It’s that time of year again, financial data devotees — the Calcbench Non-GAAP Reconciliations Study is here!

Every spring, Calcbench and Suffolk University team up to catalog the non-GAAP adjustments to net income made by S&P 500 firms in their annual reports. We then analyze those non-GAAP adjustments by size and number to see what trends in non-GAAP reporting we can identify. 

Our report for 2025 earnings is now available for download, and we have a summary of our findings here, too.

We studied the 2025 annual earnings releases of the S&P 500 and identified 361 companies (72 percent of the entire S&P 500) that reported either non-GAAP net income or non-GAAP earnings per share. Within that group of 361, we then measured and classified the specific adjustments each company cited to reconcile those adjusted numbers back to “traditional” net income according to U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP).

• Among the 361 firms that reported non-GAAP earnings, 87 percent reported adjustments that led to higher earnings compared to GAAP net income, down slightly from the 89 percent identified in 2024.

• Adjusted net income exceeded GAAP net income by an average of $751 million per company, 23 percent higher than average GAAP net income. Again these 2025 numbers are down from 2024, when the average adjustment was $870 million and roughly 30 percent higher than average GAAP net income. 

• Average adjusted net income was $4 billion for 2025, compared to $3.8 billion for 2024.

• We found a total of 2,320 individual reconciling items for our sample, with an average value of $117 million per item — 14 percent lower than the previous year. The total value of all non-GAAP adjustments was $271 billion.

• The most notable swing in adjustments happened with gains and losses from investments, which went from an overall upward adjustment of $25.6 billion in 2024 to a downward adjustment of $8 billion in 2025. This suggests that a larger number of companies adjusted non-GAAP income downwards in 2025 to exclude investment gains; and the swing in this category alone (from positive $25.6 billion in 2024 to negative $8 billion in 2025) accounts for the entire decrease in non-GAAP adjustments in 2025. 

The scatterplot in Figure 1, below, shows the range of adjustments as a percentage of GAAP net income. Although most companies still adjusted their net income upward only within an upper bound of 100 percent of GAAP net income, a larger number than in previous years adjusted net income considerably higher, from 100 to 600 percent or more.

(Several companies in our sample are outside the range of our Figure 1 scatterplot since their adjustments were too large to include easily.)

Adjustment Categories by Size

The single largest category of adjustments in 2025 continued to be amortization of intangible assets. That category accounted for one-third of total amount adjusted across all firms, similar to the amortization category’s 2024 numbers. The second-largest category was impairments, at 28 percent of the total amount adjusted — up sharply from last year, when impairment-related adjustments were only 19 percent of the total. 

A complete breakdown of each category’s size, both by dollar amount and as percentage of total adjustment value, is in Figure 2, below. Year-over-year change in the left-side column refers to the percentage of total adjustment value. 

That’s enough for today. We’ll have more posts later this week digging even deeper into the data — we have lots!