Amazon’s main UK arm handed £7.6m tax credit as profits soar to £355m

Amazon’s main division in the UK was handed a £7.6m tax credit last year by HM Revenue and Customs, despite profits at the retail-to-streaming company surging by more than a quarter to £355m.

Amazon UK Services – which employs 66,000 staff, the vast majority of its 75,000 employees in Britain – said it owed £9.1m in “current tax” last year.

However, this figure, which is understood to be largely corporation tax, was reduced by £16.7m due to “adjustments in respect of previous periods”, leaving Amazon with the £7.6m credit for 2025.

The £16.7m adjustment relates to relief offered under a government programme that rewards investment in UK infrastructure. Amazon UK spent £5.2bn building and expanding fulfilment centres, corporate offices, machinery, equipment and datacentres last year.

The division, the parent of the company’s sprawling online shopping, warehouse and logistics operation across Britain, enjoyed a bumper year of trading in 2025. It reportied a 26.5% rise in pre-tax profits to £355m and a healthy 11% year-on-year increase in revenues to £8.2bn.

A spokesperson for the tech company said: “Amazon UK Services is only one part of our business operations in the UK. Over the past year, we have delivered on our £40bn investment plan.

“We opened a new fulfilment centre in Hull, developed a state-of-the-art site in Northampton, and expanded our footprint in London and Swansea, while continuing to grow our delivery and datacentre network, creating thousands of jobs across the country.”

Amazon reports financial results for 20 businesses registered at Companies House in the UK. Filings submitted by Amazon US show that in total the company generated about £32bn in revenues across all of its operations in Britain.

Half of these revenues come from five divisions: Amazon UK Services; the company’s streaming service, Prime Video; online advertising operations; its datacentre business; and its buyer-seller payment processing arm.

Filings at Companies House for these five arms show that combined pre-tax profits leapt from £455m in 2024 to £555m last year, according to an analysis by the Fair Tax Foundation (FTF), while the total current tax bill halved from £126m to £63m.

However, not all this money went to the UK exchequer, because a significant proportion related to revenues generated by these operations from business outside the UK.

The FTF analysis calculated that the actual combined UK corporation tax bill paid by Amazon’s big five operationswas just £39m last year.

“In the UK, Amazon enjoyed a great year when it comes to paying low or little corporate income tax on its profits,” said the FTF chief executive, Paul Monaghan. “It equates to a tax rate of just 7.1%. How on earth can other retailers compete with hard-wired systematic tax avoidance such as this?”

Amazon UK said that across its entire business it is one of the biggest taxpayers in the country. Last month it issued a press release saying that it paid more than £1.3bn in UK taxes of all kinds last year.