The UK has 90 taxes. Here they all are

A Jenga tower

90 UK taxes. On one chart.

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The UK has 90 taxes.1 This chart shows them all, and this article explains why we have so many.

Update 29 May 2026: the Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury responded to this article by pointing out that the Government had just abolished bingo duty, folded diverted profits tax into corporation tax, and ended the pseudo-tax shadow ACT.

The chart is interactive: click on a segment or category to drill down. The control underneath switches between pounds, % of GDP and % of all tax take.

Data is for 2024/25, and the full methodology is below.

It’s immediately clear how dependent we are on taxes on employment.2 The UK is pretty typical here – all OECD countries have a similar dependence on taxes on employment (excepting very small and/or oil/gas rich countries).

Those taxes, together with VAT and corporation tax make up about 3/4 of all tax revenue – which is why Labour’s decision to rule out increasing any of those taxes was so unfortunate, given they clearly intended to put up tax.

Note that there are only 81 taxes visible on the chart3; the other nine can’t be seen, because they don’t currently yield any revenue.4

The obvious question is: why do we need so many taxes?

Part of the answer is sensible. Different taxes do different jobs. We tax income, consumption, business profits, property, capital gains and environmental harms because we want to tax these different things differently. Some taxes are deliberately behavioural: we tax tobacco, alcohol, gambling, landfill and carbon emissions not just to raise revenue, but because we would like less smoking, drinking, gambling, dumping and emitting.

But that only explains some of the chart. The rest is politics. Governments create small targeted taxes because they sound painless: a levy on banks, a surcharge on banks, a duty on shares, another duty on shares, a levy on this sector, a charge on that activity. Each one had a speech and a press release. None had a repeal date.

So the UK tax system is not really a designed object. It is a very long-running game of Jenga, where each generation of politician carefully adds new taxes and new tweaks to the top of the pile, and rarely does anyone dare to touch the horrors lurking lower down.

Perhaps the oddest of the UK’s many tax oddities is bearer instrument duty (BID). It’s a tax on instruments that don’t exist any more, never applies in practice, and raises no revenue. It looked like BID was finally going to get the axe last year – but still it survives. If they can’t abolish this sorry historical relic, then there’s little prospect of any serious reform.

Nigel Lawson used to pride himself on abolishing one tax every year. Rachel Reeves would shock everyone if she did the same – but it probably wouldn’t cost one penny of tax revenue.

Methodology

The starting point for the chart is the Office for Budget Responsibility’s March 2026 forecast for 2024-25 “National Accounts taxes”: £1,013.286bn, or 34.536% of GDP. Our chart treats the £58.870bn of VAT refunds as reducing VAT, rather than (as the OBR National Accounts do) having a higher amount of VAT and then a deduction. So our total is £954.416bn compared to the National Accounts’ £1,013.286bn.

The GDP denominator is OBR nominal GDP for 2024-25: £2,934.021bn.

We use 2024-25 because it is the latest complete OBR outturn year with a full all-tax taxonomy. There are newer monthly figures from ONS and HMRC, but they are either provisional, cash-basis, or less convenient for a complete map of the tax system.

The underlying numbers are official, but there is no single official “right” way to group taxes. So the classification is ours, constructed to be helpful, and group taxes by the thing being taxed: employment, asset income, consumption, business profits, property, wealth, environmental externalities, and so on.

Income tax on dividends and savings interest is taken from HMRC’s Table 2.6 Income Tax liabilities by income source, scaled to the OBR income-tax total used in the chart. Income tax on rents is estimated from HMRC’s Table 3.7 property-income distribution by total-income band, applying broad 2024-25 non-savings income tax rates.

Some lines are awkward in a sunburst chart. Negative receipts, such as petroleum revenue tax repayments and some income-tax repayment lines, are netted into their parent totals rather than displayed as positive slices.

A few tax-like receipts, such as the TV licence fee, some regulatory levies, and visa charges are included because the OBR includes them in National Accounts taxes (they are “unrequited“). There are some surprising entries in that category – ATOL (the £2.50 compulsory, per-passenger fee paid by travel operators for flight-inclusive package holidays) was reclassified as a tax by the ONS in April 2012. Others (like passport fees) are not included because the OBR does not consider them taxes (they are “requited”). On the other hand, the ONS thinks that National Insurance is requited and therefore not a tax; we think that is unrealistic, given the extremely tenuous relationship between national insurance contributions and benefits. So we classify all National Insurance as tax.

Sources were:

The code that generated the chart is available on our GitHub, together with the underlying data.

Thanks to B for help with the data. Chart created using Apache ECharts, by the Apache Software Foundation and contributors (Apache-2.0).

Photo “Jenga work” by santibon, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0, modified by Tax Policy Associates.

Footnotes

  1. The first version of this article said 85. We apologise for the error. ↩︎
  2. i.e. income tax, National Insurance contributions and the apprenticeship levy. Employer NICs and the apprenticeship levy belong in this category because they are, economically, a tax on employment income. ↩︎
  3. We split income tax into its constituent elements – work, dividends, rent, investments, but count it as one tax in this total number. ↩︎
  4. There are two oddities: bearer instrument duty (a very old tax, these days probably never applied in practice) and the Electricity Generator Levy (essentially a regulatory fix, intended to never be applied). Then some taxes which are too new to yield revenue in 2024/25: CBAM, Vaping products duty, Extended producer responsibility fees, Building Safety Levy, Scottish aggregates tax, the International student levy, and multinational top-up tax. ↩︎

28 responses to “90 UK taxes. On one chart.”

  1. Robert Lee May 30, 2026 1:18 pm It winds me up that dividend tax doesn’t classify as tax paid on ‘work’ – sole limited company directors have to take a small salary (£7kpa) then pay themselves the remainder as dividends or else their company (which is effectively them) ends up paying a disproportionate amount of tax compared to those on PAYE or self employed… (15% employers NI on everything over £5k pa). Labour lied as they have put tax up on working people as dividend tax went up by 2% in April… Company directors often work harder than most ‘working people’ but are lumped in with investors because no one can be bothered to amend the system! Reply
  2. David Milne KC May 29, 2026 5:02 pm Amongst the things that “youngsters” who complain about today’s tax burden weren’t around to remember is that during the dark days of Edward Heath 🤣,the top rate of income tax was 98% , which rate was reached on an income of just under £10k- not an enormous income even then- and the exchange control regime only allowed you to take £50 out of the country ( a regime which gave birth to the package holiday)++ there were lots of pay regulations which limited pay rises to try to curb inflation. Just saying! Reply Dan Neidle May 29, 2026 5:13 pm I had no idea that was the cause of the package holiday! Need to do some research… Reply
  3. Richard McDonald May 29, 2026 3:10 pm 0.85% of the world population but more than 13% of the world’s accountants, sort of sums up the UK and its overly complex tax system. Reply
  4. Michael Bruce May 29, 2026 1:49 pm It’s a Baroque edifice built by the Treasury that needs a regular pruning but clearly isn’t getting it.
    I suspect that it’s the administrative complexity and the impact on business draws the attention but you rarely read any analysis of the macroeconomic impact which might well have a greater impact.
    Is there any country that does taxation well? Reply Dan Neidle May 29, 2026 2:52 pm writing on that soon! Reply
  5. Nicholas Coulson May 29, 2026 11:42 am Fascinating breakdown. I may have missed the explanation, but I’m puzzled by the absence of any reference to CGT. Reply Dan Neidle May 29, 2026 12:34 pm it is there! One of the segments off “Wealth” Reply
  6. mark lee May 29, 2026 10:22 am Superb list. Earlier this year the Tax Advice Network referenced just 36 taxes administered by HMRC. I suspect that their list (that I helped compile) was incomplete but how many of the 90 taxes you have identified do you think are administrated by HMRC? Reply
  7. Charles Levett-Scrivener May 29, 2026 10:18 am Did you include Riparian Rates payable by some farmers in East Anglia to the Environment Agency? This is different to payments to internal Drainage Boards. Reply
  8. Nick Barnes May 29, 2026 9:55 am You appear to have two items labelled “Non-residential SDLT” Reply Alec Burrett May 30, 2026 5:02 pm Are you confusing Non-residential SDLT and Non-resident SDLT by any change? I know I had to do a double take when I first saw it. Reply
  9. Alec Burrett May 29, 2026 1:33 am You mentioned that bearer instrument duty (BID) survived the chop and remains a tax, despite being a tax on a thing that functional can be treated as no longer existing. However, you failed to mention that the lovely tax lady decided to abolish Bingo Duty from the current tax year onwards. I am afraid marks are going to have to be deducted for suggesting Ms Reeves isn’t going to preen the number of taxes by this admission. Reply
  10. Edward Barrow May 28, 2026 3:48 pm Very interesting and an excellent graphic. It does, however, show only one side of the system’s complexity – there’s almost certainly much more complexity along the ‘jaffa cake line’ for each of the big taxes, between what’s taxable and what’s not. The most fertile ground for tax professionals… Reply
  11. Will Ross May 28, 2026 2:47 pm Was EGL really just a fig leaf, never to be implemented? Whilst the threshold is obviously far too high, surely the principle is robust, it will actually deliver revenues and could be tweaked to address our uncompetitive electricity prices through rebates. If it were hypothecated to electricity rebates, would you still count it as a tax, or would it just be a pricing mechanism? Reply
  12. Graeme Coles-Andrew May 28, 2026 1:01 pm Fascinating chart. Lighthouse dues! Note that passport fees are indeed included on it. Reply
  13. Sophia Hampton May 28, 2026 11:53 am Is the business improvement district levy included in the ‘other small taxes’ section? Reply
  14. Gary Bandy May 28, 2026 11:50 am Your numbers are confusing. You say there are 85 taxes in the opening sentence, but if 81 are on the chart and 8 aren’t then the total is 89. Or perhaps there are only 77 on the chart and not 81. Or is this all to do with footnote 2 treating one tax as four? Reply Dan Neidle May 28, 2026 2:20 pm I think it now adds up! Reply
  15. jonathan West May 28, 2026 10:10 am And yet it seems we are to get another levy in the form of the S&S ISA interest levy – just so the interest does not count towards the exempted interest income allowance. Reply
  16. Anthony Dell May 28, 2026 9:54 am Another terrific article. Compared to Hong Kong, Singapore, or even Estonia, the UK tax system is far too complex and is evidently destructive to business and growth. Ever growing benefits and debt are also a huge concern for the economy. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a government with the courage and vision to start fixing the issues. Reply
  17. Mr. justin clayton May 28, 2026 9:13 am ‘Income tax on work’? What about Income tax on Pensions? I can see “savings income tax”, but does that just cover interest. Reply David Cairns May 28, 2026 11:51 am Good question. The OBR/HMRC data imply that the ‘income from work’ includes all income that it is captured through the PAYE system which includes, therefore, income tax on pensions from former employers and SIPPs. As state pensions in 2024/25 were lower than personal allowance no tax would have been payable on them on the assumption that they are treated as the first tranche of income (as they usually are for PAYE purposes). It is unclear how the tax reliefs (top ups) on pension contributions are dealt with.
    There are probably similar quirks in other parts of the data but, in my view, they do not detract from the the important messages in the table. Reply Sean Humphrey May 28, 2026 12:17 pm Pension is an income Reply Pikolo May 28, 2026 1:00 pm Pensions are (intended as) a way of deferring tax on work. A small fraction of pension taxation will go through Wealth – Inheritance tax Reply
  18. John Barnett May 28, 2026 9:10 am Would it be possible to have a % of total tax receipts as well as a % of GDP on the slider? Reply
  19. Neil Fletcher May 28, 2026 9:08 am I cannot see if you included a massive administrative burden Multinational Top-up Tax? Reply Dan Neidle May 28, 2026 10:27 am there wasn’t any in 2024/25 but I should mention in the footnotes Reply

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