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Companies That Barely Cover Their Interest
Share of non-financial companies whose operating earnings are less than one and a half times their interest bill, trailing twelve months, %
Plays the chart through its history. Pauses are where the data set a record or moved most.
Palanor calculation from SEC EDGAR XBRL 10-Q and 10-K filings: EBIT is operating income over the last four fiscal quarters, interest is interest expense (cash interest paid where none is tagged), net debt is total debt less cash. Financial companies (SEC SIC 6000 to 6799, except real estate and REITs) are left out. Each reading uses only what companies had filed with the SEC by its date, as first reported, so it mostly reflects the previous quarter’s balance sheets. Index membership before late September 2026 is today’s constituents carried back, so older readings leave out companies that later left the index.
The share of large U.S. companies whose operating earnings only just pay, or fail to pay, their interest. It is where corporate credit stress shows first: a rising share means more companies are one weak year away from borrowing to pay interest.
What this chart reads
- Share of S&P 500 Companies With Interest Coverage Below 1.5×as “S&P 500”latest 2026-09-30
- Share of Russell 1000 Companies With Interest Coverage Below 1.5×as “Russell 1000”latest 2026-09-30
Sources
Share of S&P 500 Companies With Interest Coverage Below 1.5×. Source: U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, EDGAR XBRL financial data (companyfacts API, data.sec.gov) from each company's 10-K and 10-Q filings; calculated by Palanor. SEC filings are public information: "Information presented on sec.gov is considered public information and may be copied or further distributed by users of the web site without the SEC's permission" (sec.gov/privacy).
Share of Russell 1000 Companies With Interest Coverage Below 1.5×. Source: U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, EDGAR XBRL financial data (companyfacts API, data.sec.gov) from each company's 10-K and 10-Q filings; calculated by Palanor. SEC filings are public information: "Information presented on sec.gov is considered public information and may be copied or further distributed by users of the web site without the SEC's permission" (sec.gov/privacy).
Charts are drawn from Palanor's signal library and recomputed from source data on every view. Transformations (changes, indexing, year-on-year rates) are Palanor's.