Corporations Make Up 5 Percent of Businesses but Earn 62 Percent of Revenues

By: Andrew Lundeen, Kyle Pomerleau

While there are significantly more pass-through entities than C corporations, corporations still earn the largest portion of total gross receipts. In 2011, corporations earned 62 percent of the $30.9 trillion in total business receipts. Meanwhile, pass-through businesses make up nearly 95 percent of all firms and account for the remaining 38 percent of gross receipts with $11.8 trillion.

It’s interesting to note, though, that despite earning $8 trillion less in total gross receipts, pass-throughs earned more net income (over $1.3 trillion) than corporations (over $800 billion) in 2011.

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About the Authors

Andrew Lundeen

Director of Federal Projects
Kyle Pomerleau Tax Foundation

Kyle Pomerleau

Resident Fellow, American Enterprise Institute

Kyle Pomerleau is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he studies federal tax policy.

Before joining AEI, Mr. Pomerleau was chief economist and vice president of economic analysis at the Tax Foundation, where he led the macroeconomic and tax modeling team and wrote on various tax policy topics, including corporate taxation, international tax policy, carbon taxation, and tax reform.