Metrics for Tracking Debt Exposure

Today we return to the issue of corporate debt, and which firms might feel more pressure in 2027 as they try to refinance old debt at today’s higher interest rates. Our previous post last week gave a few suggestions for how analysts can use Calcbench to track such data; now let’s consider a few more examples based on actual corporate disclosures. 

To start, we used our Multi-Company page to pull up the 2025 disclosures of non-financial companies in the S&P 500. We looked at interest expense compared to net income, and charted those companies with the highest ratios of interest expense to net income. Figure 1, below, shows the top 10.

Name	Ticker	Interest Expense	Net Income	Ratio
American Airlines Group Inc.	AAL	$1,716,000,000	$111,000,000	1545.9%
Aes Corp	AES	$1,407,000,000	$162,000,000	868.5%
Omnicom Group Inc.	OMC	$263,400,000	$43,700,000	602.7%
Pvh Corp.	PVH	$94,200,000	$25,300,000	372.3%
Advance Auto Parts	AAP	$139,000,000	$44,000,000	315.9%
Warner Bros. Discovery	WBD	$2,085,000,000	$727,000,000	286.8%
Alaska Air Group	ALK	$272,000,000	$100,000,000	272.0%
Organon & Co.	OGN	$504,000,000	$187,000,000	269.5%
Genuine Parts Co	GPC	$163,506,000	$65,945,000	247.9%
Norwegian Cruise Lines Ltd.	NCLH	$953,506,000	$423,246,000	225.3%

In theory, these companies could face painful consequences if they need to refinance debt at higher interest rates in 2027, because they have little room to maneuver on the net income line. If their interest expense shoots up, net income could evaporate — or the company would need to grow rapidly, cut costs, or both. 

That said, Figure 1 doesn’t take us very far. Analysts next need to know whether a specific company they follow has a specific tranche of debt coming due in 2027, and at what interest rate.

Calcbench subscribers could then pivot to our Disclosures & Footnotes Query page, which tracks all the granular disclosures you’d need to perform company-specific analysis.

For example, Advance Auto Parts ($AAP) is No. 5 on our list, with $139 million in interest expense versus $44 million in net income for 2025. If you then look at the company’s debt disclosure footnote from its 2025 Form 10-K, filed back in February, you’d see that Advanced Auto had $350 million in debt coming due in October 2027 at an interest rate of 1.75 percent. See Figure 2, below.

That $350 million debt tranche due next year could be problematic, because interest rates are likely to be considerably higher than 1.75 percent by next fall. (For comparison purposes, the current Fed Funds rate is 3.88 percent right now.) If Advance Auto has to roll over that debt at higher rates, net income could get pinched.

But that debt disclosure in the 10-K is already eight months old. So we skipped ahead to the company’s second-quarter report, filed on Aug. 20. The debt footnote from that period added an important detail:

During the second quarter of fiscal 2026, the Company entered into a Rule 10b5-1 Repurchase Plan (the "Repurchase Plan") to effect repurchases of outstanding principal amounts of the Company's 1.75% Senior Unsecured Notes due October 1, 2027 (the "2027 Notes") and the 5.95% Senior Unsecured Notes due March 9, 2028 (the "2028 Notes"), subject to certain price and market conditions. During the second quarter ended July 18, 2026, the Company repurchased an aggregate $0.1 million and $29 million of outstanding principal related to the 2027 Notes and 2028 Notes under the Repurchase Plan, respectively.

So Advanced Auto at least has plans to pay down that low-interest rate debt before it comes due in one year’s time, and has made a token ($100,000) payment already. Where will things stand in months to come? We’ll need to wait for Advanced to file its next 10-Q sometime in November and then for future updates in periods after that.

Other Examples

We pinwheeled through a few other firms in our Top 10 list above to see what else they might be disclosing in their own footnotes. For example… 

• Clothing company PVH Corp. ($PVH) has $709.1 million due in 2027 at a rate of 3.125 percent.

• Power utility AES Corp. ($AES) has $3.55 billion in debt maturing in 2027, although the company doesn’t disclose exact interest rates for that debt coming due. It reports debt by type (fixed rate bank notes, variable rate bonds, and so forth) with average interest rates per type (which tended to be 5.6 to 9.1 percent).

• Biotech company Organon ($OGN) reported $8.63 billion in total debt, but none of that amount seems to be due in 2027.

A Few Factors Among Many

Of course, debt load and interest expense are only two among many factors that you might want to include in your analytical picture. For example, a company might be able to avoid the pain of higher interest expense if it can grow its business — but how likely is that for the company you follow, given tariff costs, inflationary pressures, and finicky consumer sentiment? 

Maybe those other factors won’t matter much to net income growth, or maybe they will. You might need to perform other financial analysis to answer those questions, which would then allow you to contemplate interest expense questions more carefully.

Our point is simply that solid financial analysis depends on looking at multiple angles, which in turn depends on pulling together the right data for each of those angles. Calcbench has it; all you need to do is pull it up.