Amazon’s UK tax bill up on previous year as revenues widen

Amazon has revealed it paid £932 million in direct taxes in the UK last year, some £150 million more than the prior year.

The online marketplace, which is one of the country’s biggest employers, earned about £27 billion in total UK revenues in 2023, up from £23 billion in 2022.

The direct taxes the firm must pay includes corporation tax, business rates, and digital services tax.

The total bill came to £932 million over 2023, a jump from the £781 million paid the year before.

Amazon said its total tax contribution makes it among the top 10 largest taxpayers in the UK.

Furthermore, the total amount of tax Amazon collected, such as VAT, which customers pay on products they buy, or the national insurance contributions of its staff, came to £3.4 billion last year.

This bring its total bill to about £4.3 billion, up from the £3.6 billion paid last year.

Amazon is among the top 10 largest private sector employers in the UK, with more than 75,000 staff across the country.

Meanwhile, separate figures for Amazon UK Services – which supports operations such as through investing in warehouses – show the business paid £18.7 million in tax last year, with revenues amounting to £6.9 billion.

A spokeswoman for Amazon said: “As we continue to invest in our UK operations and workforce, we help fund public services and vital infrastructure, and create jobs throughout the country.”

The group invested more than £12 billion in the UK last year such as through building warehouses and offices, it said.

Last week, Amazon said all its staff would return to the office five days a week from January, in a bid to return to its pre-Covid structure.

It also said it wanted to cut down the number of managers across the group in order to reduce layers of bureaucracy.