The EU considers widening its CORE company levy so Apple and other big firms pay more, the FT reportsThe EU considers widening its CORE company levy so Apple and other big firms pay more, the FT reports

The European Commission is considering changes to CORE, its proposed annual levy on large companies, so that it raises more money from US technology firms including Apple, the Financial Times reported on 7 October.

The FT cited six officials with knowledge of the discussions, according to Reuters, which carried the report with a statement of its own from the Commission. This is a proposal under discussion, not law and not yet a formal amendment. Apple, Google and Meta did not immediately respond to Reuters, and no figure specific to Apple has been published.

What is CORE?

CORE, short for Corporate Resource for Europe, is one of five new sources of revenue the Commission proposed in July 2025 for the EU's 2028 to 2034 budget, which is meant in part to repay the money the EU borrowed for its NextGenerationEU recovery fund. Under the proposal, COM(2025) 574, every company resident in the EU, and every EU branch of a foreign company, with annual net turnover above EUR 100 million pays a fixed yearly contribution. The Commission expects it to raise around EUR 6.8 billion a year on average.

That top band is the problem the FT describes. A company of Apple's size pays the same EUR 750,000 as a firm one thousandth of its size, which Reuters says captures only a small portion of a multinational's earnings. Meanwhile medium-sized European businesses have complained that CORE hits them disproportionately.

What is the Commission said to be considering?

According to the FT, as 9to5Mac and Reuters relay it, officials are looking at adjusting the thresholds and amounts so the levy falls mainly on very large companies. It would apply to all big corporations rather than only to sellers of digital services. That matters because a tax aimed at digital services is what drew threats of retaliation from the United States: Reuters says President Trump threatened in June a 100 per cent tariff on goods from any country taxing US technology companies' digital services. One official told the FT that the answer was to cover pretty much all the big companies. No new thresholds or rates have been set, and the plan is to agree the principle among the 27 member states first.

A Commission spokesperson told Reuters only that it stands ready to help the Council and Parliament agree the new revenue package.

Our take

For Apple this would be small money with a large symbolic weight. Even a levy many times the current EUR 750,000 cap would be a rounding error against Apple's European revenue. What changes is the principle: the EU would be taxing large companies by size at the level of the Union, rather than leaving each member state to tax profits it has historically struggled to pin down. That is a quieter version of the fight Apple lost over its Irish tax arrangements.

It also fits a pattern in how Brussels deals with Apple. The FT counted 257 meetings between Apple and EU policymakers since mid-2024, second only to Google, and much of that attention has been on rules written to reach a handful of US companies without naming them. A levy designed to land on Apple, Google and Meta while technically covering every large company is the same approach applied to tax.

The obstacle is unanimity. A change to how the EU raises its own revenue needs every member state to agree and then ratify it, and the FT's own source says many capitals already oppose CORE. APPDOOK's reading is that this will be slow, contested and possibly abandoned, and that nothing here should change what Apple charges European customers in the near term. The thing to watch is whether a revised CORE emerges with tiers above EUR 750,000, because that is the point at which it stops being a fee and becomes a tax on size.