Interest coverage: what 1443 US filers actually report
Half of the 1443 companies with a filed interest coverage sit at 4.92x or below. The bottom quarter is at 2.16x or below, the top quarter starts at 13.24x, and the top tenth at 45.92x.
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. 1450 of the 5323 listings in the current pool hold this figure at all.
| Cohort | Companies | p5 | p10 | p25 | p50 | p75 | p90 | p95 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Every filer | 1443 | 0.49x | 0.94x | 2.16x | 4.92x | 13.24x | 45.92x | 166.55x |
| Industrials | 293 | 0.37x | 0.79x | 2.02x | 5.57x | 12.53x | 29.41x | 69.82x |
| Technology | 233 | 0.71x | 1.30x | 2.90x | 7.89x | 19.73x | 108.38x | 179.72x |
| Consumer Cyclical | 180 | 0.49x | 0.99x | 2.39x | 5.44x | 15.50x | 60.55x | 248.04x |
| Healthcare | 154 | 0.68x | 0.99x | 2.22x | 5.81x | 15.94x | 53.75x | 177.28x |
| Energy | 119 | 0.60x | 0.89x | 2.27x | 4.10x | 7.30x | 28.64x | 61.11x |
| Consumer Defensive | 95 | 1.29x | 1.64x | 2.69x | 7.53x | 19.61x | 121.68x | 285.78x |
| Basic Materials | 88 | 0.40x | 1.15x | 2.33x | 6.48x | 16.07x | 40.90x | 71.44x |
| Communication Services | 78 | 0.43x | 0.60x | 1.23x | 3.20x | 5.84x | 38.32x | 83.93x |
| Utilities | 71 | 0.56x | 1.19x | 1.94x | 2.40x | 2.81x | 4.35x | 8.21x |
| Real Estate | 70 | 0.14x | 0.43x | 1.03x | 2.19x | 3.44x | 4.89x | 9.37x |
| Financial Services | 61 | 1.20x | 1.69x | 2.99x | 7.48x | 16.81x | 66.13x | 229.88x |
1443 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; 353 excluded as not applicable (Bank, Mortgage REIT); winsorised at p1/p99; min cohort 30. The clamp ran between 0.07x and 1118.79x. 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
How many times over operating profit covers the interest bill.
The arithmetic, as the product prints it when a subscriber expands the figure: Operating Income / Interest Expense.
It is one of the 116 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.
What the number hides
It is built on operating profit rather than on cash, so a company whose profit is not converting into cash can show comfortable cover and still be short of the money. The interest figure is the charge in the year just filed, so a business that refinanced after the year end is being measured against a bill it no longer pays. A company with almost no interest expense produces a very large number that is a fact about its denominator rather than about its resilience.
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
- No company page uses this figure yet. The set of companies this section publishes is a fixed authorised list rather than a product of the ticker universe, so a metric can have a market distribution before it has a single named example.