Company research
Revenue per employee, sector by sector, from the 10-K headcounts
Every large US company prints its employee count on the cover of its 10-K. Put a decade of those numbers next to the revenue in the same filing and you get the one productivity series nobody publishes — including the years since 2022, when revenue kept climbing and headcount did not.
375 companies · fiscal years 2015–2025
FY2015–FY2025
- Companies studied
- 375
- market cap above $28B
- People employed
- 25.0M
- as reported for FY2025
- Median, FY2025
- $678K
- $434K in FY2015
- Sector aggregate
- $673K
- total revenue ÷ total headcount
- With headcount disclosed
- 366 of 375
- 9 report none
| Sector | Median FY2025 | Aggregate | Employees | Revenue, 3y | Headcount, 3y | Per employee, 3y | Headcount, 10y |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Financial Services57 | $958K | $914K | 3,000K | +48.2% | +2.8% | +13.0% a year | +21.4% |
| Communication Services14 | $1.11M | $1.18M | 1,224K | +23.5% | -4.8% | +9.0% a year | -8.4% |
| Healthcare45 | $653K | $1.22M | 2,832K | +26.5% | +0.2% | +8.1% a year | +46.4% |
| Industrials55 | $442K | $433K | 3,369K | +16.3% | -6.0% | +7.3% a year | +2.4% |
| Consumer Cyclical30 | $394K | $407K | 4,817K | +25.5% | +5.0% | +6.1% a year | +41.4% |
| Consumer Defensive20 | $636K | $427K | 4,277K | +10.7% | -5.4% | +5.4% a year | +4.7% |
| Technology80 | $490K | $520K | 4,146K | +22.6% | +8.5% | +4.1% a year | +25.4% |
| Real Estate14 | $1.60M | $545K | 234K | +30.2% | +25.8% | +1.2% a year | +97.1% |
| Utilities22 | $1.20M | $1.24M | 289K | +5.4% | +4.3% | +0.3% a year | -5.6% |
| Basic Materials13 | $759K | $653K | 352K | +3.2% | +3.7% | -0.2% a year | +22.7% |
| Energy25 | $5.06M | $2.56M | 411K | -17.2% | +8.2% | -8.5% a year | -15.2% |
| Fiscal year | Median | Aggregate | Total employees | Total revenue | Companies |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | $678K | $673K | 24.95M | $16.79T | 362 |
| 2024 | $651K | $635K | 24.77M | $15.73T | 362 |
| 2023 | $596K | $588K | 24.31M | $14.30T | 355 |
| 2022 | $545K | $562K | 24.57M | $13.81T | 353 |
| 2021 | $528K | $516K | 23.85M | $12.31T | 351 |
| 2020 | $483K | $471K | 22.14M | $10.42T | 341 |
| 2019 | $509K | $484K | 21.62M | $10.46T | 332 |
| 2018 | $498K | $471K | 20.89M | $9.84T | 326 |
| 2017 | $474K | $450K | 19.67M | $8.85T | 316 |
| 2016 | $450K | $425K | 19.30M | $8.21T | 311 |
| 2015 | $434K | $414K | 19.33M | $8.00T | 307 |
| Company | Revenue per employee | Change | Revenue | Headcount |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GE Industrials | $169K→$804K | +374.9% | +57.4% | -66.9% |
| APP Technology | $1.68M→$6.26M | +272.0% | +94.6% | -47.7% |
| NVDA Technology | $1.20M→$3.62M | +202.7% | +384.9% | +60.2% |
| ALNY Healthcare | $518K→$1.49M | +186.7% | +258.0% | +24.9% |
| KKR Financial Services | $1.34M→$3.82M | +184.8% | +246.1% | +21.5% |
| LVS Consumer Cyclical | $116K→$317K | +174.2% | +216.7% | +15.5% |
| HOOD Financial Services | $590K→$1.54M | +161.2% | +229.4% | +26.1% |
| MCK Healthcare | $3.52M→$7.98M | +126.7% | +36.0% | -40.0% |
| BNY Financial Services | $383K→$841K | +119.5% | +104.2% | -7.0% |
| IBKR Financial Services | $1.49M→$3.22M | +116.3% | +144.1% | +12.8% |
| COIN Financial Services | $708K→$1.45M | +104.8% | +124.8% | +9.8% |
| PLTR Technology | $497K→$1.01M | +103.5% | +134.8% | +15.4% |
| TFC Financial Services | $404K→$786K | +94.4% | +36.5% | -29.8% |
| TWLO Technology | $469K→$907K | +93.3% | +32.4% | -31.5% |
| BE Industrials | $474K→$914K | +92.9% | +68.8% | -12.5% |
| Company | Revenue per employee | Change | Revenue | Headcount |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IBM Technology | $30.22M→$256K | -99.2% | +11.6% | +13,095.2% |
| MRNA Healthcare | $4.84M→$414K | -91.5% | -89.7% | +20.5% |
| ET Energy | $7.15M→$3.70M | -48.2% | -8.1% | +77.6% |
| LITE Technology | $251K→$156K | -38.0% | -3.9% | +55.0% |
| TRGP Energy | $7.61M→$4.80M | -36.9% | -21.0% | +25.3% |
| EOG Energy | $10.35M→$6.64M | -35.9% | -23.5% | +19.3% |
| STLD Basic Materials | $1.85M→$1.26M | -31.6% | -18.3% | +19.4% |
| OXY Energy | $3.03M→$2.07M | -31.5% | -40.4% | -13.0% |
| OKE Energy | $7.71M→$5.32M | -31.1% | +47.0% | +113.3% |
| PFE Healthcare | $1.21M→$834K | -31.0% | -37.6% | -9.6% |
| VLO Energy | $18.10M→$12.51M | -30.9% | -30.4% | +0.7% |
| MCHP Technology | $325K→$227K | -30.1% | -35.5% | -7.6% |
| COP Energy | $8.27M→$5.93M | -28.3% | -25.3% | +4.2% |
| SRE Utilities | $3.41M→$2.45M | -28.2% | -11.8% | +22.8% |
| MPC Energy | $9.97M→$7.17M | -28.0% | -25.2% | +3.9% |
Largest US-listed operating companies by market capitalisation, one line per company, foreign private issuers (ADRs and 20-F filers) excluded. 125 foreign private issuers were dropped from the market-cap cut for filing on a different basis. The universe and every filing behind them are listed in full.
The gap between two growth rates
Across the 375 largest US-listed companies, the median company earned $434K of revenue per employee in 2015 and $678K in 2025 — +56% over 10 years. Inflation accounts for a good part of that, which is why the two columns to read are not the level but the pair beside it: how fast revenue grew, and how fast the payroll did.
In the last three years those two came apart. Across the 349 companies with a complete FY2022-to-FY2025 window, total headcount moved +0.9% — and 3 of the 11 sectors here employ fewer people now than they did three years ago. That is the shape of the argument everyone is having about automation, and it shows up in the filings before it shows up in any narrative: companies do not announce that they stopped hiring, they simply file a smaller number on the cover of the next 10-K.
Be careful with what this number is. It counts people on the payroll, so a company that moves work to contractors gets more productive on this measure without changing anything real, and an acquisition moves both sides at once. It is the ratio the company itself discloses, not an estimate — and that is its whole advantage over the productivity series that get quoted.
The median and the aggregate diverge most in technology, and the divergence is the point: the sector's largest members carry several times the revenue per head of its typical member. When someone quotes a sector's revenue per employee without saying which of the two they mean, that gap is the size of the error.
Questions people ask about this
- Where does the employee count come from?
- The cover page of each company's own annual report on Form 10-K, as filed with the SEC. It is a point-in-time figure at the fiscal year end and it is matched to the income statement for that same fiscal year, not to the year the filing was made — a January-ending retailer files in March, and keying on the filing date would put its headcount in the wrong year.
- Does revenue per employee actually measure productivity?
- Partly, and it is easy to overread. The number falls when a company insources and rises when it moves the same work to contractors, who never appear in the headcount. Acquisitions move both sides at once. It is a good measure of how much revenue an organisation carries per person on its own payroll, and a poor measure of how hard anyone is working.
- Why do the median and the aggregate differ so much?
- The aggregate divides the sector's total revenue by its total headcount, so a handful of enormous companies set it. The median is the middle company. Where the two diverge — most sharply in technology — it is telling you that the sector's largest members are far more revenue-dense than its typical member, which is a fact about concentration rather than about the sector.
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
- Universe: the largest US-listed companies by market capitalisation, one line per company, foreign private issuers and non-dollar filers excluded. For each fiscal year, revenue comes from the annual income statement and headcount from the 10-K cover-page count whose period end falls within 75 days of that statement's period end. Sector aggregates are only reported where at least five companies have both figures, and the count behind every row is shown. Companies that report no headcount are excluded from that year 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. "Revenue per employee, sector by sector, from the 10-K headcounts." Data through FY2025. https://plutux.ai/resources/tools/revenue-per-employee-by-sector
Historical figures for information only — not investment advice, and not a forecast.
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