Q3 earnings season has barely begun, with only a few hundred large companies filing their earnings reports so far. Still, that’s enough for us to fire up the Calcbench Earnings Tracker again and get the analysis engine running.

At close of business on Friday, Oct. 24, we were tracking data from roughly 300 non-financial firms that had already filed their Q3 2025 reports. Collectively, that group reported net income nearly 70 percent higher than the year-ago period; while revenue was up a healthy 5.2 percent and cost of goods sold (an important metric for signs of inflation) up 4.5 percent. See Figure 1, below.

We need to emphasize that this first assessment of Q3 earnings comes with a host of caveats. First, there are only 300-ish companies in our sample size, a small fraction of the total number that end up in the Calcbench Earnings Tracker. (For example, we had more than 3,800 firms in our final assessment of Q2 earnings.) Important chunks of the economy are still missing from this Q3 picture, such as the tech giants; they’re mostly going to file this coming week. Crucial retailers such as Target ($TGT) and Walmart ($WMT) won’t file until later still. 

Second, these early filers tend to be large companies, with more sturdy and robust financial fundamentals than smaller ones. The smaller folks won’t start to file until mid-November, and the big picture we start to see then might look very different from the one portrayed by the biggest of filers now. 

All those caveats said — this first earnings report ain’t shabby. 

We caught a foreshadowing of this message from some individual companies that filed early, such as Delta Air Line’s ($DAL) positively stellar earnings report two weeks ago. 

The message in Figure 1 seems to be that revenue growth is staying ahead of cost of goods sold expense (not by much, but by enough), while capex and opex spending are both down from the year-ago period. Take all that together, and it helped to drive a surge in net income.

Then again, back to another caveat: small sample sizes such as ours are vulnerable to outliers. For example, total net income for our sample this week grew by $54.6 billion, but $21.26 billion of that surge came from Intel ($INTC), and that’s because Intel swung from a $17 billion loss one year ago (Q3 2024) to plus $4.27 billion in net income in Q3 2025. 

Still, the overall picture isn’t bad. Figure 2, below, shows the data again in table format.

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 us@calcbench.com.

Now, another week of earnings is about to start hitting the wires. Everyone back to work!