Walmart Inc.'s return on equity: 3 definitions, 3 answers
Depending on which definition is used, Walmart Inc.'s return on equity for FY2026 is anywhere from 20.68% to 22.97%. Every one of them is arithmetically correct, and all of them come out of the same filed balance sheet.
Computed from Walmart Inc.'s 10-K for fiscal 2026, the year ended 2026-01-31, filed 2026-03-13. Accession 0000104169-26-000055 on the SEC archive (opens in a new tab)
The same balance sheet, read 3 ways
| Definition | Formula, in filed line items | Measured over | Value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Net income over closing equity | netIncome / totalStockholdersEquity | One filed fiscal year | 21.98% |
| Net income over average equity | netIncome / ((totalStockholdersEquity this year + totalStockholdersEquity last year) / 2) | Two filed balance sheets | 22.97% |
| Net income over total equity including minority interestsours | netIncome / totalEquity | One filed fiscal year | 20.68% |
The lowest of these is 20.68% and the highest is 22.97%, a factor of 1.11. All of them are arithmetically correct. They are answers to different questions, and the column above says which question each one answers.
- Net income over closing equity
- A full year of profit over the equity standing on the last day of it. The most commonly published of the three, and the one that moves most when a company buys back stock late in the year. Read from Net income 21.89 bn USD, Total stockholders' equity 99.62 bn USD.
- Net income over average equity
- The textbook definition. Profit earned over a year is matched against the equity that was employed across that year, so it needs the prior year's balance sheet and cannot be computed for a company's first filed year. Read from Net income 21.89 bn USD, Total stockholders' equity 99.62 bn USD, Total stockholders' equity (prior year) 91.01 bn USD.
- Net income over total equity including minority interests
- Adds the equity held by outside shareholders in consolidated subsidiaries. Identical to the closing figure where a company has no minority interests, and materially lower where it has large ones. Read from Net income 21.89 bn USD, Total equity 105.89 bn USD.
And our own figure. The number this product prints for WMT is 20.68%, computed as netIncome divided by total equity, taking totalEquity where the filer reports it and totalStockholdersEquity otherwise. That is the net income over total equity including minority interests line above.
What this page does not claim
It does not say that a figure you read elsewhere is wrong. Every definition above is a legitimate one in use, and a publisher printing any of them is printing a correct number. What is usually missing from the page you read it on is the sentence saying which of these it is, and that sentence is the whole content of this page. No other publisher's figure is quoted here; all of these were computed by us from the filing linked above.
What this page leaves out
Evaluated over 10 filed fiscal years, FY2017 to FY2026. Accounts filed before this company began tagging its statements in XBRL are not machine-readable and are outside this page. No share price is involved in any figure here, so nothing on this page is limited by the depth of our price archive.
Figures on this page are recomputed from statements filed with the SEC, and each row names the submission it came from. Filings can be mis-tagged upstream and companies restate, so check a number against the filing before you rely on it. To find out whether a company you own can be answered this way at all, use the coverage checker.
Related
This is one figure on one company. Inside the product, every number on screen opens into the formula that produced it, the filed inputs, the fiscal year and the filing date, for the same reason this page exists: a figure whose definition is hidden is not evidence.