Price to earnings: what 2625 US filers actually report
Half of the 2625 companies with a filed price to earnings sit at 19.84x or below. The bottom quarter is at 12.48x or below, the top quarter starts at 36.02x, and the top tenth at 70.88x.
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. 2746 of the 5323 listings in the current pool hold this figure at all.
| Cohort | Companies | p5 | p10 | p25 | p50 | p75 | p90 | p95 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Every filer | 2625 | 3.82x | 7.03x | 12.48x | 19.84x | 36.02x | 70.88x | 132.48x |
| Financial Services | 654 | 5.88x | 8.11x | 11.33x | 14.84x | 23.91x | 51.26x | 79.85x |
| Industrials | 411 | 3.47x | 7.19x | 14.97x | 25.54x | 38.18x | 73.33x | 134.92x |
| Technology | 365 | 2.85x | 7.58x | 16.47x | 30.51x | 60.47x | 120.32x | 247.96x |
| Consumer Cyclical | 302 | 4.48x | 7.57x | 12.70x | 19.25x | 30.88x | 54.71x | 94.23x |
| Healthcare | 223 | 2.43x | 5.23x | 13.15x | 25.66x | 43.20x | 93.94x | 181.46x |
| Energy | 162 | 4.32x | 7.29x | 12.13x | 17.94x | 29.43x | 58.84x | 148.13x |
| Consumer Defensive | 135 | 1.27x | 7.74x | 13.47x | 20.35x | 33.23x | 55.12x | 116.82x |
| Basic Materials | 124 | 8.53x | 10.90x | 14.64x | 21.26x | 35.24x | 57.60x | 110.24x |
| Communication Services | 107 | 0.55x | 2.81x | 7.63x | 16.88x | 41.30x | 85.05x | 322.41x |
| Utilities | 87 | 6.57x | 10.90x | 15.79x | 20.17x | 24.38x | 51.63x | 70.10x |
| Real Estate | 51 | 3.36x | 3.87x | 5.27x | 9.60x | 20.63x | 34.33x | 74.52x |
2625 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; 150 excluded as not applicable (Equity REIT); winsorised at p1/p99; min cohort 30. The clamp ran between 0.43x and 692.00x. 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
The share price against a year of earnings per share.
The arithmetic, as the product prints it when a subscriber expands the figure: Price / Earnings per Share (diluted).
It is one of the 116 indicators computed for every covered listing, filed under value. 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
The price half of this ratio is a quote and the earnings half is a filing, so the two are as of different dates and the coverage note below says which. Earnings sit in the denominator, which makes the number unstable exactly where earnings are small: a company that barely broke even prints a very large multiple describing the rounding rather than the business. A ratio also exists only where there is a profit to divide by, so the cohort is narrower than the market.
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. One side of this figure comes from a share price rather than from a filing, so these marks move when the market does and this build has not seen the market since it ran. The price archive on this site is refreshed on its own schedule, which is slower than 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.
Related
- What is a good P/E ratio? - the lesson, rather than the cohort.
- Every metric with a published distribution
- Would this rule have broken?
- Whether a company you own is covered