Net margin: what 4401 US filers actually report
Half of the 4401 companies with a filed net margin sit at 2.60% or below. The bottom quarter is at -21.76% or below, the top quarter starts at 13.07%, and the top tenth at 25.49%.
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. 4631 of the 5323 listings in the current pool hold this figure at all.
| Cohort | Companies | p5 | p10 | p25 | p50 | p75 | p90 | p95 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Every filer | 4401 | -1161.90% | -230.21% | -21.76% | 2.60% | 13.07% | 25.49% | 35.02% |
| Technology | 725 | -1405.88% | -244.91% | -30.35% | 0.22% | 11.25% | 24.47% | 38.47% |
| Healthcare | 719 | -12015.99% | -4032.22% | -399.54% | -31.58% | 3.41% | 17.52% | 30.50% |
| Industrials | 661 | -329.18% | -100.20% | -9.13% | 2.82% | 10.38% | 18.21% | 24.24% |
| Financial Services | 618 | -164.24% | -34.51% | 5.76% | 15.39% | 24.46% | 31.85% | 46.15% |
| Consumer Cyclical | 497 | -300.56% | -80.56% | -8.25% | 1.85% | 6.85% | 12.68% | 17.41% |
| Energy | 234 | -114.09% | -33.67% | -2.75% | 4.90% | 16.02% | 27.52% | 36.77% |
| Consumer Defensive | 219 | -340.45% | -94.90% | -14.21% | 1.71% | 8.76% | 15.89% | 20.01% |
| Real Estate | 215 | -130.60% | -71.01% | -9.54% | 8.03% | 27.73% | 45.00% | 61.89% |
| Communication Services | 208 | -180.08% | -83.02% | -14.23% | -0.14% | 7.95% | 17.60% | 25.25% |
| Basic Materials | 206 | -448.81% | -69.36% | -11.29% | 2.85% | 12.23% | 28.09% | 35.74% |
| Utilities | 95 | -109.88% | -7.72% | 4.44% | 11.83% | 15.83% | 22.64% | 26.07% |
4401 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; winsorised at p1/p99; min cohort 30. The clamp ran between -20715.61% and 111.91%. 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
What is left of revenue once interest, tax and everything else is taken out.
The arithmetic, as the product prints it when a subscriber expands the figure: Net Income / 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.
- Net margin stays at or above 10 percent
- A convention, not an estimated boundary.
What the number hides
This line carries the whole capital structure and the whole tax position, so it moves for reasons that have nothing to do with trading. A tax settlement, a gain on selling a division, or a rate change on floating debt all arrive here. A company recognising a deferred tax asset can report a year of very high net margin because the tax line was a credit rather than a charge, and the year after can look like a collapse for the same reason.
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): net margin stays at or above 10 percent, tested against 10 filed years, broken in 0.
- Walmart Inc. (WMT): net margin stays at or above 10 percent, tested against 10 filed years, broken in 10.
Related
- Reading a net 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