How much windfall profit have oil companies made in Europe?

The conflict in Iran began on 28 February 2026. Within weeks, Brent climbed to over $100 and Europe's oil companies began to experience and then report significant increases to income and profit. We analyse how much additional profit they earned and how much of it can be attributed to the EU27.

We use a deliberately simple and conservative definition of excess profit: the change in a company's adjusted net income between a war quarter in 2026 and the same quarter a year earlier. Comparing quarters removes seasonality and requires no assumption about what a "normal" level of profit would have been.

Across the eight companies covered: Shell, BP, TotalEnergies, Eni, Orlen, Repsol, OMV, Moeve - those that publish enough geographic detail to allocate their profit to the EU27 - EU-attributed excess profit was approximately €1.6 billion in the first quarter of 2026 and €5.9 billion in the second, totalling €7.5 billion over the first two war quarters combined. 

The first quarter contained only one month of war; the second was the first full war quarter, which is why it is so much larger. Because oil companies can shift profit across jurisdictions we do not rely on where profit is booked. Instead we use companies' Country-by-Country Reporting of revenues to allocate group-level profit to the EU27 and, where possible, to individual member states. This restricts the analysis to the eight companies that publicly publish sufficient geographic detail.

As these excess profits stem from revenues earned within the EU27, they could be captured by a permanent windfall tax, if designed correctly.