Well, we looked under the hood of that net income growth, and perhaps quite a bit.

Using our Multi-Company page, we pulled the net income numbers for a total of 3,285 firms that have filed Q1 2026 earnings as of Tuesday morning. (Legions of smaller and mid-sized companies are filing Q1 earnings this week.)

Yes, overall net income is still growing nicely, up 19.9 percent from Q1 2025 — but that growth is almost entirely due to a tiny number of firms reporting huge jumps in net income. Strip those super-achievers out of the picture, and net income growth for everyone else has barely budged upward.

Table 1, below, tells the tale. Yes, those 3,285 companies reported $103.5 billion more in net income this quarter; but $96.66 billion of that amount comes from only 10 companies (seven of them tech companies involved in the AI revolution). 

Remove those 10 super-achievers from the sample, and the rest of the economy has so far eeked out a mere 2.3 percent growth in net income. 

The overall picture for Q1 could still change depending on what remaining filers report in coming weeks. For example, both Walmart ($WMT) and Nvidia ($NVDA) haven’t yet filed, and the sheer size of each one will definitely have a material effect on the complete picture. 

Who are these 10 over-achievers, you ask? See Table 2, below.

Operating Income

Operating income tells a similar, although not quite as pronounced, tale. See Table 3, below.

And who are the 10 superstar firms looking from this angle? Almost the same lineup as we saw above with net income. 

What does all this mean for corporate performance overall? You tell us— but you can tell a much more nuanced picture, if you dig into the right data.

Which Calcbench has, in spades.