At least 88 of the largest corporations in America paid no federal corporate income taxes in their most recent fiscal year despite enjoying substantial pretax profits in the U.S. While the biggest U.S. corporations have avoided taxes in this way for decades, it appears that corporate tax avoidance has increased in the most recent year. This is at least in part due to two separate packages of corporate tax cuts pushed through by the Trump administration: last year’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” and the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA).

These tax-avoiding corporations represent a variety of industries and together enjoyed more than $105 billion in U.S. pretax income in 2025. The statutory federal income tax rate for corporate profits is 21 percent, which means these 88 corporations would have paid a collective total of $22.1 billion for the year had they paid that rate on their 2025 income. Instead, they received $4.7 billion in tax rebates. This means the total federal corporate income tax breaks enjoyed by these companies comes to $26.7 billion when measured against the 21 percent statutory rate. Measured against the 35 percent corporate income tax rate that was in effect before the two corporate tax cuts pushed through by Republicans and President Trump since 2017, these companies collectively cut their income taxes by $41 billion in 2025 alone.

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Corporate Tax Avoidance Relies on a Variety of Tax Breaks
Because the tax returns of these corporations are not public, it’s impossible to know exactly how the companies are avoiding all tax liability. But the Securities and Exchange Commission requires publicly traded companies to disclose, in their annual reports to shareholders, basic information about their U.S. pretax income, and the federal and state income tax paid on that income. Annual reports released starting this year, covering calendar year 2025, are subject to new, more detailed disclosure rules that also require companies to list categories of tax provisions that have a significant effect on their income tax expense each year. For this reason, we can generally describe the tax breaks used by many of these 88 companies to get their tax expense to zero.

The most universally relied-on tax break in our sample is accelerated depreciation. A provision in the 2025 tax law allowing companies to immediately write off capital investments—the most extreme version of tax depreciation—helped more than half of these companies reduce their federal income tax last year. 3M, Cheniere Energy, Southwest Airlines, Duke Energy, Venture Global, and Tesla all used depreciation tax breaks to substantially reduce current income tax expense, as did several dozen other companies on this list. (Many other companies on the list likely used depreciation tax breaks but did not separately disclose them.) The 88 companies collectively reported reducing their income taxes by $11.4 billion in 2025 through accelerated depreciation.