Patent box
special low corporate tax regime on intangible assets
A patent box is a special very low corporate tax regime used by several countries to incentivise research and development by taxing patent revenues differently from other commercial revenues. It is also known as intellectual property box regime, innovation box or IP box. Patent boxes have also been used as base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) tools, to avoid corporate taxes.
History
In the early 1970s Ireland introduced the first scheme in its Corporation Tax. Section 34 of the 1973 Finance Act allowed total tax relief in respect of royalties and other income from licenses patented in Ireland.
The concept was applied in 2001 by the French Tax Authorities as a reduced rate of tax on revenue from IP licensing or the transfer of qualified IP. Within Europe, Belgium, Hungary, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom have also introduced similar schemes.
In the United States, Patent Box legislation has been introduced by Congress several times since 2007 but has not been enacted. In July 2015, Reps. Charles Boustany, R-La., and Richard Neal, D-Mass., introduced a discussion draft of the Innovation Promotion Act of 2015. Citing pressures introduced by the current economic climate, this act again aims to introduce a patent box to the Internal Revenue Code.
The public source identifies “Patent box” as special low corporate tax regime on intangible assets. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Patent, special and corporate.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q17020202. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1973, 2001, 2007 and 2015.
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This entry incorporates text from “Patent box” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.