Q3 Earnings: Our First Look

Good news, aficionados of financial analysis! The famed Calcbench Earnings Tracker is back in action, with our first analysis of Q3 2026 earnings data. 

Our sample size in this first week of Q3 analysis is still small: 243 non-financial companies, almost all of them large firms in the S&P 500 since those are typically the folks who file first after quarter-close. Within that group, however, the numbers do seem off to a promising start.


Figure 1, below, tells the tale. Revenue is up 15.2 percent from the year-ago period, operating income up 26.2 percent, and net income up 38 percent. 


You might recall that Q2 earnings growth was distorted by what we called the SpaceX effect: gigantic leaps in net income in that period caused by a few tech firms reporting one-time gains from shares of SpaceX ($SPCX) that they owned, since SpaceX had just gone public.


Here in Q3, that effect no longer exists. SpaceX ended Q3 at $148 per share, down from $157.50 at the end of Q2. This means that some companies might now report small losses on SpaceX holdings in the Other Income(Loss) line, but in the grand scheme of Q3 net income growth none of that is likely to be material.


What we really see in this first week of earnings analysis is the oversized effect that a few large, company-specific items can have on our relatively small sample size. 


For example, note the 65.5 percent drop in restructuring charges compared to one year ago; that’s because Q3 2025 included big restructuring charges from Starbucks ($SBUX) and Air Products & Chemicals ($APD) at $795 million and $755 million, respectively, which don’t exist in this year’s Q3 numbers. 


At this early juncture, we only recommend that analysts keep their eyes on fundamentals, such as whether growth in expenses is exceeding growth in revenue. So far it’s not, although growth in operating expenses is less than 1 point behind growth in revenue. 


We also need to study capex spending, and whether that growth is being pushed along by a tiny number of AI hyperscalers spending gobs of money on data centers while everyone else is cutting capex. The Calcbench research team will explore that question further in weeks to come.


Figure 2, below, shows our Earnings Tracker data in table format. 


Metric Q3 2026 Q3 2025 Firms YoY Change
Revenue $1.12T $974.73B 234 15.2%
Cost Of Revenue $631.40B $572.87B 210 10.2%
Capex $124.94B $78.56B 175 59.0%
Operating Expenses $274.73B $239.69B 228 14.6%
SGA Expense $168.67B $149.36B 224 12.9%
Operating Income $203.47B $161.18B 243 26.2%
Operating Cash Flow $256.89B $191.31B 213 34.3%
EBIT $202.36B $167.07B 233 21.1%
Net Income $154.09B $111.65B 239 38.0%
Assets $6.33T $5.63T 235 12.3%
Inventory $359.36B $330.60B 160 8.7%
Cash $445.21B $360.17B 229 23.6%
Liabilities $4.04T $3.65T 228 10.7%
Total Debt $1.85T $1.72T 179 7.5%

Calcbench tracks these earnings using our Earnings Tracker template, which pulls in financial disclosures as companies file their latest earnings releases with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Earnings Tracker provides an up-to-the minute snapshot of financial performance compared to the year-earlier period.


If Calcbench subscribers wish to get their hands on the template we use for this analysis, so you can conduct your own experiments at home, use this link to the file. 


Please note that it will only work with an active Calcbench subscription. If you need an active subscription (and who doesn’t, really, when swift access to real-time data is so important?), contact us at us@calcbench.com.


That’s all for this week. Come back next Friday for more!

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