Return on equity: what 4029 US filers actually report
Half of the 4029 companies with a filed return on equity sit at 5.22% or below. The bottom quarter is at -23.33% or below, the top quarter starts at 13.67%, and the top tenth at 26.19%.
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. 4691 of the 5257 listings in the current pool hold this figure at all.
| Cohort | Companies | p5 | p10 | p25 | p50 | p75 | p90 | p95 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Every filer | 4029 | -202.44% | -100.50% | -23.33% | 5.22% | 13.67% | 26.19% | 39.92% |
| Healthcare | 813 | -448.02% | -260.65% | -111.65% | -38.97% | -1.72% | 16.27% | 29.40% |
| Financial Services | 681 | -33.06% | -7.95% | 5.29% | 9.80% | 14.18% | 26.80% | 38.71% |
| Technology | 571 | -189.41% | -96.36% | -21.18% | 2.79% | 15.94% | 31.84% | 52.75% |
| Industrials | 515 | -156.94% | -66.72% | -6.45% | 8.37% | 17.20% | 30.08% | 41.69% |
| Consumer Cyclical | 370 | -138.05% | -53.09% | -8.39% | 8.04% | 18.11% | 38.46% | 54.11% |
| Real Estate | 221 | -39.16% | -25.32% | -2.64% | 4.75% | 9.34% | 14.64% | 24.37% |
| Basic Materials | 219 | -92.30% | -64.04% | -17.68% | 2.03% | 13.23% | 20.98% | 28.69% |
| Energy | 219 | -96.91% | -35.09% | -3.09% | 8.13% | 15.09% | 24.88% | 34.82% |
| Consumer Defensive | 168 | -139.68% | -86.63% | -10.50% | 7.69% | 17.26% | 26.76% | 37.58% |
| Communication Services | 153 | -117.42% | -69.34% | -15.47% | 2.20% | 12.78% | 28.24% | 41.44% |
| Utilities | 98 | -26.39% | -7.97% | 4.90% | 8.36% | 10.80% | 15.16% | 22.85% |
4029 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 -661.54% and 171.25%. 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
Profit as a share of the equity shareholders have left in the business.
The arithmetic, as the product prints it when a subscriber expands the figure: Net Income / Shareholders' Equity 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.
The 3 definitions in circulation
More than one arithmetic is published under this name, and each answers a different question. The cohort above uses the one the product prints. These explanations live here rather than on each company page below, because what a definition measures is a property of the metric and repeating it under every ticker would be the same paragraph on ten pages.
- Net income over closing equity netIncome / totalStockholdersEquity
- A full year of profit over the equity standing on the last day of it. The most commonly published of the three, and the one that moves most when a company buys back stock late in the year. It needs one filed fiscal year.
- Net income over average equity netIncome / ((totalStockholdersEquity this year + totalStockholdersEquity last year) / 2)
- The textbook definition. Profit earned over a year is matched against the equity that was employed across that year, so it needs the prior year's balance sheet and cannot be computed for a company's first filed year. It needs two filed balance sheets.
- Net income over total equity including minority interests netIncome / totalEquity
- Adds the equity held by outside shareholders in consolidated subsidiaries. Identical to the closing figure where a company has no minority interests, and materially lower where it has large ones. It needs one filed fiscal year.
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.
- Return on equity stays at or above 15 percent
- A convention, not an estimated boundary. Fifteen percent is a common quality screen; our own bands sit at 8, 12 and 20, anchored on a mature-market cost of capital near 8 percent.
What the number hides
Equity is what is left after debt, so borrowing to buy back stock raises return on equity while the business earns nothing more. A company that has repurchased enough stock to push equity close to nothing prints a return in the hundreds of percent, and one with negative equity prints arithmetic rather than a measurement. Both sit in the tail of the cohort below, which is why it is clamped before the marks are computed.
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): 3 definitions of return on equity from one FY2025 balance sheet , spanning 151.91 to 171.42.
- Microsoft Corporation (MSFT): 3 definitions of return on equity from one FY2026 balance sheet , spanning 30.23 to 34.04.
- The Coca-Cola Company (KO): 3 definitions of return on equity from one FY2025 balance sheet , spanning 38.24 to 45.97.
- Costco Wholesale Corporation (COST): 3 definitions of return on equity from one FY2025 balance sheet , spanning 27.77 to 30.69.
- Johnson & Johnson (JNJ): 3 definitions of return on equity from one FY2025 balance sheet , spanning 32.87 to 35.03.
- NIKE, Inc. (NKE): 3 definitions of return on equity from one FY2026 balance sheet , spanning 20.91 to 22.14.
- Walmart Inc. (WMT): 3 definitions of return on equity from one FY2026 balance sheet , spanning 20.68 to 22.97.
- The Home Depot, Inc. (HD): 3 definitions of return on equity from one FY2025 balance sheet , spanning 110.48 to 145.54.
- Texas Instruments Incorporated (TXN): 3 definitions of return on equity from one FY2025 balance sheet , spanning 30.15 to 30.73.
- Adobe Inc. (ADBE): 3 definitions of return on equity from one FY2025 balance sheet , spanning 55.43 to 61.34.
- Apple Inc. (AAPL): return on equity stays at or above 15 percent , tested against 10 filed years, broken in 0.
- Microsoft Corporation (MSFT): return on equity stays at or above 15 percent , tested against 10 filed years, broken in 0.
- The Coca-Cola Company (KO): return on equity stays at or above 15 percent , tested against 10 filed years, broken in 1.
- Johnson & Johnson (JNJ): return on equity stays at or above 15 percent , tested against 10 filed years, broken in 1.
- NIKE, Inc. (NKE): return on equity stays at or above 15 percent , tested against 10 filed years, broken in 0.
- Texas Instruments Incorporated (TXN): return on equity stays at or above 15 percent , tested against 10 filed years, broken in 0.