What does 12 Nights at Wembley mean for Tax? A Hypothetical Illustration

Using a famous artist as a purely hypothetical case study, this article explores how tax can work for large UK stadium tours. It uses simplified estimates for educational and illustrative purposes only and does not represent real financial data, tax filings, or professional advice about any individual or organisation.

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Unless you’ve been living on Mars for the last few weeks, you’ll know Harry Styles is back. And he’s back with a world tour that includes TWELVE nights at Wembley Stadium.

As accountants, the first thing we thought about was Harry’s Tax Return – because that’s what we’re like!

So, let’s take a look at what an artist's tax position might look like after selling out twelve nights at the biggest stadium in the UK.

First, some assumptions

We obviously don’t have visibility of Harry Styles’ tax and business affairs, so we’ll have to make a few assumptions for the purpose of estimating.

To keep things simple, we’ll just look at the Wembley shows – not the full 60+ date world tour.

12 nights at Wembley

~90,000 tickets per night

Average ticket price: £200.00 (eye watering, but maybe not far off!)

This gives us an estimated gross ticket revenue of £216 million.

Crucially, this is not income – it’s the tour’s turnover!

A lot of this income will not become his money

Running tours is expensive, and running a tour of this scale is doubly so. This means we need to strip away some revenue to pay for it. This might include:

The promoter’s share (often between 15%-30%)

The stadium’s venue fees, staffing and security

The artist’s manager, agent, lawyer and (of course) his accountant! Combined this could be around 20%-30% of gross.

Crew salaries, stage production, insurance, marketing and rehearsals all add additional costs.

Big stadium tours often cost 40%-55% of gross before the artist is even paid!

That said, using the above assumptions and estimates, you would still be looking at an £80m–£120m artist share before tax.

How much tax would be paid?

Most famous artists don’t actually get paid personally for performing and selling music. They usually set up a UK limited company instead. There are lots of reasons to do this (not just for global stars either).

But this means they do not pocket the cash from touring. Instead, they pay themselves via a mix of salary, dividends, royalties, and other remuneration planning options.

This matters because company tax is not the same as personal tax.

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Corporation Tax (hypothetical)	Personal Tax when the money leaves the company
UK Corporation Tax rate: 25% (for large profits)	Harry’s Salary: Income tax up to 45%, plus National Insurance Contributions.
Allowable deductions include tour costs, staff, equipment depreciation, professional fees and pension contributions.	Dividends: The top dividend tax rate is 39.35%, making them often more tax-efficient than salary.
Example: £100m profit - £25m Corporation Tax = £75m retained	International factors: Shows outside the UK would have withholding taxes abroad. This gets much more complex.

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Here’s how this could look

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Artist share	Corp tax	Dividend tax	Total tax
£80m	£20m	£23.6m	£43.6m
£120m	£30m	£35.4m	£65.4m

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On an £80m–£120m stadium-tour profit, a UK-based artist could potentially face a total tax bill in the £45m–£65m range if profits are fully distributed.

But remember…

They wouldn’t need to extract everything at once

Money left in the company is only hit with corporation tax

International dates add foreign withholding taxes, usually offset by UK tax credits.

Charitable giving, pensions, and retained earnings can materially change the timing (not the existence) of tax.

The real picture will have many more moving parts than these examples.

Tax efficient structures

Depending upon their accountant and financial advisors, artists may choose to invest in one of a variety of tax-efficient structures, such as EIS (Enterprise Investment Scheme), SEIS (Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme) and VCTs (Venture Capital Trusts) which would allow them to spread investments and obtain up to 30% tax relief on the invested amount. The VC benefit reduces to 20% in April 2026, so the best reliefs will be available for those who do it now.

What responsible tax planning would look like

Here are some of the best practices that someone a similar position to Harry ought to consider:

What they should be doing

Paying tax where income is earned

Claiming legitimate expenses only

Keeping profits in company when not needed personally

Using pensions & charitable donations transparently

What they should not be doing

Using artificial offshore structures to avoid tax

Misclassifying personal expenses as business

Using aggressive avoidance schemes (which are very heavily scrutinised nowadays).

This example may be hypothetical, but the issues it raises are real

The purpose of this blog is not to focus on Harry Styles specifically.

We do not have anywhere near the information required to predict his tax position accurately. As such, the figures used are illustrative estimates and should not be treated as factual or attributable to any individual.

The purpose is to highlight the complexities of tax and personal remuneration for higher earners, whether they’re artists, engineers, or scale up owners.

There are lots of common lessons, best practices and considerations shared between the biggest and wealthiest artists in the world and those who have high- or complex-income streams (even if they don’t consider themselves wealthy!).

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