What the columns mean and how they're calculated
The industry tables cover roughly 500 publicly traded companies — a hand-curated list of major US-listed employers, focused on companies that are large enough to be meaningful to workers. The list was built with a few priorities in mind:
Not every company in the list will appear in the tables — some are excluded because their financial data didn't pass our quality checks (see who's included below).
Each company is manually assigned to one of 26 sectors. We do not use a third-party classification system like GICS or SIC codes — we made our own judgment calls based on what makes intuitive sense for workers comparing employers.
A few places where our categorization differs from standard financial classifications:
These calls are inherently imperfect. If you think a company is in the wrong sector, let us know.
Not every company in the list makes it into the sector tables. A company is excluded if:
A sector only appears on the industry index if it has at least 3 qualifying companies. Sectors with fewer than 3 are hidden.
This is the company's annual net income divided equally across all reported employees. It's the primary column and what the table is sorted by default.
The smaller grey number below is the company's total net income — the full profit figure before dividing by headcount.
When we use EBITDA instead: For companies where a one-time item — like a tax windfall, asset write-off, or acquisition charge — heavily distorts net income, we substitute EBITDA as a cleaner measure of what the core business actually generated that year. This is noted on the company's individual results page.
EBITDA stands for Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization. It strips out accounting adjustments and financing costs to show how much cash the core business generates — often the figure executives and investors focus on internally.
For capital-intensive businesses — airlines, utilities, manufacturers — EBITDA can be 2–5× higher than net income, because depreciation on physical assets is a large non-cash charge that reduces net income but doesn't leave the company as cash.
N/A means EBITDA data wasn't available for that company in the filing period.
Stock buybacks happen when a company uses its cash to repurchase its own shares from the market. This reduces the number of shares outstanding, increases earnings per share, and typically boosts the stock price — transferring value to shareholders.
The figure shown is how much the company spent on buybacks in its most recent fiscal year, divided by headcount. N/A means the company did not buy back shares or the data wasn't available.
Dividends are cash payments made directly to shareholders, typically on a quarterly schedule. Unlike buybacks, dividends go to all shareholders proportionally based on how many shares they hold.
The figure is total dividends paid in the most recent fiscal year, divided by headcount. N/A means the company doesn't pay a dividend.
The "avg per employee" shown in the sector header is the unweighted average of profit per employee across all qualifying companies in that sector.
This means every company counts equally regardless of size. A 500-person company with high profit per employee moves the average just as much as a 500,000-person company. This reflects typical performance across companies in the sector, not the aggregate weighted by workforce size.
The "combined profit" is the sum of all qualifying companies' net income in the sector — the raw total, not divided by anything.
The table is sorted by profit per employee descending by default. You can click any column header to re-sort.
All financial figures come from the most recently available annual report (10-K) for each company:
The tables are pre-generated from a snapshot of financial data and updated periodically — they don't pull live data on each page load the way the main calculator does. If a number looks stale or wrong, report it here.