In the 2023–24 financial year, one company reported close to $20 billion of income in Australia — and paid zero company tax. That company, the meat-processing giant JBS, wasn't breaking any rules. It simply topped a list of 1,136 large companies that paid no income tax at all that year. Here's how that happens — and why it's mostly not the scandal the headline suggests.
The headline number
Every year the Australian Taxation Office publishes its Corporate Tax Transparency report — a public list of what Australia's biggest companies earned and what they paid. The latest report, covering 2023–24, includes 4,110 corporate entities, each with $100 million or more in total income.
Of those 4,110 companies, 1,136 — about 28% — paid no income tax at all. More than one in four of the country's largest companies handed the ATO nothing.
Put like that, it sounds alarming. But there's important context: 28% is the lowest share of non-taxpaying companies since the report began in 2013–14, when the figure was 36%. It was 31% just the year before. The trend, slowly, is heading the right way.
So how is that legal?
The key to the whole thing is one fact that's easy to forget: company tax is paid on profit, not revenue.
Australia's company tax rate is 30% for large companies — but that 30% applies to taxable income, which is what's left after a business subtracts its costs, losses and deductions. A company can take billions of dollars through the front door and still, quite legitimately, have little or no taxable profit at the end. The ATO itself points to three main reasons a large company pays no tax:
- It made a loss this year. If expenses exceeded income, there's no profit to tax. High-turnover, low-margin industries — supermarkets, fuel retailers, meat processors — can move enormous amounts of money on razor-thin margins.
- It's using losses from earlier years. Tax losses can be carried forward. A company that lost money heavily in one year can offset those losses against profits in later years until they run out — paying no tax in the meantime.
- It claimed offsets and deductions. Legitimate deductions — including the research and development tax incentive and depreciation on big infrastructure — can reduce taxable income all the way to zero.
None of these is a loophole. They are core features of how income tax works — for companies and individuals alike. JBS sits squarely in that first category: meat processing is a famously high-revenue, thin-margin business, and JBS has appeared at or near the top of the no-tax list for several years running.
The big names that paid nothing
JBS is far from alone, and the list includes household names. Among the large companies reported as paying no Australian income tax in 2023–24 were the telco Optus, Virgin Australia, biotech giant CSL, Domino's, internet provider TPG and toll-road operator Transurban.
Seeing names like these can feel like proof that something's wrong. Usually it isn't. Domino's, for instance, reported around $700 million of income but has been losing money heavily overseas — its struggles in Japan and France pushed it to close more than 300 stores worldwide. Virgin Australia collapsed into voluntary administration in 2020; a company that has been through that emerges with years of accumulated losses to work through before it pays tax again. Transurban pours billions into building toll roads, and the depreciation and interest on that kind of infrastructure is a genuine, deductible cost.
A single year of zero tax, on its own, tells you very little. It's a snapshot, not a verdict.
When it isn't so innocent
That said, not every zero on the list is innocent — and the transparency report exists precisely because some of it isn't.
The harder cases are large multinationals that shift profits offshore: booking income, royalties or interest payments in lower-tax countries so that very little taxable profit is left in Australia at all. The ATO runs a dedicated Tax Avoidance Taskforce aimed squarely at this behaviour, and it has clawed back billions from multinationals in recent years. Publishing the numbers each year is part of the pressure — aggressive tax structuring is much harder to hide when the figures are public.
The point of the report isn't to brand every non-payer a villain. It's to let the public tell the difference between a company that genuinely made no profit and one that engineered that result.
The bigger picture
Step back from the zeros and the overall picture is the opposite of a system in collapse. Those same 4,110 companies paid a combined $95.7 billion in income tax for 2023–24 — the second-highest total on record.
The load is heavily concentrated. The mining, energy and water sector alone paid $48.5 billion — just over half of all corporate tax collected. And oil and gas companies, long criticised for paying little, paid $10.4 billion as the vast carried-forward losses from building their gas projects finally ran dry. Several started paying Australian company tax for the first time.
So the headline "1,136 companies paid no tax" is true — but it sits alongside another true headline: large companies paid more tax in 2023–24 than in almost any year in history.
What it means for you
For an ordinary taxpayer, the contrast can sting. Your income tax is deducted from your pay before you ever see it, every single payday. A company is taxed only on what's left after its costs — and it can carry a bad year forward to soften the next one.
The rules genuinely are different, because a wage and a business profit are different things. But individuals aren't shut out of the same logic entirely. If you run a small business or earn investment income, you can carry forward your own tax losses, and capital losses can be banked against future capital gains. The principle — tax follows profit, and losses can be carried forward — runs right through the system, from the biggest miner to the smallest sole trader.