Profitability margins
Median operating profit margin: 3.98%
How the operating profit margin is calculated here, and where it lands: a median of 3.98 percent across 3,164 US companies on the 2026-09-07 build.
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 operating profit margin was 3.98 percent across 3,164 companies with filed accounts, and the third quartile was 14.95. A 15 percent operating margin, often used as a rough test of a decent business, is therefore almost exactly the seventy-fifth percentile of the whole market.
Stated with its source, across the 3,164 US companies with filed accounts carrying an operating margin, the median was
3.98 percent (GET /api/public/distribution/operating_margin, build 2026-09-07)and the third quartile was 14.95. So 15 percent sits fractionally above the seventy-fifth percentile of the entire market. One company in four clears it.
What the distribution actually looks like
| Sector | Companies | p25 | Median | p75 | p90 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Utilities | 87 | 10.97 | 20.74 | 24.91 | 31.37 |
| Real Estate | 117 | 2.97 | 17.66 | 36.02 | 60.62 |
| Financial Services | 144 | -20.98 | 12.50 | 25.15 | 41.48 |
| Energy | 199 | -0.93 | 10.31 | 24.57 | 37.48 |
| Basic Materials | 159 | -4.50 | 7.64 | 21.77 | 38.04 |
| Industrials | 499 | -4.03 | 6.12 | 14.62 | 21.71 |
| Consumer Cyclical | 379 | -3.06 | 4.59 | 10.96 | 19.47 |
| Consumer Defensive | 177 | -4.73 | 4.50 | 11.64 | 19.93 |
| Communication Services | 167 | -10.25 | 2.43 | 12.73 | 23.40 |
| Technology | 599 | -24.91 | 2.03 | 13.32 | 25.85 |
| Healthcare | 636 | -469.59 | -33.98 | 5.95 | 18.70 |
| All sectors | 3,164 | -21.09 | 3.98 | 14.95 | 26.72 |
Three readings of the same 15 percent line, taken from that table:
For a utility it is below average. The utilities median is 20.74 and its first quartile is 10.97, so 15 percent puts a utility between the bottom quarter and the middle of its own sector.
For an industrial it is roughly the third quartile. Industrials sit at 14.62 at p75.
For a healthcare company it beats three quarters of the sector. Healthcare's third quartile is 5.95 and its ninth decile is 18.70, so 15 percent lands between them.
The market's first quartile is minus 21 percent
That is the figure worth sitting with. Across all 3,164 companies the twenty-fifth percentile operating margin is -21.09 percent. A quarter of the companies with a filed operating margin lost more than twenty cents at the operating line for every dollar of revenue.
The healthcare column is where most of that comes from. Its median operating margin is -33.98 percent and its first quartile is -469.59 percent. Those are not distressed industrial businesses. They are companies with a research programme, a small licensing or milestone revenue line and a full cost base, and dividing one by the other produces a number whose magnitude carries no information at all.
This is the practical reason a screen written as "operating margin above 15 percent" behaves differently from what its author expects. It is not filtering for quality within a peer group. Across the market it removes the loss-makers first, and the loss-makers are concentrated in one sector.
Where the operating margin sits between the other two
The same build reports the median net margin at 3.79 percent, across a different and larger cohort of 3,905 companies. Median operating margin 3.98, median net margin 3.79. Nineteen hundredths of a percentage point apart.
That is not a statement about what happens below the operating line, because the two medians are taken over two different populations. It is a warning against reading a waterfall out of three separately computed medians. The arithmetic looks like it works and it does not.
The winsorising, and why it matters here more than usual
Every observation was clamped to the first and ninety-ninth percentile before the breakpoints were computed: -30,712.68 and 63.64 at the all-market level. Values are clamped, never dropped, so the cohort size is the cohort that produced the numbers.
A lower clamp of minus thirty thousand percent is not a typographical error. It is what an operating margin looks like when the denominator is a few thousand dollars of revenue. Any statistic on operating margins that does not say what it did with those rows has quietly done something with them.
Fifty-one exact zeros were excluded as coerced missing data. Unlike a debt-free balance sheet, an operating margin of precisely 0.00 is almost never a real measurement.
What this leaves out
One build, dated 2026-09-07. The distribution is rebuilt from filed accounts and these breakpoints move. Every response from the distribution endpoint carries its own build date and marks itself stale after 35 days.
The cohort is companies whose filed statements are on record, one row per company. It is not the whole US universe and these counts are not coverage claims.
Unlike gross margin, the operating margin is not withheld for banks, insurers or property trusts at the cohort level, so the financial services and real estate rows include filers whose income statement has no operating line in the ordinary sense. Read those two rows with that in mind.
The stored figure prefers the data vendor's trailing-twelve-month ratio where one is published, so it is not always what you would get by dividing one fiscal year's operating income by that year's revenue.
Sector is a coarse grouping and the 15 percent line is a convention rather than an estimated boundary. Nothing above is a view on any company or sector, and a percentile is not a reason to own anything.