Return on equity
Return on equity is how much profit a company produces per dollar of capital that belongs to its shareholders — the classic measure of how hard the owners' money is working. It is usually written ROE.
How it is computed here
| Formula | net income ÷ average shareholders' equity |
|---|---|
| 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 | roe |
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. |
|---|---|
| Shareholders' equity, this year and last | Total assets minus total liabilities, at both year-ends. The AVERAGE of the two is used, because profit was earned across the year while equity is measured on one day — dividing a year's profit by a single day's balance flatters a company that raised capital in December and punishes one that bought back stock in January. |
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 equity, step by step
A company that earned steadily while its equity grew.
| Net income | $276M |
|---|---|
| Equity at the start of the year | $1,800M |
| Equity at the end of the year | $2,000M |
- Average equity = (1,800 + 2,000) ÷ 2 = $1,900M.
- ROE = 276 ÷ 1,900 = 0.145 = 14.5%.
- Using year-end equity alone would have given 276 ÷ 2,000 = 13.8% — a full point lower, for no reason except which day you looked.
Result: 14.5%
Each dollar the owners had in the business produced fourteen and a half cents of profit this year.
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 equity is good for
ROE is the single number that connects the income statement to the balance sheet. Two companies with the same profit are not equally good if one needed three times the capital to produce it, and this is the ratio that says so.
What this number does not tell you
ROE rises when equity shrinks, and equity shrinks when a company borrows to buy back its own shares. A very high ROE can mean an excellent business or a leveraged one, and the ratio cannot tell you which — read it next to return on assets, which cannot be flattered the same way. Where equity is negative the ratio has no reading at all: this site leaves it blank rather than printing the mathematically well-formed nonsense that a negative denominator produces. This is not a hypothetical edge case here. Of the 5,531 companies on this site with a reported equity balance, 961 — close to one in six — report negative equity in their most recent filing. Every one of those return-on-equity cells is blank. The blank is the reading.
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 equity
| ABBVAbbVie Inc. | 15367.3% |
|---|---|
| CLCOLGATE PALMOLIVE CO | 1603.0% |
| SEATVivid Seats Inc. | 916.1% |
| MAXMediaAlpha, Inc. | 783.8% |
| ARECAmerican Resources Corp | 718.3% |
| HRBH&R BLOCK INC | 710.9% |
| AVAHAveanna Healthcare Holdings, Inc. | 634.7% |
| CHUCCharlie's Holdings, Inc. | 547.7% |
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.