Now we know how much tax King Charles pays, and it is very little

The monarch is not liable for tax, but the king and his mother before him started paying it voluntarily in 1993. Photograph: Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty Images View image in fullscreen The monarch is not liable for tax, but the king and his mother before him started paying it voluntarily in 1993. Photograph: Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty Images Analysis Now we know how much tax King Charles pays, and it is very little Juliette Garside The monarch’s declaration doesn’t tell us much, except that his bill is lower than for people with much smaller fortunes The veil of secrecy that surrounds the royal finances was nudged aside a little on Thursday to allow the release of a new piece of information. We learned for the first time how much the king’s annual tax bill comes to. This was not a full tax return. It was a two-sentence declaration, stating his tax payable amounted to £12.9m in 2024-25, and a slightly smaller sum the year before. His total tax payable since accession comes to £30m. It has been a long time coming. Unlike other citizens, the monarch is not liable for tax, but the king and his mother before him started paying it voluntarily in 1993. The declaration was short on detail. We don’t know what his total income was for those years. We don’t know the total value of his private fortune. And we have no idea how much his tax bill was reduced by for expenses such as those incurred performing royal duties. The small nugget of new information has brought to light one startling fact though. The king’s tax bill is low, even when compared with those who have smaller fortunes. Thanks to painstaking investigations by the Guardian, in its 2023 cost of the crown series , the king’s private wealth, known as the privy purse, is estimated to be at least £1.8bn. This includes the Duchy of Lancaster estate – a £690m land and property portfolio handed from one monarch to the next and which provides him with income of £25m a year; and an even larger pile of other assets, such as cars, jewels, art and the private residences of Balmoral and Sandringham. We have very little idea how much the king holds in financial investments, or what the revenues from these are. The tax the king pays covers all of the privy purse, all £1.8bn or more of assets. Because we don’t know the the total income, we are not able to check what the king’s effective tax rate is, but comparisons with other taxpayers raise questions. The king, his billions, and the first public royal tax bill – The Latest Read more A scan of this year’s Sunday Times tax list shows that the hedge fund boss Suneil Setiya, also estimated to be worth £1.8bn, paid £114m in annual tax. This is ten times the sum the king paid in 2023-24. The musician Ed Sheeran, whose fortune at £410m is a fraction of the king’s, paid £20m to HMRC. The author JK Rowling, worth an estimated £975m, was billed £47m on her earnings and gains. Even the Manchester City footballer Erling Haaland, who is Norwegian, pays more than the king – his mos