Debt to equity: what 3208 US filers actually report
Half of the 3208 companies with a filed debt to equity sit at 0.44 or below. The bottom quarter is at 0.09 or below, the top quarter starts at 1.10, and the top tenth at 2.32.
Measured 2026-09-07 from accounts filed with the SEC, 0 days ago, one row per company. The cohort is rebuilt nightly and is flagged stale after 35 days. 4057 of the 5257 listings in the current pool hold this figure at all.
| Cohort | Companies | p5 | p10 | p25 | p50 | p75 | p90 | p95 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Every filer | 3208 | 0.01 | 0.01 | 0.09 | 0.44 | 1.10 | 2.32 | 4.84 |
| Healthcare | 712 | 0.00 | 0.01 | 0.03 | 0.15 | 0.60 | 1.37 | 2.76 |
| Technology | 510 | 0.01 | 0.01 | 0.04 | 0.19 | 0.75 | 1.52 | 2.88 |
| Industrials | 488 | 0.01 | 0.04 | 0.21 | 0.56 | 1.15 | 2.19 | 4.61 |
| Consumer Cyclical | 338 | 0.03 | 0.08 | 0.34 | 0.86 | 1.65 | 4.50 | 7.58 |
| Financial Services | 216 | 0.00 | 0.01 | 0.10 | 0.42 | 1.27 | 2.48 | 5.50 |
| Energy | 200 | 0.01 | 0.02 | 0.19 | 0.49 | 1.13 | 2.62 | 5.74 |
| Basic Materials | 192 | 0.00 | 0.00 | 0.03 | 0.32 | 0.74 | 1.53 | 2.45 |
| Consumer Defensive | 157 | 0.01 | 0.05 | 0.22 | 0.65 | 1.42 | 2.50 | 4.08 |
| Real Estate | 156 | 0.04 | 0.14 | 0.46 | 0.90 | 1.73 | 4.83 | 6.10 |
| Communication Services | 144 | 0.01 | 0.02 | 0.14 | 0.65 | 1.84 | 3.69 | 10.08 |
| Utilities | 94 | 0.04 | 0.19 | 0.82 | 1.43 | 1.81 | 2.51 | 4.52 |
3208 companies in the market row. How a cohort is counted: One deduplicated company per cohort row, drawn only from companies with filed statements on record. One row per company. Key: case-folded, whitespace-collapsed stocks.name. Representative listing: most archived fiscal years, then largest stored market cap, then ticker ascending.
Selection rule actually applied to the market row: tier=VERIFIED; one row per company; exact zeros kept (a debt-free balance sheet really is 0); 324 excluded as not applicable (Bank); winsorised at p1/p99; min cohort 30. The clamp ran between 0.00 and 18.85. Clamped to the observed values at p1 and p99 before the breakpoints were computed. Values are clamped, never dropped, so the cohort size is the cohort that produced the breakpoints.
Every sector this build published for cleared the 30-company minimum on this metric, so no row is withheld. Every sector this build published a distribution for, on any metric, at this coverage tier. A sector named as refused therefore had enough companies for some other metric and not for this one.
How this figure is computed
Borrowings against the book equity underneath them.
The arithmetic, as the product prints it when a subscriber expands the figure: Total Debt / Shareholders' Equity.
It is one of the 118 indicators computed for every covered listing, filed under integrity. That count and that pillar are read from the product's own indicator registry when this page renders, so a metric that leaves the registry stops being described as one of its indicators here.
The 5 definitions in circulation
More than one arithmetic is published under this name, and each answers a different question. The cohort above uses the one the product prints. These explanations live here rather than on each company page below, because what a definition measures is a property of the metric and repeating it under every ticker would be the same paragraph on ten pages.
- Long-term debt to equity longTermDebt / totalStockholdersEquity
- The narrowest of them. It ignores everything due inside a year, so a company that funds itself with commercial paper looks unlevered here. It needs one filed fiscal year.
- Borrowings to equity (shortTermDebt + longTermDebt) / totalStockholdersEquity
- Interest-bearing borrowings on both sides of the twelve-month line, and nothing else. It needs one filed fiscal year.
- Total debt to equity totalDebt / totalStockholdersEquity
- Total debt as the filer tags it. Where a company reports finance lease obligations, they sit inside this figure and not inside the borrowings line, which is the usual reason the two differ. It needs one filed fiscal year.
- Total debt to total equity including minority interests totalDebt / totalEquity
- The same numerator over a denominator that also counts the equity outside shareholders hold in consolidated subsidiaries. Identical to the line above where a company has no minority interests, and lower where it has large ones. It needs one filed fiscal year.
- Total liabilities to equity totalLiabilities / totalStockholdersEquity
- Everything owed to anyone, borrowed or not: payables, deferred revenue, tax. Always the largest of the four and the one most often labelled simply 'debt/equity'. It needs one filed fiscal year.
Where the thresholds we test come from
The counterfactual pages in this section test named lines against filed years. Each line and the reason for it are set out once here rather than repeated on every company page that uses it.
- Debt to equity stays at or below 1.0
- Graham, The Intelligent Investor (revised edition, 1973), chapter 14, defensive-investor criteria.
What the number hides
Both halves are book figures rather than market ones. Equity is a historical accumulation that buybacks reduce and old write-offs have already cut, so a profitable company with a long repurchase history can show a high ratio while covering its borrowings out of one year of cash flow. Nothing in the ratio is about whether the interest is affordable. Zero is a real reading for a company with no borrowings and is kept rather than treated as a gap in the data.
What this page leaves out
It is one cross-section, not a history: these marks describe where filers stood on 2026-09-07 and say nothing about where they stood a year ago. Every figure behind it comes from a filed statement rather than from a price, so nothing here moves with the market. Listings in the current equity pool holding this figure at all, counted by GET /api/screener/fields. Listings, not deduplicated companies, and counted today rather than on the build date, so it is a coverage figure and not the cohort.
Cross-sectional statistics computed from filed accounts held on the build date shown. A breakpoint describes where a figure sat among comparable companies, not whether any company is worth owning. This is research, not advice.
This figure on named companies, against their filings
- Apple Inc. (AAPL): 5 definitions of debt to equity from one FY2025 balance sheet , spanning 1.0623 to 3.8722.
- Microsoft Corporation (MSFT): 5 definitions of debt to equity from one FY2026 balance sheet , spanning 0.0702 to 0.7143.
- The Coca-Cola Company (KO): 5 definitions of debt to equity from one FY2025 balance sheet , spanning 1.3093 to 2.1928.
- Costco Wholesale Corporation (COST): 5 definitions of debt to equity from one FY2025 balance sheet , spanning 0.1959 to 1.6436.
- Johnson & Johnson (JNJ): 5 definitions of debt to equity from one FY2025 balance sheet , spanning 0.4836 to 1.443.
- NIKE, Inc. (NKE): 5 definitions of debt to equity from one FY2026 balance sheet , spanning 0.3997 to 1.5839.
- Walmart Inc. (WMT): 5 definitions of debt to equity from one FY2026 balance sheet , spanning 0.3476 to 1.7947.
- The Home Depot, Inc. (HD): 5 definitions of debt to equity from one FY2025 balance sheet , spanning 3.6167 to 7.2022.
- Texas Instruments Incorporated (TXN): 5 definitions of debt to equity from one FY2025 balance sheet , spanning 0.8325 to 1.1253.
- Adobe Inc. (ADBE): 5 definitions of debt to equity from one FY2025 balance sheet , spanning 0.5343 to 1.5377.
- Apple Inc. (AAPL): debt to equity stays at or below 1.0 , tested against 10 filed years, broken in 8.
- Microsoft Corporation (MSFT): debt to equity stays at or below 1.0 , tested against 10 filed years, broken in 1.
- The Coca-Cola Company (KO): debt to equity stays at or below 1.0 , tested against 10 filed years, broken in 10.
- Costco Wholesale Corporation (COST): debt to equity stays at or below 1.0 , tested against 10 filed years, broken in 0.
- Johnson & Johnson (JNJ): debt to equity stays at or below 1.0 , tested against 10 filed years, broken in 0.