-dollar corporations to find new ways to avoid paying taxes. More than half of the tax-avoiders listed in the report used a provision in the new tax law allowing companies to immediately write off capital investments, reducing their collective taxes by $11.4 billion.

Pharmaceutical and tech companies, meanwhile, were able to take advantage of tax write-offs for research and development, exempting them from approximately another $4.4 billion.

In total, the corporate tax avoidance documented in 2025 by the researchers helped to rob the public coffers of yet another $26.7 billion, enough to give every public school student a free lunch for a year, according to a University of Missouri analysis of the National School Lunch Program.

The researchers said that the full scale of corporate tax avoidance remains unclear, since corporate tax returns are not publicly available. Some companies were also excluded because they are not part of the S&P 500 or have not yet reported their 2025 taxes.

Amy Hanauer, the executive director for ITEP:

“These findings are not isolated cases. They reflect systemic deficiencies in the corporate tax code,” said Amy Hanauer, the executive director for ITEP. “Without meaningful reform, profitable corporations will continue to pay less than their fair share.”