Valuation Terminal View
Equity Valuation
What investors pay today for each dollar of profit the S&P 500 is expected to earn over the next twelve months.
Core print
Current reading
S&P 500 is at 19.55×, in the lower half of its own five-year range (37th percentile). That is 3.9% below its five-year median of 20.34×. Over the past twelve months the multiple has compressed by 2.83 points. A multiple is only readable next to what moved it: check whether estimates are rising or falling before calling this expansion or growth.
Interactive chart
S&P 500 trades at a blended forward 12-month P/E of 19.55× as of August 22, 2026, an earnings yield of 5.11%. Change from the previous session: −0.04. That is the 37th percentile of the trailing five years. Against every observation since 1998 it is the 71th percentile, across 7,323 daily readings. Recorded once a day and kept permanently — consensus estimates carry no vintages, so this history cannot be rebuilt after the fact.
The broadest read on US equity valuation. Because the multiple is price divided by expected earnings, it moves for two very different reasons — the market re-rating, or analysts revising their forecasts — and separating the two is most of the analytical work. A multiple that climbs while estimates fall is expansion; one that climbs alongside estimates is growth being paid for.
Each index is priced as a whole rather than as an average of its members: every constituent contributes its own expected earnings and its own market value, and the index multiple is the ratio of the two, weighted the way the index itself weights them. Expected earnings blend the next two fiscal years in proportion to how much of the coming twelve months falls in each, so the number does not jump when a company rolls its fiscal year. Companies that report in a currency other than the dollar are converted before aggregation, not after.
Values through the launch date come from a terminal-data archive of daily closes; every value after it is computed on this site from consensus earnings estimates and the tracking ETF’s published weights. The two agree to within 1% on the overlap for the S&P 500, Nasdaq-100 and technology.
S&P 500 Forward P/E: 19.55× (5.11% Earnings yield), As of August 22, 2026.
A multiple on its own answers nothing — the same 20× was late-cycle in 2000 and early-cycle in 2013. What makes it readable is position: this page ranks the current reading against the trailing five years and against the whole history back to 1998, and both numbers are shown above the chart. Read the level together with the rank, and against the direction of estimates.
It divides the current price by the profit a company or index is expected to earn over a future period, rather than the profit it has already reported. A blended forward 12-month P/E uses the next twelve months specifically, drawing on both of the next two fiscal years in proportion.
Prices reflect what investors expect, not what already happened. A trailing multiple can look cheap at the top of an earnings cycle and expensive at the bottom, because the denominator is describing a period the market has already moved past.
Because the denominator moves too. In deeply cyclical sectors the multiple is lowest when earnings are at their peak — which is usually late in a cycle, not early. Semiconductors are the clearest case of this inversion.
It is the P/E turned upside down — expected earnings divided by price, expressed as a percentage. It stays meaningful when earnings approach zero, where the P/E ratio runs away to infinity, and it can be compared directly against a bond yield.
Once every day. Each reading is kept permanently, which is what turns a current number into a history.