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US corporate profits and GDP

Valuation/profits · 1947 to 2026 · BEA national accounts · 3 sources · data as of 1 Aug 2026

Somebody has to keep score of what American companies actually earn, and in the United States that somebody is the Bureau of Economic Analysis. It counts profits across the whole corporate sector as part of the national accounts, then publishes them alongside the size of the economy. Put one over the other and you get a single number: how much of everything the country produces is landing as corporate profit.

This page has that ratio going back to 1947, the levels behind it, and the part almost everyone skips, which is that the same BEA release contains three different corporate profits numbers that differ by hundreds of billions of dollars. It also explains why this data does not line up with S&P 500 earnings, because those two get compared constantly and they measure different companies on different rules.

I built it as a reference you can check a claim against. When you see a headline saying profits are at a record share of the economy, or that margins have to come back down, the numbers here let you ask which series they used and which baseline they compared it to. Every figure is computed from published series that are linked below with their release dates. Where I've divided two series myself rather than quoting a published one, the page says so, and you can redo the division yourself in a minute.