Big companies paid the Australian government $45.7 billion in tax in the 2016/17 financial year, an extra $7.5 billion than the year before.
The Australian Taxation Office has revealed the 19.6 per cent lift in tax revenue in its latest corporate tax transparency report.
The spike largely came from the mining, energy and water sectors, reflecting a pick up in commodity prices in the year, according to the report released on Thursday.
The funds were paid by 2109 corporations in 2016-17, with an extra 68 entities joining the largest corporations category from the year before.
Of the companies, 1721 were Australian public-owned and foreign-owned operations with an income of $100 million or more.
Another 388 were privately owned Australian companies with an income of $200 million or more.
In total, 14 entities were paying the petroleum resource rent tax (PRRT), compared with nine the year before.
The tax office has urged people not to over-emphasise the number of big companies in the group that didn't pay any tax or just a small amount in the year relative to their gross income.
Tax is paid on profits and not income, second commissioner Jeremy Hirschhorn said, stressing also that some single entities that didn't pay tax were part of corporate groups that did.
But Labor spokesman Andrew Leigh said the fact 722 companies didn't pay any tax shows the system is not as fair as it should be.
The coalition has failed to change that in the past five years, he said.
"While a Shorten Labor government would crack down on multinational tax avoidance, Scott Morrison's one-point economic plan has been an unaffordable tax cut for multinationals and big banks," he said.
The vast bulk of the big companies (95 per cent) were estimated to have been compliant with tax laws.
That's about the same as the year before, when the compliance rate was 94 per cent.
New analysis also shows that in 2015/16, the estimated tax gap for the companies with an income of more than $250 million a year was 4.4 per cent, down from 5.8 per cent in 2014/15.
The gap marks the difference between what companies pay and what the ATO estimated they should, often due to different interpretations of tax law.
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said the falling gap shows the coalition's extra investments aimed at cracking down on tax avoidance - including $679 million for an ATO task force over four years - are paying off.
"Ensuring corporate taxpayers pay their fair share of tax helps us to provide tax relief for individuals and small and family businesses, and the essential services that Australians rely on," he said.
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