Facebook UK pays £29m corporation tax despite record £3.3bn sales
Facebook’s UK operations paid £29m in corporation tax last year despite reporting a record £3.3bn in sales, while its average staff pay rose to £262,000.
The social media company’s latest accounts for its London-based arm showed gross income from advertisers surged by more than 37% last year from £2.4bn to £3.3bn.
Its parent company, Meta, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, is the second-largest player in the UK digital advertising market, after Google.
The Companies House filing for Facebook UK, which describes itself as a provider of sales support, marketing services and engineering support to the Meta group, reported £229.5m in pre-tax profits last year. This was up more than a fifth on the £190m the company made in 2020.
The company paid £29.8m in UK corporation tax last year, down on the £36.7m it paid the year before. Facebook said it spent £1.8bn on sales support, marketing services and engineering support services.
Facebook UK’s tax charge was £69.7m last year, however deductions including a tax credit of more than £32m meant the company paid far less.
“Over the last year we’ve continued to invest in the UK, including opening a new office campus in King’s Cross [in London],” said a spokesperson for Meta. “While we paid $8.52bn [£7.65bn] in corporation tax globally last year, and our average effective tax rate over the last decade was around 20%, under current rules the vast majority of this is paid in the US.”
While Meta is now considering job cuts amid a slowdown in growth among big tech companies, its UK operation was on a hiring spree last year.
Its workforce grew 37% from 3,745 to 5,148 employees as the operation agreed leases on two new office sites, and extended an existing lease in London.
As a result,
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