Amazon has made $11.2B in profits in 2018 but will pay no federal income tax and will receive a rebate of $129M due to unspecified tax credits
Amazon, the ubiquitous purveyor of two-day delivery of just about everything, nearly doubled its profits to $11.2 billion in 2018 from $5.6 billion …
Context & Ripple Effects
ITEP's finding that Amazon doubled profits to $11.2B in 2018 while owing nothing federally — and collecting a $129M rebate — became the reference point for how Amazon's tax filings get read. The very next year's numbers flipped the script: Amazon reported $1B+ in federal income tax expense, plus $2.4B+ in other federal taxes, $1.6B+ in state and local taxes, and roughly $9B in sales taxes collected.
The pattern didn't hold. By 2025, per Politico's coverage, Amazon's annual tax bill had fallen 87% year over year to $1.2B even as profits grew 45% to roughly $90B — this time attributed mostly to the GOP's depreciation breaks in the One Big Beautiful Bill. The 2018 zero-tax year was not an endpoint but an early data point in a rate that swings with whatever credits and breaks are on the books.
First-order effects
- Amazon enters 2019 with a net-negative federal income tax position — a $129M rebate on $11.2B of profit — making it the immediate target for tax-scrutiny groups like ITEP and for politicians using it as the emblem of corporate tax avoidance.
Second-order effects
- The report sets the baseline every subsequent filing is measured against: when Amazon's 2019 returns showed $1B+ in federal income tax expense alongside billions in other federal, state, local, and collected sales taxes, the coverage framed it explicitly as a reversal of the zero-tax year rather than routine reporting.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, large companies' effective federal tax rates are governed less by profit levels than by the current menu of credits and depreciation breaks — Amazon went from $0 owed in 2018, to paying in 2019, back to a bill cut 87% in 2025 on far larger profits, all without its underlying business model changing.
The trend: For mega-cap tech, the effective federal tax rate has become a policy variable that swings with each round of credits and depreciation breaks, decoupled from reported profit growth.