Skip to content
MARKETS / GLOSSARY / NET MARGIN

Net margin

Net margin is how many cents of each dollar billed survive all the way to the bottom line — net income as a share of revenue. It is also called net profit margin.

Definition

How it is computed here

Formulanet income ÷ revenue
UnitRatio (shown as %)
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
Identifiermargem_liquida
The inputs

What goes into the formula

Net incomeWhat is left after every cost, expense, interest payment and tax.
RevenueThe top line, net of collected sales taxes where the filing still includes them.

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 net margin, step by step

A supermarket and a software company.

Supermarket — revenue$100,000M
Supermarket — net income$2,000M
Software — revenue$4,000M
Software — net income$1,200M
  1. Supermarket: 2,000 ÷ 100,000 = 0.02 = 2.0%.
  2. Software: 1,200 ÷ 4,000 = 0.30 = 30.0%.
  3. The supermarket earned 1.7 times more money on a margin fifteen times thinner.

Result: 2.0% against 30.0% — and the thin one earned more

Margin is a rate, not an amount. The supermarket sells its inventory dozens of times a year; the software company sells its product once and collects for years. Comparing their margins compares two things that were never the same measurement.

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 net margin is good for

Net margin is the clearest single measure of whether a business model converts activity into profit, and it is the figure most people mean when they ask whether a company is profitable. Tracked across years for one company it shows whether growth is being bought or earned.

The limit

What this number does not tell you

Margin is close to meaningless across industries. A supermarket earning 2% and a software company earning 30% are not comparable — the supermarket turns its capital over many times a year and the software company does not. Compare margins inside an industry, or not at all. Net margin also inherits every one-off in net income: a single asset sale can double it for one year. The spread across industries is wide enough to make comparison meaningless. In the most recent year, the median net margin of the 971 financial companies on this site is 13.4%; the median for the 1,222 healthcare companies is −30.0%. Both are ordinary results for their sector. A margin only carries information next to the margins of companies that do the same thing.

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

In the data

Highest reported net margin

From the most recent fiscal year of each company.

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.

Related

Read next