Countries With the Highest Corporate Tax Rates (2025)

Data

Note: How Corporate Tax Rates Really Work

What is a statutory corporate tax rate?

The corporate income tax is the tax a government levies on the profits of companies. The headline figure shown in this chart is the statutory rate, sometimes called the top marginal rate: the percentage written into law for the highest bracket of business profits. It is the number used in negotiations, in news headlines, and in decisions about where to incorporate. It is not necessarily the number a company actually pays, though - real-world tax bills depend on deductions, credits, incentives, and how profits are routed across borders.

Why the world's highest rates are where they are

• Narrow tax bases: Comoros, Chad, Sudan, Cameroon and Mozambique have limited payroll, property and consumption tax systems, so corporate tax does a lot of the revenue-raising work - and top rates stay in the 32-50% range.
• Small and island economies: Puerto Rico, Sint Maarten, American Samoa, Cuba and Saint Kitts and Nevis lean on corporate tax, import duties and consumption taxes rather than broad personal income tax bases.
• Resource economies: Suriname and Venezuela earn much of their income from oil, gas and mining. High headline rates often sit alongside special regimes for extractive industries.
• Debt and deficit pressure: France raised its top rate from 25.83% to 36.13% in 2025 through a temporary surtax on large companies - a fiscal repair measure, not a permanent redesign of the tax system.
• Regional averages: the worldwide average statutory rate is 23.58% across 181 jurisdictions (26.04% when weighted by GDP). South America averages the highest at 28.38%, Asia the lowest at 19.74%.
• A long decline: in 1980 the unweighted worldwide average rate was 40.18%. It has fallen for four decades as countries competed for investment, and the slide has levelled off only recently.

Statutory vs effective rates

The statutory rate is only a starting point. A company's effective rate - the tax actually paid divided by profit - is usually lower, because businesses can deduct interest, depreciation, research spending and past losses, and can claim targeted incentives. Two countries can share a 35% headline rate while collecting wildly different amounts. Some low-rate jurisdictions go further: Malta's headline rate is 35%, but its refund system can reduce the effective burden to around 5% for many foreign-owned companies, which is why it appears both on lists of "highest rates" and on lists of the world's most attractive tax regimes. Germany's 30.06% combines the federal rate with the municipal trade tax, so the number a company faces depends on which city it operates in.

The 15% global minimum tax

• Under the OECD/G20 Pillar Two agreement, large multinational groups - broadly those with annual revenue above EUR 750 million - face a 15% minimum effective tax rate on their profits, wherever they operate.
• Countries implement it mainly through three mechanisms: the Income Inclusion Rule (IIR), the Undertaxed Profits Rule (UTPR), and the Qualified Domestic Minimum Top-up Tax (QDMTT), which lets a country itself claw back the difference up to 15%.
• By 2025, 29 countries had adopted all three rules, while others had adopted only one or two.
• Fifteen jurisdictions levy no corporate income tax at all. Six of them - Bahrain, Bermuda, Guernsey, the Isle of Man, Jersey and the Bahamas - now apply the QDMTT, effectively lifting the tax on large groups to 15% even without a general corporate tax.
• A handful of very low-rate countries, including Ireland, Hungary and Barbados, kept their 9-12.5% headline rates but apply the top-up so that big multinationals still reach 15%.

How to read this chart

• The chart ranks jurisdictions by their top statutory corporate rate in 2025; it is not a ranking of how much tax companies actually pay.
• Ties are common: six jurisdictions share 35% and five share 34%, so small differences in design can change the order.
• Several entries are territories rather than sovereign countries - Puerto Rico and American Samoa are U.S. territories, and Sint Maarten is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands - but each sets its own corporate tax.
• Missing from the top of the chart by design: the United States, whose combined federal and state rate sits a little above 25%, and Japan at around 30%.
• A high headline rate is not automatically bad for business: research consistently finds that what investors weigh is the effective burden plus legal certainty, infrastructure, and market access.

Fun facts

• In 1980, the GDP-weighted global average corporate rate was 46.66% - nearly double today's 26.04%.
• Europe cut the hardest: its average fell from 44.6% in 1980 to 20.65% in 2025.
• Thirteen countries changed their corporate tax rates in 2025 alone - eight raised them and five, including Iceland and Luxembourg, cut them.
• Even with 15 jurisdictions charging zero corporate tax, most of them now collect something from large multinationals thanks to the global minimum rules.

Tip: when comparing tax regimes, look at the statutory rate, the effective rate, and whether the country has signed on to the 15% global minimum - a 9% headline rate means little for a large group if a top-up tax follows it.