Profitability margins
Median US profit margin is 3.79 percent
What a US profit margin is, measured: the median was 3.79 percent across 3,905 companies on the 2026-09-07 build, and the ninth decile was 27.47 percent.
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)
On the 2026-09-07 distribution build the median US net profit margin was 3.79 percent across 3,905 companies with filed accounts, and 20 percent, the round number people reach for when they want to say a business is genuinely profitable, sits between the third quartile and the ninth decile of that same cohort.
Stated with its source, across the US companies with filed accounts carrying a net margin, the median was 3.79 percent (GET /api/public/distribution/net_margin, build 2026-09-07), the third quartile was 14.17 and the ninth decile was 27.47. Twenty percent falls between those last two. It is better than three quarters of the market and short of the top tenth.
The sector table, because the market figure is the least useful one
| Sector | Companies | p25 | Median | p75 | p90 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Financial Services | 589 | 6.81 | 17.12 | 27.56 | 59.33 |
| Utilities | 94 | 5.30 | 11.83 | 15.85 | 22.75 |
| Real Estate | 214 | -5.64 | 8.71 | 28.38 | 46.19 |
| Energy | 223 | -2.49 | 5.41 | 15.54 | 26.30 |
| Basic Materials | 187 | -7.04 | 4.03 | 13.47 | 28.86 |
| Industrials | 532 | -4.72 | 3.81 | 10.72 | 18.27 |
| Consumer Defensive | 186 | -4.63 | 2.71 | 8.77 | 15.29 |
| Consumer Cyclical | 424 | -4.25 | 2.67 | 7.61 | 13.46 |
| Technology | 624 | -22.22 | 1.52 | 12.18 | 25.82 |
| Communication Services | 173 | -13.17 | 0.67 | 9.37 | 17.57 |
| Healthcare | 658 | -350.95 | -29.71 | 5.01 | 18.04 |
| All sectors | 3,905 | -13.13 | 3.79 | 14.17 | 27.47 |
Twenty percent is below the median for financial services and above the ninth decile for consumer cyclical. In consumer defensive it beats roughly nine companies in ten. In financial services it is unremarkable.
Note the financial services ninetieth percentile of 59.33, and its ninety-fifth of 240.35. A net margin above one hundred percent is arithmetically possible when net income includes gains that never passed through the revenue line the ratio divides by. Those rows are real numbers over a denominator that does not mean what it means elsewhere, which is the reason the sector column exists at all.
Holding it is the harder test
A margin is a snapshot. The question a long-term holder actually has is whether the figure survived a decade of filings, and that is a different question with a different answer.
Apple's net margin, every fiscal year on file, each figure taken from the 10-K for that year:
| Fiscal year | Net margin | Filing |
|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 21.19 | 10-K, 2016-10-26 |
| 2017 | 21.09 | 10-K, 2017-11-03 |
| 2018 | 22.41 | 10-K, 2018-11-05 |
| 2019 | 21.24 | 10-K, 2019-10-31 |
| 2020 | 20.91 | 10-K, 2020-10-30 |
| 2021 | 25.88 | 10-K, 2021-10-29 |
| 2022 | 25.31 | 10-K, 2022-10-28 |
| 2023 | 25.31 | 10-K, 2023-11-03 |
| 2024 | 23.97 | 10-K, 2024-11-01 |
| 2025 | 26.92 | 10-K, 2025-10-31 |
Ten filed years, ten years at or above 20 percent, with the worst year at 20.91 in fiscal 2020. A rule reading "net margin stays at or above 20 percent" would never have fired against Apple in the whole span the archive holds.
Walmart over its own ten filed years, for contrast:
| Fiscal year | Net margin | Fiscal year | Net margin |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 2.81 | 2022 | 2.39 |
| 2018 | 1.97 | 2023 | 1.91 |
| 2019 | 1.30 | 2024 | 2.39 |
| 2020 | 2.84 | 2025 | 2.85 |
| 2021 | 2.42 | 2026 | 3.07 |
The same rule would have fired in all ten. Walmart's best filed net margin in a decade, 3.07 percent in fiscal 2026, is less than a sixth of Apple's worst.
That comparison is not a judgement about either business. Walmart's return on assets on the same build is 7.69 percent against Apple's 31.18, and the gap between those two figures is much smaller than the gap between the margins, because Walmart turns its assets over 2.51 times a year and Apple 1.16. A margin is one term of two.
Why this post gives a percentile and not a count
The published distribution reports breakpoints, cohort sizes and refusals. It does not report how many companies sit above an arbitrary line, and inventing that count by interpolating between two percentiles would be producing a figure nothing measured. Where 20 percent falls between the third quartile and the ninth decile is a measurement. How many companies are above it is not published, and this page does not guess it.
Every filed figure above comes with the disclaimer the retro-test carries:
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
One distribution build, dated 2026-09-07, over companies whose filed statements are on record. It is rebuilt and the breakpoints move.
Fifty exact zeros were excluded from the net margin cohort as coerced missing data, and the observations were clamped to the first and ninety-ninth percentile, -20,794.57 and 345.73, before the breakpoints were computed.
Unlike gross margin, net margin is not withheld for banks, insurers or property trusts at the cohort level. The financial services and real estate rows therefore contain filers whose revenue line is not comparable to an operating company's.
Apple and Walmart are two companies, chosen because both already have ten filed years in the open research section. They are an illustration of the two shapes, not a sample of anything, and neither is a view on either company.
The archive holds at most ten fiscal years, so "for ten years" is the longest statement this data can support. A company may have held the same margin for thirty years and this page cannot tell you.