Return on invested capital: what 1530 US filers actually report
Half of the 1530 companies with a filed return on invested capital sit at 7.11% or below. The bottom quarter is at 0.35% or below, the top quarter starts at 14.02%, and the top tenth at 25.77%.
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. 1733 of the 5323 listings in the current pool hold this figure at all.
| Cohort | Companies | p5 | p10 | p25 | p50 | p75 | p90 | p95 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Every filer | 1530 | -70.15% | -26.00% | 0.35% | 7.11% | 14.02% | 25.77% | 38.18% |
| Industrials | 316 | -44.74% | -14.59% | 3.42% | 8.54% | 15.32% | 24.91% | 30.86% |
| Healthcare | 233 | -253.80% | -124.01% | -37.40% | 3.61% | 12.76% | 25.18% | 41.23% |
| Consumer Cyclical | 222 | -24.34% | -5.54% | 3.57% | 8.29% | 14.84% | 26.52% | 41.95% |
| Technology | 221 | -44.98% | -25.43% | 1.17% | 8.03% | 17.53% | 42.43% | 62.00% |
| Energy | 108 | -20.80% | -5.86% | 2.57% | 7.20% | 11.89% | 18.14% | 26.18% |
| Consumer Defensive | 102 | -28.07% | -11.72% | 2.74% | 6.36% | 14.05% | 21.18% | 34.10% |
| Basic Materials | 99 | -24.96% | -12.21% | 1.48% | 7.59% | 12.90% | 18.17% | 28.16% |
| Communication Services | 84 | -31.96% | -15.47% | -1.56% | 2.75% | 8.84% | 23.67% | 28.52% |
| Financial Services | 75 | -12.66% | -3.41% | -0.50% | -0.14% | 9.36% | 20.17% | 66.62% |
| Utilities | 52 | 1.58% | 2.83% | 4.55% | 5.36% | 6.18% | 9.97% | 16.26% |
| Real Estate | Fewer than 30 comparable companies have this figure on file, so a percentile would be noise. We are not showing one. | |||||||
1530 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; 621 excluded as not applicable (Bank, Capital markets, Insurer, Mortgage REIT); winsorised at p1/p99; min cohort 30. The clamp ran between -305.28% and 89.54%. 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.
One sector is named above without a distribution. 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. The minimum is 30 companies, and a cohort under it refuses rather than publishes a percentile it cannot support.
How this figure is computed
What the business earns after tax on the capital actually tied up in it, borrowed and owned together.
The arithmetic, as the product prints it when a subscriber expands the figure: NOPAT / Invested Capital x 100, where NOPAT = Operating Income x (1 - Tax Rate) and Invested Capital = Equity + Total Debt - Cash.
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.
What the number hides
Invested capital is a balance-sheet position on one day, so a company that raised money in December looks worse than the identical company that raised it in January. Acquisitions load the denominator with goodwill, which flatters an acquirer that has already written it off against one that has not. And the tax rate inside NOPAT is the effective rate of a single filed year, which one settlement can move further than the operating business did.
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.
Related
- Return on equity vs invested capital - the lesson, rather than the cohort.
- Every metric with a published distribution
- Would this rule have broken?
- Whether a company you own is covered