- Over the past five years, the CEOs of the five largest U.S. companies made an average of $52 million annually, over 1,000 times more than a typical worker earns in a year.
- The five largest U.S. companies alone spent over $1 trillion in stock buybacks and dividends over the past five years, over five times more than they paid in federal taxes during that same period.
- If the five largest companies paid pre-TCJA corporate tax rates, they would have paid an additional $168 billion in taxes over the past five years, enough to pay for the entire federal public housing budget over this period four times over.
A new Oxfam analysis out today shows U.S. corporations in the S&P 500 spent three times more on stock buybacks and dividends in 2024— $1.572 trillion—than the estimated total income of the poorest 27 million U.S. households combined ($498 billion). Such payouts disproportionately enrich the wealthiest 1%, who own half of all stocks and mutual fund shares while the bottom 50% own just 1%. The CEOs of the five largest companies made an average of $52 million annually over the past five years—over 1,000 times more than the typical worker earned in 2024. Oxfam’s analysis comes as many of these same mega-corporations are enjoying a massive giveaway from the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act" (OBBBA), passed in July, which handed them nearly $1 trillion in new tax breaks.
“For years, the country’s largest corporations have been shoveling trillions into the pockets of already-wealthy shareholders, driving inequality between the very richest and the rest of us,” said Rebecca Riddell, Senior Policy Lead for Economic Justice at Oxfam America. “Now, it seems these trends are about to be turbocharged, with President Trump and Congress having just handed these same companies massive, unnecessary tax breaks, while taking away food benefits and healthcare from millions of ordinary people.”
Over the past five years, the five largest US companies spent over $1 trillion in stock buybacks and dividends, more than five times what they paid in federal taxes. Had they paid taxes according to the rates in place prior to the cuts in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) — which was unchanged by the OBBBA — those five corporations alone would have paid an additional $168 billion in taxes over the last five years, enough to cover the entire federal public housing budget during this period four times over.
The OBBBA was the latest step in a decades-long effort to tilt the tax code in favor of mega-corporations. In 2017, President Trump signed the TCJA into law, which, alongside other tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy, lowered the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% and provided a number of corporate tax breaks, depriving the U.S. of hundreds of billions in revenue. Although loopholes and deductions meant that many companies already paid an effective tax rate well below 35% pre-2017, the TCJA cut the average effective tax rates of large, profitable corporations nearly in half, from 22% to 12.8%. Rather than invest the significant tax savings from the TCJA in higher wages, corporations spent a large portion of them on shareholder payouts in the form of stock buybacks and dividends.
While the OBBBA increased taxes on the lowest-income households and cut Medicaid and food assistance, it both retained the historically low 21% corporate tax rate and extended a suite of expiring corporate tax breaks at a cost of $920 billion over the next decade.
Oxfam America calls on policymakers to make the tax code fairer and ensure large profitable corporations pay more in taxes. This means reversing the damage that the TCJA and OBBBA inflicted, including by ending harmful loopholes and reverting to a graduated corporate income tax that taxes the most profitable corporations at a rate of at least 35%.
Oxfam is a global organization that fights inequality to end poverty and injustice. We offer lifesaving support in times of crisis and advocate for economic justice, gender equality, and climate action. We demand equal rights and equal treatment so that everyone can thrive, not just survive. The future is equal. Join us at oxfamamerica.org.
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Notes to editors:
Data on stock buybacks comes from the S&P 500 and a review of public SEC filings for the five largest corporations by market capitalization as of May 30, 2025: Microsoft, NVIDIA, Apple, Amazon, and Alphabet (Google). We reviewed SEC filings for each company’s last five fiscal years, as of May 30, 2025. Not all fiscal years end on the same date.
Patrick Kennedy and co-authors found that the TCJA has had no effects on the annual earnings for workers in the bottom 90% of the within-firm distribution. They found that 51% of corporate output gains from tax cuts went to firm owners, 10% went to executives, 38% to high-paid workers, and 0% to low-paid workers.
A 2019 IMF working paper utilizing survey data and balance sheets of S&P 500 firms found that only about 20% of additional corporate income attributable to the TCJA has been used for capital and R&D spending, with much of the remainder being used for share buybacks and dividend payouts.
The total income for the bottom 20% was calculated by multiplying 2024 Census data on average household income for the bottom fifth of the income distribution by the number of households in the bottom 20%.
CEO pay was taken from public proxy statements and annual reports. Figures reflect amounts reported in companies’ summary compensation tables. Summary compensation tables estimate the value of option and stock awards at the time of grant, and do not account for changing values of awards in previous years. Accordingly, compensation reported in the summary table may diverge from actual compensation paid to a CEO in a given year, depending on how the value of previous awards fluctuated.
The “typical worker” is defined here as a worker with median earnings, using the Census Bureau’s most recent data (2024) on median earnings. The Census Bureau defines earnings as the “sum of wage and salary income and nonfarm and farm self-employment income (gross receipts minus expenses).” In 2024, the median worker — including part-time workers — earned $51,370.
To calculate additional taxes that would be paid under the previous corporate income tax rate schedule, we compared what companies would owe under pre-TCJA statutory rates with the federal taxes that companies disclosed paying in their public SEC filings. The pre-TCJA tax code taxed the first $50,000 in corporate income at 15%, the next $25,000 at 25%, the next $9.925 million at 34%, and income above $10 million at 35%. We considered taxable income to be a company’s reported U.S. domestic income, minus what they paid in state and local taxes. In cases where a company’s federal, state, and local taxes were not disaggregated, we estimated its value based on the state and local taxes disclosed in its effective tax rate reconciliation table.
Figures for the federal public housing budget come from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Congressional budget justifications for FY 2026 and previous years. Total budget authority for public housing from 2021 to 2025 was $42.3 billion.