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S&P 500 Buybacks vs. Capital Spending
Share repurchases and capital expenditures by S&P 500 companies, trailing 12 months, $ billions
Plays the chart through its history. Pauses are where the data set a record or moved most.
Palanor totals from SEC filings for S&P 500 members on each date.
Two uses of corporate cash: returning it to shareholders or investing it. A wider gap in favor of capex means companies are building more than they are buying back.
What this chart reads
- Capital Expenditures · S&P 500 (trailing 12 months, $bn)as “Capital spending”latest 2026-09-30
- Share Repurchases · S&P 500 (trailing 12 months, $bn)as “Share buybacks”latest 2026-09-30
Sources
Capital Expenditures · S&P 500 (trailing 12 months, $bn). Source: Palanor reads XBRL filings from SEC EDGAR, a public-domain source. For each company, cash purchases of property and equipment are derived from 10-Q and 10-K statements and summed over four quarters.
Share Repurchases · S&P 500 (trailing 12 months, $bn). Source: Palanor reads payments for repurchase of common stock from SEC EDGAR XBRL filings, which are public domain. The data come from 10-Q and 10-K reports filed by S&P 500 companies.
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.