The ‘Total tax contribution study for UK legal and accounting activities’ report from TheCityUK found the UK’s legal and accounting firms made a total tax contribution of £19.1bn in 2018, up 6.8% from 2016 for those studied.
This is equivalent to over half the total UK Transport budget. For every £100 of turnover, UK legal and accounting firms pay £38.40 in taxes.
The report also found that the two sectors’ overall growth has outpaced wider UK economic growth in every year since 2010, with legal and accounting Gross Value Added (GVA) growing by 58% compared to 35% for wider UK GVA. This has resulted in the industry making up a greater proportion of the total UK economy in terms of GVA, up from 2.4% in 2010 to 2.7% in 2018.
In total, 743,000 people are employed by the UK’s legal and accounting sectors, representing 2.4% of the total UK workforce. EU statistics show that the UK has the largest number of people working in the legal and accounting sector of any EU country, with employees in the UK representing 23.5% of the total number of legal and accounting employees in the EU.
