Apple will pay $38 billion in tax and repatriate about $250 billion

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Apple announced a new set of investments to support the American economy and its workforce, concentrated in three areas where Apple has had the greatest impact on job creation: direct employment by Apple, spending and investment with Apple’s domestic suppliers and manufacturers, and fueling the fast-growing app economy which Apple created with iPhone and the App Store. Apple is already responsible for creating and supporting over 2 million jobs across the USA.

The US has allowed companies to defer paying taxes on foreign profits until those profits were repatriated. US companies accumulated a total of around $2.8 trillion in overseas holdings according to Audit Analytics estimates. The new Trump tax plan passed in 2017 has a one-time 15.5 percent tax on all of a company’s overseas cash.

Microsoft may pay $11.7 billion, Cisco Systems $6.2 billion, IBM $6.1 billion, and Google parent Alphabet $5.2 billion.

Combining new investments and Apple’s current pace of spending with domestic suppliers and manufacturers — an estimated $55 billion for 2018 — Apple’s direct contribution to the US economy will be more than $350 billion over the next five years, not including Apple’s ongoing tax payments, the tax revenues generated from employees’ wages and the sale of Apple products.

Apple, already the largest US taxpayer, anticipates repatriation tax payments of approximately $38 billion as required by recent changes to the tax law. A payment of that size would likely be the largest of its kind ever made.