Stats › Valuation › Earnings growth
S&P 500 earnings growth
A price to earnings ratio has two halves, and people argue almost entirely about the first one. The price is known. The earnings depend on which earnings you pick, and if you pick next year's, you aren't measuring anything yet. You're quoting a forecast with a price attached to it.
That's what this page is about. S&P 500 earnings are currently expected to grow fast, and that expectation is doing a lot of work. It's the reason a forward multiple of 20.1 sits so far below a trailing multiple of 28.63, and the reason the same market can look reasonably priced and historically expensive at the same time depending on which figure somebody chooses to show you.
I built it because the forward P/E is the number quoted most often and understood least. There's a well documented tendency for full year analyst estimates to start high and be revised down as the year goes on, and that tendency lives inside every forward multiple you'll ever see, including the historical averages people compare against. Everything here comes from one earnings report and one valuation series, both dated and linked below. Two clicks and you can see whether I've read them correctly.
The S&P 500's blended earnings growth for Q2 2026 was +37.9%, and the estimate for the full calendar year is +27.3%. Those figures are what makes the forward P/E of 20.1 look reasonable against a trailing P/E of 28.63: getting from one to the other requires earnings to rise roughly 42%. If the growth is delivered, the market is not especially expensive. If it is not, the forward multiple was never real, which is the structural weakness of every forward valuation measure.
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