MARKETS / GLOSSARY / FISCAL YEAR

Fiscal year

A fiscal year is the twelve-month period a company chooses to report on. It does not have to be the calendar year, and for a great many companies it is not.

Definition

How it is computed here

Formulathe twelve months the company itself declares as its reporting year
UnitNot a figure — a convention
PeriodOne fiscal year, as reported
SourceExtracted from SEC filings; every value on an asset page carries the accounting tag and the filing it came from
The inputs

What goes into the formula

The company's chosen year endA date the company sets and the regulator accepts. Retailers commonly end in late January, after the Christmas season has been counted and the stock cleared; technology hardware companies often end in September; agricultural businesses end after the harvest.
The label used hereThis site labels a year the way the filing does. A fiscal year ending in September 2025 is FY2025, even though a third of it happened in 2024.

A formula without its inputs explained is decoration. Where an input is missing from a filing, the metric is left empty here rather than completed with a zero or an estimate.

Worked example

How to calculate fiscal year, step by step

Three companies reporting 'FY2025'.

Company A — year ended31 December 2025
Company B — year ended27 September 2025
Company C — year ended31 January 2026
  1. All three are labelled FY2025.
  2. A covers January to December 2025.
  3. B covers October 2024 to September 2025.
  4. C covers February 2025 to January 2026.
  5. A and C overlap by eleven months. B and C overlap by four.

Result: Three 'FY2025' figures covering three different years

Putting these three side by side in a table — which every screener on the internet does, including this one — compares periods that are not the same period. It is usually close enough to be useful, and it is never exact.

The figures in this example are illustrative and rounded — they are not a real company. The real figures on this site are the live ones below and on every asset page, each carrying the filing it came from.

Why it matters

What fiscal year is good for

Every figure on this site is annual and labelled by fiscal year, so knowing what that label means is the difference between reading the data and misreading it. It also explains apparent anomalies: a retailer whose 'FY2025' includes the whole of the 2025 Christmas season is not comparable to one whose FY2025 ended in November.

The limit

What this number does not tell you

The label does not tell you the end date, and this site prints the label rather than the date on summary tables. A company that CHANGES its fiscal year end produces one short or long 'year' in the series, and a growth rate measured across it is measuring a different number of months at each end. Nothing here restates a company's history onto a calendar-year basis: doing so would require allocating quarters the filing does not provide, and that would be an estimate.

Every metric on this site is published with its blind spot stated. A figure without its limit is half a fact.

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On a real company

See it in a published filing

Their sectors

These pages show the figure across up to nineteen fiscal years, with the accounting tag and the filing behind every value.

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