A master limited partnership (MLP) is a unique investment that combines the tax benefit of a small partnership with the liquidity of a publicly traded stock, allowing stockholders quickly to purchase or sell their stocks. MLPs issue investment units which are traded on a security exchange just like shares of some other stock. To qualify as a MLP, a company must generate at least 90% of its income from operations in the real estate, financial services, or natural resources sectors.

The major basis for a company to get into a company structured as a MLP may be the tax avoidance. Unlike corporations, master limited partnerships are not susceptible to double taxation (paying taxes at both corporate and personal levels). The owners of the partnership are taxed just once on the individual portions of the MLP’s income, gains, losses and deductions. On quarterly basis, How Much Gain Reduction Should You Use On The Master Limiter?  MLPs make distributions which are much like dividends to its unit-holders. Unlike dividends, these distributions are not taxed when they’re received because they are considered return of principal. That results in higher yield, because the cash that would have been taken care of income taxes are distributed to investors. Furthermore, the tax law allows companies to amortize or depreciate money that is dedicated to an asset. MLPs allow those deductions to feed to the unit-holder, who pays no taxes until decides to sell the investment. At the selling point, the investor has to cover taxes over the realized capital gains (the difference involving the sales price and the first cost). The capital gains are taxed at a lower tax rate and the unit-holders end up paying less overall in taxes than they’d when it were considered interest instead.

MLPs contain two business entities: general partners and limited partners. General partners manage the day-to-day operations of the MLP, while limited partners don’t have any involvement in the company’s operation activities but investing capital and obtaining periodic cash distributions in return. Generally, the overall partners receive 2% of the whole partnership pie and they’ve the right your can purchase limited-partner units to boost its ownership percentage. A distinguishing characteristic of MLP may be the incentive distributions rights (IDRs). Considering the truth that company performance is measured by the cash distributions to the limited partners, IDRs provide the overall partners with a performance- based pay for successfully managing the master limited partnership. The IDRs are structured in such way that for every incremental dollar in cash distribution, the overall partners receive higher marginal IDR payments, which can increase the first 2% distributable cash to raised levels such as 15%, 25% around 50%.

The fact that master limited partnerships pay no federal and state income tax implies that more cash can be obtained for distributions. This makes MLP units worth much more than similar shares of corporation. The worthiness of MLP’s units is determined by the distributable cash flow. Therefore, nearly all MLPs operate in very stable, slow-growing sectors of the vitality industry, such as pipelines and storage terminals. These assets produce steady cash flows with little variations that enable the MLP to meet its cash distribution requirements.