Company research
What large US companies spend on the future: R&D and capital expenditure
Roughly half the largest US companies report no research spending at all, which is why a sector's average R&D intensity usually measures how many of its members are research businesses rather than how much they spend. This computes it over the disclosing companies only, and says how many that is.
168 of 375 companies disclose R&D · FY2015–FY2025
FY2015–FY2025
- R&D, FY2025
- 9.54%
- 6.69% of revenue in FY2015
- Median disclosing company
- 10.44%
- middle company, not the aggregate
- Capital expenditure
- 7.77%
- low of 5.91% in FY2021
- Total R&D
- $673B
- capex $1.25T
- Disclose any R&D
- 168 of 375
- 45% of the universe
| Fiscal year | R&D, aggregate | R&D, median | Disclosing | Capex | R&D spent | Capex spent |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 9.54% | 10.44% | 168 of 374 | 7.77% | $673B | $1.25T |
| 2024 | 8.99% | 10.40% | 180 of 374 | 7.13% | $606B | $1.08T |
| 2023 | 9.09% | 10.79% | 179 of 375 | 6.38% | $571B | $908B |
| 2022 | 8.09% | 10.13% | 179 of 373 | 6.16% | $501B | $845B |
| 2021 | 7.81% | 9.20% | 178 of 366 | 5.91% | $434B | $720B |
| 2020 | 8.23% | 11.24% | 170 of 365 | 6.25% | $371B | $652B |
| 2019 | 7.53% | 10.33% | 170 of 362 | 6.73% | $336B | $708B |
| 2018 | 7.02% | 9.33% | 168 of 357 | 6.82% | $306B | $673B |
| 2017 | 6.97% | 10.05% | 162 of 352 | 6.50% | $273B | $592B |
| 2016 | 7.35% | 9.16% | 157 of 346 | 6.82% | $241B | $577B |
| 2015 | 6.69% | 9.60% | 151 of 339 | 7.21% | $216B | $589B |
| Sector | R&D | In FY2015 | Median | Disclosing | Capex | R&D spent |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Communication Services | 16.51% | 5.37% | 12.80% | 6 of 14 | 17.59% | $124B |
| Technology | 11.59% | 9.08% | 15.82% | 73 of 80 | 10.35% | $238B |
| Consumer Cyclical | 11.13% | 6.45% | 7.85% | 9 of 30 | 10.11% | $141B |
| Healthcare | 10.53% | 9.72% | 13.03% | 33 of 45 | 1.63% | $122B |
| Financial Services | 9.82% | 4.85% | 9.35% | 5 of 57 | 2.97% | $6B |
| Industrials | 4.24% | 3.24% | 3.16% | 28 of 55 | 6.26% | $36B |
| Consumer Defensive | 2.37% | 1.66% | — | 2 of 20 | 3.13% | $698M |
| Basic Materials | 2.20% | 1.29% | — | 4 of 13 | 13.52% | $2B |
| Energy | 0.44% | 1.20% | 0.60% | 8 of 25 | 9.04% | $4B |
| Utilities | — | 0.18% | — | 0 of 22 | 39.16% | — |
| Real Estate | — | 0.42% | — | 0 of 14 | 9.78% | — |
| Company | R&D spent | Share of revenue |
|---|---|---|
| AMZN Consumer Cyclical | $109B | 15.14% |
| GOOGL Communication Services | $61B | 15.16% |
| META Communication Services | $57B | 28.55% |
| AAPL Technology | $35B | 8.30% |
| MSFT Technology | $32B | 11.53% |
| JNJ Healthcare | $15B | 15.57% |
| INTC Technology | $14B | 26.06% |
| LLY Healthcare | $13B | 20.46% |
| NVDA Technology | $13B | 9.90% |
| MRK Healthcare | $13B | 19.27% |
| PFE Healthcare | $12B | 19.14% |
| AVGO Technology | $11B | 17.18% |
| BMY Healthcare | $10B | 20.65% |
| ORCL Technology | $10B | 17.18% |
| F Consumer Cyclical | $9B | 5.02% |
| Company | R&D intensity | Change | R&D, FY2025 |
|---|---|---|---|
| AXON Industrials | 11.9%→24.6% | +12.7%pts | $684M |
| NTRA Healthcare | 14.6%→27.1% | +12.5%pts | $624M |
| VEEV Technology | 13.1%→25.2% | +12.1%pts | $693M |
| GILD Healthcare | 9.2%→19.7% | +10.5%pts | $6B |
| EA Technology | 24.2%→34.4% | +10.2%pts | $3B |
| MSTR Technology | 12.3%→19.7% | +7.4%pts | $94M |
| STRF Technology | 12.3%→19.7% | +7.4%pts | $94M |
| TTWO Technology | 10.6%→17.8% | +7.2%pts | $1B |
| MCHP Technology | 16.3%→22.4% | +6.1%pts | $984M |
| IBM Technology | 6.4%→12.3% | +5.9%pts | $8B |
| KEYS Technology | 13.6%→18.7% | +5.2%pts | $1B |
| AAPL Technology | 3.5%→8.3% | +4.9%pts | $35B |
| ISRG Healthcare | 8.3%→13.0% | +4.8%pts | $1B |
| INTC Technology | 21.9%→26.1% | +4.2%pts | $14B |
| EBAY Consumer Cyclical | 10.7%→14.8% | +4.1%pts | $2B |
| Company | R&D intensity | Change | R&D, FY2025 |
|---|---|---|---|
| ALNY Healthcare | 672.8%→35.7% | -637.1%pts | $1B |
| VRTX Healthcare | 96.5%→31.1% | -65.4%pts | $4B |
| P Industrials | 53.1%→25.4% | -27.8%pts | $804M |
| DXCM Healthcare | 34.2%→12.9% | -21.4%pts | $599M |
| OKTA Technology | 44.8%→24.6% | -20.2%pts | $642M |
| NVDA Technology | 29.1%→9.9% | -19.2%pts | $13B |
| BE Industrials | 25.4%→9.2% | -16.2%pts | $186M |
| ANET Technology | 25.0%→13.7% | -11.3%pts | $1B |
| TSLA Consumer Cyclical | 17.7%→6.8% | -11.0%pts | $6B |
| WDAY Technology | 40.2%→31.1% | -9.1%pts | $3B |
| KLAC Technology | 18.9%→11.2% | -7.7%pts | $1B |
| MPWR Technology | 19.8%→13.7% | -6.1%pts | $382M |
| TWLO Technology | 25.5%→20.1% | -5.4%pts | $1B |
| ADSK Technology | 28.9%→24.2% | -4.7%pts | $1B |
| ABBV Healthcare | 19.4%→14.9% | -4.5%pts | $9B |
Largest US-listed operating companies by market capitalisation, one line per company, foreign private issuers (ADRs and 20-F filers) excluded. Full provenance, method and a citation line are in Sources and method below. The universe and every filing behind them are listed in full.
Two lines that used to move in opposite directions
Among the 168 companies in this universe that report a research line at all, R&D went from 6.69% of revenue in FY2015 to 9.54% in FY2025, and in dollars from $216B to $673B — 3.1 times as much. The other 207 companies report none, which is not an omission: a bank or a pipeline genuinely has no research line, and averaging their zeros in is how published sector figures end up measuring composition instead of intensity.
Capital expenditure is the more interesting series right now. It fell as a share of revenue for most of the decade, bottoming at 5.91% in FY2021, and has turned back up to 7.77%. That reversal is the data-centre build-out arriving in the filings as cash actually spent, and it is visible a long way before it shows up in anybody's earnings.
Read the median column beside the aggregate. The aggregate is dominated by a handful of enormous research budgets, so when the two diverge it is telling you the sector's spending is concentrated rather than broad — which is a different fact about an industry than a high average.
The limitation worth stating plainly: what lands in the R&D line is partly an accounting choice. The rules were not written with software in mind, and a company that capitalises engineering work into software assets reports a lower research number than one that expenses the same work. Compare a company or a sector against its own history first; compare across sectors with that caveat attached.
Questions people ask about this
- Why exclude companies that report no R&D?
- Because including them measures the wrong thing. A bank and a utility genuinely spend nothing on research, so putting a zero in the average turns a sector's R&D intensity into a headcount of how many of its members are research businesses. The share here is computed over the disclosing companies and their revenue only, and the count of disclosing companies is printed next to every figure so the denominator is never hidden.
- Is R&D comparable across sectors?
- Only loosely. What lands in the R&D line is an accounting choice bounded by rules that were not written with software in mind: a pharmaceutical company's trials are unambiguously research, while a technology company can capitalise part of the same engineering work into software assets and report a lower number. Compare a sector against its own history first, and against another sector only with that caveat attached.
- Why show capital expenditure alongside it?
- Because the two together are what a company spends on the future, and they have moved in opposite directions for most of the last decade — research rising as a share of revenue while capital spending fell. The recent turn in capital expenditure is the more interesting one: it is where the build-out of data centres shows up in the filings, and it shows up as cash spent rather than as a press release.
Sources and method
- Data
- SEC filings (EDGAR) — Each company's annual report on Form 10-K. Every company named on the page links to the filing its figures were read from.
- Financial Modeling Prep — Distributor of the filing data, and the source of the market caps used to pick the universe.
- How it was calculated
- Same universe as the other filing pages. Research and development expense and revenue come from the annual income statement; capital expenditure from the cash-flow statement of the same fiscal year. Sector figures are aggregates — total spend over total revenue — computed across the companies that disclose the line, and the number of those companies is published beside each figure. The median column is the middle disclosing company, which is not moved by one large spender. Companies reporting no R&D are excluded from R&D figures rather than counted as zero.
- How often it changes
- Rebuilt from the filings about once a year, after the bulk of the universe has reported. The fiscal year it runs through is at the top of the page.
- Citing this page
Free to quote — please link rather than copy the table.
Plutux. "What large US companies spend on the future: R&D and capital expenditure." Data through FY2025. https://plutux.ai/ko/resources/tools/research-and-development-by-sector
Historical figures for information only — not investment advice, and not a forecast.
Related tools
- Reinvest or pay outCompanies sorted by what they spent in 2015-2019, then measured on what they grew through 2025 — with the survivorship problem stated up front rather than hidden.
- Revenue per employeeA decade of revenue against the headcount each company actually reported, and the point where the two stopped moving together.
- Interest burdenInterest expense against operating profit, by sector, through the zero-rate years and out the other side.