Profitability margins
Apple profit margin: gross is mid-pack
Apple's company profit margin over ten filed years against the 2026-09-07 technology cohort: gross is mid-pack, operating and net in the top decile.
By Javier SanzPublished
Founder of ValueScreener. Built Ninety Nine, a securities services provider, and sold it to a tier-one global bank; ran operations and internationalization at Alpaca, the brokerage API.
Who writes thisEditorial processLinkedIn (opens in a new tab)X (opens in a new tab)
Apple's fiscal 2025 gross margin of 46.91 percent, the highest it has ever filed, sits below the 49.27 percent median of the 536 technology companies in the 2026-09-07 cohort. Its operating and net margins for the same year sit between the ninetieth and ninety-fifth percentiles of that sector.
Apple's advantage is usually described as pricing power, which would show up in the gross margin. Against its own sector, the gross margin is the least remarkable of the company's three profit margins.
Ten filed years, three margins
Every figure below is the value in the annual report for that fiscal year. Accession numbers are given underneath so any row can be opened on sec.gov.
| Fiscal year | Gross | Operating | Net |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 39.08 | 27.84 | 21.19 |
| 2017 | 38.47 | 26.76 | 21.09 |
| 2018 | 38.34 | 26.69 | 22.41 |
| 2019 | 37.82 | 24.57 | 21.24 |
| 2020 | 38.23 | 24.15 | 20.91 |
| 2021 | 41.78 | 29.78 | 25.88 |
| 2022 | 43.31 | 30.29 | 25.31 |
| 2023 | 44.13 | 29.82 | 25.31 |
| 2024 | 46.21 | 31.51 | 23.97 |
| 2025 | 46.91 | 31.97 | 26.92 |
The filings, in order: 0001628280-16-020309, 0000320193-17-000070, 0000320193-18-000145, 0000320193-19-000119, 0000320193-20-000096, 0000320193-21-000105, 0000320193-22-000108, 0000320193-23-000106, 0000320193-24-000123, 0000320193-25-000079. The last was filed 2025-10-31.
The shape is a five-year decline followed by a five-year climb. Gross margin fell every year from fiscal 2016 to fiscal 2019, bottoming at 37.82, and has risen every year since to 46.91. The operating margin traces the same curve, from 27.84 down to 24.15 and back to 31.97. That 9.09 point spread is the second widest among the eight companies whose ten-year gross margin bands are published here.
Against the sector, the three margins rank very differently
The 2026-09-07 distribution build, technology cohort. Apple's stored figure is the same as its fiscal 2025 filed figure in all three cases, so the comparison is like for like.
| Margin | Apple | Technology p25 | Median | p75 | p90 | p95 | Where Apple sits |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gross | 46.91 | 31.66 | 49.27 | 70.91 | 80.29 | 85.04 | between p25 and the median |
| Operating | 31.97 | -24.91 | 2.03 | 13.32 | 25.85 | 33.62 | between p90 and p95 |
| Net | 26.92 | -22.22 | 1.52 | 12.18 | 25.82 | 36.45 | between p90 and p95 |
Apple's gross margin, the highest it has ever filed, is below the median of the 536 technology companies in that cohort. Its operating margin is in the top ten percent of the 599 technology companies in the operating margin cohort, and its net margin is in the top ten percent of 624.
Whatever separates Apple from the median technology company on this data, it is not happening above the gross line. It is happening between the gross line and the operating line. Apple keeps 31.97 of the 46.91 points of gross margin it starts with, a retention of 68 percent. The median technology company starts at 49.27 and keeps 2.03.
That last comparison is across two different cohorts and two different companies, so treat it as an order of magnitude and not a subtraction. The point it makes survives the caveat: a sector whose median company converts almost none of its gross margin into operating profit contains a company that converts more than two thirds of it.
The years the usual rules would have fired
The open research section publishes three fixed rules with fixed thresholds. Run against Apple's ten filed years:
Gross margin at or above 40 percent broke in five of the ten years, 2016 through 2020. It has held every year since.
Operating margin at or above 15 percent never broke. The lowest filed reading was 24.15 in fiscal 2020.
Net margin at or above 10 percent never broke. The lowest filed reading was 20.91, also in fiscal 2020. Ten percent is not a demanding line against this market either: on the same build the median US net margin is 3.79 percent, and technology's is 1.52.
Operating and net margin both bottom in fiscal 2020. Gross margin bottoms a year earlier, at 37.82 in fiscal 2019, and had already recovered to 38.23 by 2020. They move together because they are three views of one income statement rather than three independent measurements, but they do not all turn in the same year.
Filed figures from SEC EDGAR. This is a computation on public filings, not a recommendation, and not advice. Past filings do not indicate future results.
What this leaves out
Ten fiscal years is the whole archive, not the whole company. Apple has filed annual reports since 1981 and this data begins at fiscal 2016.
The sector comparison uses one distribution build, dated 2026-09-07, over companies whose filed statements are on record and deduplicated to one row per company. The three technology cohorts are different sizes because the three figures are held for different numbers of companies, so the three rows of the comparison table are not strictly comparable to each other.
Technology as a sector puts a hardware manufacturer and a pre-profit software company in the same cohort. That is why the technology median operating margin is 2.03 percent, and it means the median is a weak reference point even though the percentile placement is exact.
The three thresholds, 40, 15 and 10 percent, are conventions rather than estimated boundaries. The open research pages say so on their own face. Nothing about clearing or breaking one of them is a statement about the company.
Nothing on this page is a view on Apple or on any security, and none of it describes what any margin will do next.