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Profit per employee: the S&P 500's widest range

Tyson Foods earns about $1,579 of profit per employee. Nvidia earns $1,767,619. Both are enormously successful companies. The difference is the single most useful fact on this site.

By the Fair500 editors · Published 18 July 2026 · All figures from SEC filings · How these numbers are built

Divide a company's three-year average profit by its headcount and you get a number that varies more than almost anything else in corporate data. Across the S&P 500 it spans four orders of magnitude. This is not a measure of how well a company is run; it is a measure of what kind of machine it is.

The 20 highest profits per employee in the S&P 500 (3-year average net income ÷ headcount).
#	Company	Sector	Profit per employee	Median worker pay	Employees
1	Vici PropertiesVICI	Real Estate	$95,000,000	$468,119	28
2	Host Hotels & ResortsHST	Real Estate	$4,506,173	$243,291	162
3	Texas Pacific Land CorporationTPL	Energy	$3,947,368	$162,405	114
4	AppLovinAPP	Technology	$1,959,911	$133,808	898
5	EOG ResourcesEOG	Energy	$1,861,765	$225,792	3,400
6	NvidiaNVDA	Technology	$1,767,619	$282,050	42,000
7	Realty IncomeO	Real Estate	$1,709,559	$154,939	544
8	Diamondback EnergyFANG	Energy	$1,538,025	$168,095	1,762
9	AltriaMO	Consumer Staples	$1,488,136	$166,721	5,900
10	Devon EnergyDVN	Energy	$1,404,545	$189,700	2,200
11	PrologisPLD	Real Estate	$1,202,712	$141,121	2,802
12	WelltowerWELL	Real Estate	$1,067,416	$124,995	712
13	Apollo Global ManagementAPO	Financials	$1,058,111	$189,150	4,130
14	Federal Realty Investment TrustFRT	Real Estate	$968,750	$130,520	320
15	ConocoPhillipsCOP	Energy	$949,495	$212,063	9,900
16	APA CorporationAPA	Energy	$949,190	$237,527	1,791
17	CME GroupCME	Financials	$931,613	$167,162	3,875
18	EQT CorporationEQT	Energy	$879,842	$155,823	1,523
19	VerisignVRSN	Technology	$872,845	$233,491	928
20	Simon Property GroupSPG	Real Estate	$858,333	$78,989	3,600

What sits at the top

The leaders fall into three recognisable groups, and none of them is "companies with exceptionally productive workers" in any ordinary sense.

Asset holders with almost no staff

Vici Properties tops the list at $95 million of profit per employee, on a headcount of 28. Texas Pacific Land: $3.9 million per head across 114 people. Realty Income: $1.7 million across 544. Host Hotels: $4.5 million across 162.

These are REITs and land companies. They own assets that generate rent, and the operational work of running the underlying properties is done by tenants, operators and contractors who are not employees. Host Hotels owns hotels; the people who clean the rooms work for the management companies that run them. The 162 employees are the corporate function.

Profit per employee is essentially undefined as a fairness measure for these companies. Dividing by a headcount that excludes everyone who does the work produces a number about legal structure, not labour.

Extraction

Energy dominates the upper reaches: EOG Resources at $1.86 million, Diamondback at $1.54 million, Devon at $1.40 million, ConocoPhillips at $949,495, APA at $949,190, EQT at $879,842. The sector median is $476,467, by far the highest of any industry.

The capital does the earning. An oil and gas producer's profit comes from reserves and drilling infrastructure, operated by a comparatively small number of highly skilled technical staff. Energy's median worker pay of $162,405 is the highest in the index, and these are well-paid jobs, yet the sector still shows the largest gap between what a worker produces and what a worker is paid.

Software and semiconductors at scale

This is the group where the number means something closer to what it appears to mean. Nvidia earns $1.77 million per employee across 42,000 people. AppLovin earns $1.96 million across 898. Verisign earns $872,845 across 928.

Software's marginal cost is near zero, so profit scales with demand rather than headcount. Nvidia is the striking case because it is not a small company. 42,000 employees is a substantial workforce, and it still earns more per head than most REITs. Its median worker pay of $282,050 is correspondingly among the highest in the index.

What sits at the bottom

The other end is instructive in a different way:

The lowest profits per employee in the S&P 500.
Company	Profit per employee	Employees	Median worker pay
Tyson FoodsTSN	$1,579	133,000	$43,206
Estée LauderEL	$1,613	62,000	$38,149
3MMMM	$2,314	60,500	$66,524
Stanley Black & DeckerSWK	$2,989	43,500	$47,897
Ford Motor CompanyF	$4,083	169,000	$93,397
KrogerKR	$4,839	403,000	$34,552
DoorDashDASH	$5,414	31,400	$36,373
Darden RestaurantsDRI	$5,455	186,993	$23,074

Two different stories share this table. Kroger and Darden are structurally labour-intensive: grocery and casual dining run on thin margins across enormous headcounts, and no amount of good management turns a supermarket into a software company. Tyson, 3M, Ford and Stanley Black & Decker are there partly because the three-year window caught a period of weak earnings. These are companies with a bad patch inside the average, not permanent features of their industries.

The distinction matters. A structurally low figure is a fact about the business model. A cyclically low one will revert.

Why this measure earns its place alongside the pay ratio

Fair500 scores companies on two things, and profit per employee is the input to the second. The reasoning is that the pay ratio answers only one question, how far the chief executive is from the middle, and it is badly distorted by where and how a company employs people.

The second measure asks something the ratio cannot: of the profit each worker helps generate, how much does that worker receive? It compares median worker pay to profit per employee, and it is entirely unaffected by what the chief executive is paid.

This produces some genuinely surprising results, because the two measures often point in opposite directions:

Energy companies have the narrowest pay ratios in the index (median 81:1) and pay the highest median wages ($162,405), and score poorly on the share measure, because profit per employee of $476,467 dwarfs even those good wages.
Retailers and restaurants have the widest ratios and the lowest wages, and score better than you would expect on the share measure, because they generate very little profit per worker. Darden pays a median of $23,074 against $5,455 of profit per employee. There is not much there to share.

Neither measure alone is adequate. A company can pay poorly and still be sharing most of what it makes; a company can pay well and be keeping the overwhelming majority. The combined score on the map averages the two precisely because they disagree.

The caveats, which are substantial

Four things limit this measure, and they are worth taking seriously before drawing any conclusion from it.

Headcount definitions vary. Some companies report full-time equivalents, others every person employed. Franchise and contractor labour is generally excluded. McDonald's reports around 150,000 employees while millions work under its brand at franchised restaurants, and its figures reflect only the former.
Capital intensity is not virtue or vice. A refinery earning $1 million per employee has not extracted more from its workers than a supermarket earning $5,000. It has more capital per worker. Comparing across industries on this measure is close to meaningless, which is why the sector pages exist.
The timing bases differ. Profit is a three-year average; headcount is a point-in-time figure from the most recent annual report. A company that has grown or shrunk sharply, or made a large acquisition, will show a distorted ratio.
Loss-makers have no figure at all. Twenty-five companies in the index averaged a loss over the three-year window, and profit per employee is undefined for them, not negative but undefined. They are scored neutrally on this measure rather than being ranked as though a loss were a form of generosity.

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