Eli Lilly’s tax payments expose Ireland’s reliance on a few multinationals
Feb 28th 2026
Eli Lilly’s 2025 tax payments to Ireland, driven by blockbuster weight loss drugs and production in Kinsale, highlight how a small number of multinationals dominate Ireland’s corporate tax revenue and raise questions about economic resilience.
- Eli Lilly paid $6.6 billion in taxes to Ireland in 2025 and $3.3 billion to the United States the same year.
- Lilly reported $22.965 billion in Mounjaro revenue and $13.542 billion in Zepbound revenue in 2025, a combined $36.5 billion or 56 percent of its total revenue.
- Three multinationals, Apple, Microsoft and Eli Lilly, provided about 46 percent of Ireland’s corporation tax receipts, roughly €13 billion.
- Ireland’s corporate tax base is concentrated, with multinationals paying large shares that would be hard to replace by domestic firms alone.
- Revenue data show about 310,000 companies file tax returns in Ireland and fewer than 6 percent report profits over €500,000.
- A back-of-envelope calculation used in recent analysis suggests replacing €24 billion in multinational tax receipts would require hundreds of thousands of profitable small firms, underscoring the scale of the dependence.