Stats › Valuation › Profit margins
S&P 500 profit margins
Profit margin is the plainest thing on this whole site. Take a dollar of sales, subtract everything it cost to produce, and look at what's left. For the S&P 500 that figure is currently the highest it has been in this series, and it has risen fast enough that it deserves an explanation rather than a mention.
This page gives you the quarterly path, the sector breakdown behind it, and the argument about whether the level is permanent or a peak. That last part is the reason I built it. Margins sit underneath every valuation measure without appearing in any of them, so if you have a view on P/E ratios you already have a view on margins, whether you know it or not.
You'll find both sides here, because I don't think this one is settled. There's a strong case that the changing composition of the index explains a lot of it, and a strong case that composition doesn't explain all of it. Where the data has gaps, like a sector breakdown three quarters older than the index figure, the gap is flagged instead of filled with a guess. Sources, links and dates are at the foot, and the current FactSet report is a two minute read if you'd rather see it first hand.
The S&P 500's blended net profit margin was 16.7% in the second quarter of 2026, against 14.8% the prior quarter, 12.9% a year earlier and a five year average of 12.4%. The move is arithmetic rather than mysterious: blended earnings grew 47.4% year on year while revenue grew 14.1%, so almost the entire earnings increase came from margin rather than volume. Whether margins at this level are a permanent feature or a cycle peak is the single largest unresolved question in equity valuation, because every long run valuation measure implicitly assumes an answer.
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