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“KING Charles reveals he paid £12.9m in tax for 2024-25.”
So reported the BBC on Friday morning in a headline so obsequious to the monarchy that even the corporation’s top brass saw fit to change it.
Realistically, the Palace couldn’t have asked for more favourable coverage. It showcased a benevolence on the part of the King – and conveniently hid the fact that the royal family will in fact be taking ever more public money moving forward.
King Charles reveals he paid £12.9m in tax for 2024-25 https://t.co/gPUEobPMmI
— BBC News (UK) (@BBCNews) June 25, 2026
Because the big number from the news of the King’s finances is not the £12.9m he offered up, it is the £100m of public cash that the royal family will be given from next year.
The 2027/8 figure is roughly double the 2024/25 core sovereign grant, which was worth £51.8m. The bulk of that increase will come from the royals being given 20.5% of Crown Estate profits, up from 12%.
The BBC eventually realised this, and bosses edited that original headline. It now states: “King becomes first monarch to reveal tax bill as royal public funding to double to £100m.”
While it is refreshing to see the BBC accurately report the spiralling cost to the public purse of the monarchy, the headline remains misleading.
The King’s “tax bill” has not been revealed because it doesn’t exist.
As the “Keeper of the Privy Purse”, James Chalmers said: “The total amount of tax payable by His Majesty since accession to the throne is more than £30m – all of this, remember, on a voluntary basis.”
We have no calculations, no balance sheets, no transparency. We just have to take the word of a courtier that all is as it should be.
The King voluntarily gives a sum to the public purse, which is far outweighed by the sum the public purse gives him – and Chalmers implies we are the ones who should be grateful.
What’s more, as tax expert Dan Neidle points out: “The King gets to deduct official expenses – his own, and other members of the royal family.
“We can't reverse-out the calculation and estimate what the expenses were because we don't know how much of the £12.9m was income tax and how much was CGT [capital gains tax].
“It's odd they don't disclose the breakdown. If I was cynical, I'd say it's precisely to stop us estimating the expenses.
“But what are the deductible expenses? There are fairly stringent rules. Official stuff only. Are these rules followed? We don't know.”
He added: “I'd prefer to be more grown-up. Drop the pretence this is ‘tax’ (it isn't).”
The King has, for the first time, published a document setting how how much "tax" he pays. It's not actual tax - the Crown can't pay tax - but a funny kind of maybe-almost-not-really tax. A quick thread on what the document tells us (not much) and what it doesn't tell us… pic.twitter.com/7gl9UgMxNk
— Dan Neidle (@DanNeidle) June 25, 2026
OK. Let’s imagine, for the sake of argument, that this is a tax that the King is paying correctly. Why on earth should that be celebrated?
Paying his dues is exactly what the monarch should be doing. And his dues are far more than the £30m Charles is said to have paid since taking the throne.
In fact, that is just a fraction of the tax the King has avoided by not being held to the same laws as the rest of us.
If Charles had been subject to standard UK inheritance tax rules, for example, a conservative estimate suggests he could have owed around £152m.
That is not on the Crown Estate or the Duchy of Lancaster or other assets held in complicated semi-public systems, that is for the personal wealth he was reported to have directly inherited from his mother, Queen Elizabeth.
According to the US business magazine Forbes, the late Queen had personal assets worth around $500m (£380m) – including the privately owned Sandringham House and Balmoral Castle – when she left them to Charles.
Any normal UK citizen would face a 40% inheritance tax – about £152m – on that estate. Charles paid nothing.
So if the King has paid £30m into the public purse in three years, it will be another 12 before he even touches what he owes.
Even then, Charles would be light-years from what he would have paid as a normal person – but we will never know the true figure, because the accounts are hidden from us.
Next year, when the BBC gets around to writing its inevitable headline on the King’s supposed benevolence, “Monarch deigns to cosplay as taxpayer” may be a more accurate reflection of events.
