Warren Buffett on corporate tax: A patriotic duty to America

Warren Buffett is among the wealthiest persons in the world, with a net worth of almost $150 billion as of late August 2025, according to Forbes. He is also an astute observer of the tax code. Whether it be paying attention to taxes on options, dividends, or charitable contributions for shareholders, he’s well aware of how taxes can impact earnings.

President Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law in July 2025, and one of the important pieces of legislation was permanently setting the corporate income tax rate at 21%. During his first term in office in 2017, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was also signed into law, which lowered corporate taxes to a flat rate of 21% for 2018 from as high as 35% for 2017.

While the reduced corporate tax rate was intended to make American companies more competitive globally, some observers criticized it as benefiting wealthy shareholders more than American workers. At the same time, the lower tax rate would deprive the U.S. federal government of revenue that could be used to balance the national budget.

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Even though Buffett's holding company, Berkshire Hathaway, benefits from the permanent 21% tax rate, he isn’t alone in saying that it’s an American’s patriotic duty to pay taxes for the good of the country. Buffett and his longtime business partner, Charlie Munger (who died in 2024), shared the view that taxes helped to keep the country running and contribute to the welfare of the American people.

“When it comes to federal taxes, individuals who own Berkshire can unequivocally state, ‘I gave at the office,’” Buffett quipped in Berkshire’s 2022 annual report.

Here are the views Buffett has shared on corporate income taxes over the years, taken from his comments in annual reports starting in 1996. He will step down as CEO of Berkshire at the end of 2025.

Warren Buffett, photographed here in 2017, has more than 80 years of investing experieince, and he has said that it's his civic duty to pay taxes.

Daniel Zuchnik/Getty Images

How much tax does Berkshire Hathaway pay?

Berkshire Hathaway is a publicly traded company, and as an American corporation, it is subject to the U.S. tax code. It pays an annual corporate tax rate of 21% and is among the largest corporate taxpayers to the Internal Revenue Service, which collects tax revenue.

In 2024, Berkshire paid $26.8 billion in corporate income tax, which represented about 5% of all tax paid by corporate America, according to Buffett in Berkshire’s 2024 annual report. In addition, Buffett noted that the company — which also conducts business in other countries — also paid income tax to foreign governments and to 44 states. That’s a far cry from 1965, when Buffett took over Berkshire and the company paid no income tax.

What is Warren Buffett’s stance on paying corporate income tax?

Buffett is largely unwavering in his view on paying income taxes — that it’s an American’s civic duty to pay income taxes to help pay for the services provided by the U.S. government.

In Berkshire’s 1996 report, he mentioned President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 call to action to Americans, asking not what our country can do for us, but rather what we can do for our country. Buffett responded by mailing $860 million in income taxes to the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

He went on to write that if 2,000 other taxpayers paid an equal amount, “the U.S. would have had a balanced budget in 1996 without needing a dime of taxes — income or Social Security or what have you — from any other American. Berkshire shareholders can truly say, ‘I gave at the office.’ “

Prosperity in America

“Charlie and I believe that large tax payments by Berkshire are entirely fitting,” Buffett wrote. “The contribution we thus make to society's well-being is at most only proportional to its contribution to ours. Berkshire prospers in America as it would nowhere else.”

In 1997, Buffett continued that appreciation, saying that corporations making tax payments is far better for the country than the government supporting corporations or individuals financially.

“Writing checks to the IRS that include strings of zeros does not bother Charlie or me. Berkshire as a corporation, and we as individuals, have prospered in America as we would have in no other country. Indeed, if we lived in some other part of the world and completely escaped taxes, I’m sure we would be worse off financially (and in many other ways as well). Overall, we feel extraordinarily lucky to have been dealt a hand in life that enables us to write large checks to the government rather than one requiring the government to regularly write checks to us — say, because we are disabled or unemployed.”

How to ease Americans’ tax burden

In 2003, in response to criticism of his op-ed piece in The Washington Post that was critical of President Bush’s tax proposals, Buffett said that Berkshire was paying its fair share of corporate income tax — $3.3 billion on its 2003 income, a sum equaling 2.5% of the total income tax paid by all U.S. corporations in fiscal 2003 — and that other companies could do the same.

“Our payment will almost certainly place us among our country’s top ten taxpayers,” he wrote in the 2003 annual report. “Indeed, if only 540 taxpayers paid the amount Berkshire will pay, no other individual or corporation would have to pay anything to Uncle Sam. That’s right: 290 million Americans and all other businesses would not have to pay a dime in income, social security, excise or estate taxes to the federal government.”

Still, Buffett noted that revenue from corporate income tax was on the decline — a point that would play out in the years to come. Corporate income taxes in fiscal 2003 accounted for 7.4% of all federal tax receipts, down from a post-World War II peak of 32% in 1952, he wrote.

In the 2004 annual report, Buffett alluded to keeping all revenues from taxes to benefit America alone.

“As a rich ‘family’ awash in goods, Americans will argue through their legislators as to how [the] government should redistribute the national output — that is, who pays taxes and who receives governmental benefits. If ‘entitlement’ promises from an earlier day have to be reexamined, ‘family members’ will angrily debate among themselves as to who feels the pain. Maybe taxes will go up; maybe promises will be modified; maybe more internal debt will be issued. But when the fight is finished, all of the family’s huge pie remains available for its members, however it is divided. No slice must be sent abroad.”

Tax cuts boost Berkshire’s stock value

In the 2018 annual report, Buffett said that the reduced tax rate imposed by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017 made Berkshire’s businesses and the stocks it owned “considerably more valuable.”

Buffett likened the tax cut to the Treasury Department’s loss, but noted that it created an immediate transfer of wealth from the government to Berkshire, which had a 47% after-tax gain from its businesses in 2018 from 2017 when the tax rate was 35%.

“Consequently, our ‘A' and ‘B' shareholders received a major boost in the earnings attributable to their shares,” Buffett said. “This happening materially increased the intrinsic value of the Berkshire shares you and I own. The same dynamic, moreover, enhanced the intrinsic value of almost all of the stocks Berkshire holds.”

Still, in the 2022 annual report, Buffett remained firm on how paying corporate income taxes benefits America.

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Counting on the ‘American Tailwind’

“At Berkshire we hope and expect to pay much more in taxes during the next decade,” he wrote. “We owe the country no less: America’s dynamism has made a huge contribution to whatever success Berkshire has achieved — a contribution Berkshire will always need. We count on the American Tailwind and, though it has been becalmed from time to time, its propelling force has always returned.

“I have been investing for 80 years — more than one-third of our country’s lifetime. Despite

our citizens’ penchant — almost enthusiasm — for self-criticism and self-doubt, I have yet to see a time when it made sense to make a long-term bet against America. And I doubt very much that any reader of this letter will have a different experience in the future.”

Berkshire paid a large amount of corporate income tax in 2024, even though the tax rate was much lower than in 2017.

“Huge numbers can be hard to visualize,” Buffett wrote in the 2024 annual report. ”Let me recast the $26.8 billion that we paid last year [2024]. If Berkshire had sent the Treasury a $1 million check every 20 minutes throughout all of 2024 — visualize 366 days and nights because 2024 was a leap year — we still would have owed the federal government a significant sum at yearend. Indeed, it would be well into January before the Treasury would tell us that we could take a short breather, get some sleep, and prepare for our 2025 tax payments.”

How big is Berkshire Hathaway’s corporate income tax filing?

Buffett wrote in the 2002 annual report that its federal tax return for that year covered 8,905 pages for a total payment of $1.75 billion. By 2010, the filing rose to 14,097 pages, and then to 23,000 pages in 2013. In 2017, Berkshire filed a 32,700-page Federal income tax return and oversaw the filing of 3,935 state tax returns.