The bottom line: across a wide swath of Corporate America, the first quarter went pretty well. 

Figure 1, below, tells the tale. It tracks the earnings data of more than 2,000 non-financial companies, comparing Q1 2025 numbers to the year-earlier period. Net income, revenue, operating cash flow, capital expenditures, and cash were all up.

One point that does give pause is cost of revenue; it’s up 3.3 percent compared to one year ago, which isn’t that far behind revenue, up 3.9 percent. If tariffs or other pressures push cost of revenue up even further, that could drive companies to raise prices on their finished goods (to protect profit margins) and re-ignite inflation. Watch that one.

Also note that 16.9 percent jump in net income. It might sound like a healthy jump, but beware! Roughly $26 billion in net income this quarter was attributed to non-recurring items. If you strip those numbers out, net income only grew 9 percent — not bad, but certainly not 16.9 percent.

Balance Sheets Stronger

Another interesting morsel we noticed is that companies’ balance sheets are getting stronger. That is, the collective book value of our 2,000+ firms — defined as total assets minus total liabilities — was 8.3 percent higher in Q1 2025 compared to Q1 2024. See Figure 2, below.

Obviously plenty of individual firms will have worse balance sheets than one year ago, but when looking at the biggest of pictures, this is good news: a stronger balance sheet means a company is better positioned to weather economic difficulties that might arise. Calcbench will conduct a deeper analysis of balance sheet health next week.

Calcbench tracks these earnings using our Earnings Tracker template, which pulls in financial disclosures as companies file their latest earnings releases with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Earnings Tracker provides an up-to-the minute snapshot of financial performance compared to the year-earlier period.

If Calcbench subscribers wish to get their hands on the template we use for this analysis, so you can conduct your own experiments at home, use this link to the file. 

Please note that it will only work with an active Calcbench subscription. If you need an active subscription (and who doesn’t, really, when swift access to real-time data is so important?), contact us at info@calcbench.com.