Return on assets
Return on assets is profit per dollar of everything the company controls, borrowed or owned — how productive the asset base itself is, ignoring who financed it. It is usually written ROA.
How it is computed here
| Formula | net income ÷ average total assets |
|---|---|
| Unit | Ratio (shown as %) |
| Period | One fiscal year, as reported |
| Source | Extracted from SEC filings; every value on an asset page carries the accounting tag and the filing it came from |
| Identifier | roa |
What goes into the formula
| Net income | The bottom line for the fiscal year, after every cost, interest payment and tax. A full year's worth of earning, which is what makes the balance below an awkward counterpart. |
|---|---|
| Total assets, this year and last | Everything on the left side of the balance sheet, at both year-ends. The average of the two is used, for the same reason as in return on equity: a year's profit against one day's balance is a mismatch. |
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.
How to calculate return on assets, step by step
The same company as the ROE example, now including what it borrowed.
| Net income | $276M |
|---|---|
| Total assets at the start | $5,600M |
| Total assets at the end | $6,000M |
| Average equity, from the ROE entry | $1,900M |
- Average total assets = (5,600 + 6,000) ÷ 2 = $5,800M.
- ROA = 276 ÷ 5,800 = 0.048 = 4.8%.
- ROE was 14.5%. The gap between 4.8% and 14.5% is leverage: the company controls $5,800M of assets on $1,900M of its owners' money.
Result: 4.8%, against an ROE of 14.5%
Reading the two together is the point. ROA says how good the business is; the distance to ROE says how much borrowing is amplifying it.
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.
What return on assets is good for
ROA answers the question ROE cannot: is this a good business, or a normal business with a lot of debt? It is the natural check on a headline ROE, and for banks — whose whole model is running assets on thin equity — it is the more meaningful of the two.
What this number does not tell you
Assets are carried at accounting values that can be decades old or freshly written up after an acquisition. Two companies with identical operations show different ROA if one grew by buying and the other by building, because the buyer's balance sheet carries goodwill the builder never recorded. ROA is also not comparable across industries at all: a bank earning 1% and a consultancy earning 20% are not on the same scale. Assets differ so much by industry that the ratio does not survive the comparison. In the most recent year, the median return on assets among the 159 utilities on this site is 2.6%, and among the 1,222 healthcare companies it is −33.9%. The materials sector shows the trap most clearly: a positive median net margin of 1.7% alongside a negative median return on assets of −3.6%, because the asset base is enormous and carried at values set long ago.
Every metric on this site is published with its blind spot stated. A figure without its limit is half a fact.
Highest reported return on assets
| BRVOBravo Multinational Inc. | 127056.6% |
|---|---|
| ALRTFALR Technologies SG Ltd. | 34778.9% |
| ESSIECO SCIENCE SOLUTIONS, INC. | 6790.6% |
| LGSPLEGEND SPICES, INC. | 6501.4% |
| NSTMNovelStem International Corp. | 2706.0% |
| MDEXMadison Technologies Inc. | 2282.8% |
| VSAVisionSys AI Inc | 1659.3% |
| DLTIDLT Resolution Inc. | 1039.9% |
From the most recent fiscal year of each company.
See it in a published filing
These pages show the figure across up to nineteen fiscal years, with the accounting tag and the filing behind every value.