Operating margin: what 3164 US filers actually report
Half of the 3164 companies with a filed operating margin sit at 3.98% or below. The bottom quarter is at -21.09% or below, the top quarter starts at 14.95%, and the top tenth at 26.72%.
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. 3893 of the 5257 listings in the current pool hold this figure at all.
| Cohort | Companies | p5 | p10 | p25 | p50 | p75 | p90 | p95 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Every filer | 3164 | -1806.15% | -272.97% | -21.09% | 3.98% | 14.95% | 26.72% | 36.46% |
| Healthcare | 636 | -15886.50% | -4941.24% | -469.59% | -33.98% | 5.95% | 18.70% | 27.34% |
| Technology | 599 | -888.12% | -181.93% | -24.91% | 2.03% | 13.32% | 25.85% | 33.62% |
| Industrials | 499 | -309.28% | -99.20% | -4.03% | 6.12% | 14.63% | 21.71% | 26.72% |
| Consumer Cyclical | 379 | -227.07% | -30.09% | -3.06% | 4.59% | 10.96% | 19.47% | 25.78% |
| Energy | 199 | -113.97% | -21.41% | -0.93% | 10.31% | 24.57% | 37.48% | 45.62% |
| Consumer Defensive | 177 | -221.22% | -44.06% | -4.73% | 4.50% | 11.64% | 19.93% | 25.67% |
| Communication Services | 167 | -114.59% | -44.37% | -10.25% | 2.43% | 12.73% | 23.40% | 30.02% |
| Basic Materials | 159 | -154.51% | -47.65% | -4.50% | 7.64% | 21.77% | 38.04% | 47.05% |
| Financial Services | 144 | -2367.15% | -187.81% | -20.98% | 12.50% | 25.15% | 41.48% | 54.41% |
| Real Estate | 117 | -115.38% | -15.16% | 2.97% | 17.66% | 36.02% | 60.62% | 67.43% |
| Utilities | 87 | -30.26% | 1.42% | 10.97% | 20.74% | 24.91% | 31.37% | 36.71% |
3164 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 -30712.68% and 63.64%. 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 after every cost of running the business, before interest and tax.
The arithmetic, as the product prints it when a subscriber expands the figure: Operating Income / Revenue x 100.
It is one of the 118 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.
- Operating margin stays at or above 15 percent
- A convention, not an estimated boundary. The figure is a line to test, and the page reports what it would have done.
What the number hides
Operating income is where one-off items collect. A restructuring charge, an impairment or a legal settlement lands here and moves a year by several points without saying anything about the run rate. Development spending can also leave this line entirely: money spent building software may sit on the balance sheet as an asset instead of appearing as a cost, so two companies with the same cash going out the door report different margins.
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): operating margin stays at or above 15 percent , tested against 10 filed years, broken in 0.
- Costco Wholesale Corporation (COST): operating margin stays at or above 15 percent , tested against 10 filed years, broken in 10.
- Walmart Inc. (WMT): operating margin stays at or above 15 percent , tested against 10 filed years, broken in 10.