LONDON — King Charles III on Thursday became the first reigning British monarch to disclose his personal tax bill, breaking with a centuries-old tradition of royal financial privacy.
The gesture of transparency was part of an effort by Buckingham Palace to contain fallout from damaging revelations about the finances of the king’s disgraced and demoted brother, the former Prince Andrew, now simply Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.
Monarchs, generally speaking, are known for collecting taxes, not paying them, and Charles’s unusual role reversal seemed to raise as many questions as it answered, if not more.
Charles voluntarily paid more than 30 million pounds (about $40 million) since assuming the throne in 2022, the palace said in a brief report — including 11.7 million pounds ($15.4 million) in 2023-24 and 12.9 million pounds ($17 million) in 2024-25.
The report did not detail how much income those payments were based on, nor did it reveal new information about the king’s substantial, undisclosed personal holdings.
Without those details, it was unclear whether Charles’s tax payments were eye-popping or eye-rolling — a painful bite by the taxman, or pocket change from a fortune nobody’s allowed to see, effectively a rebate to the British public on centuries of financing for the monarchy. That financing was consolidated in 2012 into a payment mechanism known as the Sovereign Grant.
The royal family’s finances have long been a subject of fascination and arcane agreements with the British government and came under particular scrutiny after the death of Queen Elizabeth II in 2022.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s published tax return, by comparison, showed an income of 152,255 pounds ($200,000) and a tax bill of 54,718 pounds ($72,000) for 2023-24 — an effective rate of about 36 percent.
Whether Charles’s rate is higher, lower or about the same remains the king’s business alone. The average U.K. resident pays about £5,486 in personal income tax ($7,240).
But at the very least, experts said, the numbers revealed the tax bill of a very wealthy Briton.
“This is likely to put him amongst the very top of taxpayers,” said Craig Prescott, a constitutional expert at Royal Holloway, University of London. “It indicates that there is substantial income going towards the King.”
The disclosure included an accounting of the yearly Sovereign Grant, the taxpayer funding that covers the king’s official duties, which has swelled to 137.9 million pounds ($182 million) for the coming year — a temporary spike to finish a 369 million-pound ($487 million), 10-year renovation program at Buckingham Palace. After that, the government has signaled, the grant will come back down.
The palace also confirmed that Charles and his wife, Camilla, will not move back into Buckingham Palace once the renovations wrap up in 2027. Instead, the iconic residence will remain a working venue for royal functions and become more accessible to tourists.
The king, who has multiple palaces to choose from, is known when in central London to prefer the smaller and homier Clarence House.
Charles had no legal obligation to disclose his taxes, nor does he have to pay any in the first place.
The centuries-old Crown Exemption grants the monarch the mother of all deductions: no tax at all. But Queen Victoria volunteered, in 1842, to have her money “subjected to a similar burden” as everyone else’s.
And Charles’s mother, Elizabeth II — facing a backlash over the taxpayer expense of restoring the fire-damaged Windsor Castle — agreed in 1993 to pay tax on her private income, a practice Charles continued as Prince of Wales and now, for the first time with hard numbers attached, is continuing as king.
Most of the monarchs’ income comes from a chunk of their portfolio known as the Duchy of Lancaster, a sprawling, 44,748-acre estate of farmland, quarries and London office space passed down through royal generations. It paid the king 28.7 million pounds ($38 million) last year, though not all of that counts as taxable private income.
He is disclosing his personal tax information, palace officials said, in fulfillment of his pledge to make the monarchy a more transparent institution. The king is also trying to defuse public fury over multiple royal scandals, most notably those swirling around his brother.
Mountbatten-Windsor — stripped of his “prince” title and military honors after his ties to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein became impossible for the palace to ignore — has been the subject of a National Audit Office investigation into his sweetheart arrangements with the Crown Estate.
For more than two decades, he lived rent-free, give or take a token “peppercorn” payment, at Royal Lodge, a 30-room mansion on the Windsor estate, while reportedly earning private income by subletting estate cottages on the side.
Mountbatten-Windsor surrendered the Royal Lodge lease last October and vacated the property in April, relocating to another property on the Sandringham estate.
Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee has since opened its own inquiry into the broader pattern of royal property arrangements, and lawmakers have pressed for more clarity about what other family members are paying — or not paying — to live in Crown-owned homes.
The king may also be hoping to stem the erosion of public support for the monarchy. Backing for the institution has fallen to 55 percent, according to a recent Ipsos poll, the lowest level the pollster has recorded since it began tracking the question in 1993 and well below its long-term average of 71 percent.
The decline is sharpest among younger Britons: Just a third of 18-to-34-year-olds support the monarchy, with 45 percent saying they’d prefer that Britain become a republic.
Charles himself remains relatively popular — 60 percent approve of how he’s doing his job — suggesting the erosion could be aimed more at the institution’s finances and opacity than at the king personally.
The palace hopes the tax disclosures will show a king who is not simply living off the public coffers but paying into them as well, Prescott said.
“The concern has always been that they’re somehow always on the take, always on public money,” he said. “This at the very least shows that there is a substantial amount of money going the other way.”
The report also detailed just how busy the king was in the social and ceremonial side of his “soft-power” duties.
Their majesties undertook 708 separate engagements in 2025-26, an increase of more than 100 over the previous year. Together with the rest of the working royal family, they completed 2,273 engagements across Britain and overseas, while almost 97,000 guests attended 827 palace events. The report did not itemize the number of cucumber sandwiches served.
But those who want Charles to be the last British king were not appeased by the revelations about his tax bill.
“The royals can’t be allowed to self-declare their tax,” Graham Smith, the chief executive of Republic, an anti-monarchist group, said in a statement. “They’ll spin this as Charles being a huge taxpayer, but the question is, why is his income so high?”
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