Gross margin: what 2819 US filers actually report
Half of the 2819 companies with a filed gross margin sit at 37.74% or below. The bottom quarter is at 21.29% or below, the top quarter starts at 59.34%, and the top tenth at 77.81%.
Measured 2026-10-21 from accounts filed with the SEC, 1 day ago, one row per company. The cohort is rebuilt nightly and is flagged stale after 35 days. 3095 of the 5323 listings in the current pool hold this figure at all.
| Cohort | Companies | p5 | p10 | p25 | p50 | p75 | p90 | p95 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Every filer | 2819 | 1.85% | 8.54% | 21.29% | 37.74% | 59.34% | 77.81% | 86.75% |
| Technology | 629 | 3.89% | 10.91% | 29.10% | 48.07% | 68.48% | 79.53% | 84.90% |
| Industrials | 517 | 1.42% | 7.03% | 16.96% | 28.45% | 39.91% | 53.09% | 65.60% |
| Healthcare | 480 | 0.69% | 13.07% | 34.72% | 58.31% | 75.98% | 88.47% | 95.72% |
| Consumer Cyclical | 401 | 5.73% | 11.95% | 20.24% | 34.79% | 49.94% | 69.87% | 79.39% |
| Consumer Defensive | 203 | 2.89% | 8.49% | 18.56% | 32.22% | 48.67% | 62.81% | 70.59% |
| Basic Materials | 188 | 1.99% | 7.29% | 15.13% | 27.95% | 39.36% | 55.12% | 65.87% |
| Communication Services | 141 | 2.88% | 7.65% | 25.53% | 51.22% | 70.97% | 82.00% | 89.48% |
| Energy | 117 | 0.83% | 3.85% | 12.64% | 26.68% | 42.75% | 73.99% | 91.15% |
| Financial Services | 78 | -1.70% | 1.82% | 25.57% | 44.83% | 73.06% | 92.00% | 95.51% |
| Utilities | 38 | 11.02% | 12.69% | 20.76% | 34.06% | 61.17% | 72.36% | 86.44% |
| Real Estate | Fewer than 30 comparable companies have this figure on file, so a percentile would be noise. We are not showing one. | |||||||
2819 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 excluded as coerced missing data; 604 excluded as not applicable (Bank, Equity REIT, Insurer, Mortgage REIT); winsorised at p1/p99; min cohort 30. The clamp ran between -137.77% and 98.18%. 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.
One sector is named above without a distribution. 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. The minimum is 30 companies, and a cohort under it refuses rather than publishes a percentile it cannot support.
How this figure is computed
What is left of revenue after the direct cost of producing what was sold.
The arithmetic, as the product prints it when a subscriber expands the figure: Gross Profit / Revenue x 100.
It is one of the 116 indicators computed for every covered listing, filed under quality. 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.
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.
- Gross margin stays at or above 40 percent
- A convention, not an estimated boundary. No published threshold for a gross margin is defensible across industries, so this one is a line to test rather than a standard to meet.
What the number hides
No rule fixes what belongs in cost of sales. Two companies in the same trade can put distribution, depreciation on production assets, or customer support on different lines and report gross margins several points apart while running identical economics. The figure also says nothing about what the rest of the company costs: a high gross margin carried by heavy selling expense can finish the year below a low one.
What this page leaves out
It is one cross-section, not a history: these marks describe where filers stood on 2026-10-21 and say nothing about where they stood a year ago. This metric divides no 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): gross margin stays at or above 40 percent, tested against 10 filed years, broken in 5.
- Microsoft Corporation (MSFT): gross margin stays at or above 40 percent, tested against 10 filed years, broken in 0.
- NIKE, Inc. (NKE): gross margin stays at or above 40 percent, tested against 10 filed years, broken in 0.
Related
- Reading a gross margin - the lesson, rather than the cohort.
- Every metric with a published distribution
- Would this rule have broken?
- Whether a company you own is covered