What doubled this year was not corporate earnings but the earnings forecast

The profits S&P 500 companies are expected to earn this year are growing twice as fast as the market thought in January. FactSet's 7 August tally puts 2026 earnings growth at 30.0%. The same firm's figure on 19 December 2025 was 15.0%. The number is a bottom-up consensus, meaning analysts' individual company forecasts added together across the index. When the company-level forecasts rise, this figure rises with them.

S&P 500 Earnings Season Update (FactSet Earnings Insight, 2026-08-07)

출처: insight.factset.com

Charlie Bilello wrote the figure as 32%. That is above the 30.0% FactSet published on 7 August, and he did not say which tally he was reading. What can be confirmed from published data as of 11 August is FactSet's figure.

Has a year like this come without a recession

Bilello's claim is that growth of this size has only ever come as a rebound from a recession. Pull up the record of annual earnings growth and the premise holds.

One caution: that record uses reported earnings straight from the accounts, while FactSet's 30.0% uses operating earnings with one-off items stripped out. They are not measured with the same ruler, so the record is better used for direction than for ranking. It also matters that the profit growth is not coming from many places. Benzinga reported on 10 August that second-quarter earnings growth of 50.4% falls to 32.0% once Alphabet and Amazon are taken out.

S&P 500 Earnings Hit Best Growth Since 2021 (Benzinga, 2026-08-10)

출처: benzinga.com

FactSet sees 13.6% for 2027

In the same 7 August tally, the forecast for 2027 earnings growth is 13.6%. While this year's number doubled in six months, next year's stayed where it was. The market is treating the surge as a single step up rather than a slope that keeps climbing. So the question is not how big 30% is but whether it survives as a final figure. If the confirmed 2026 growth rate that arrives in February 2027 clears today's forecast, the doubling from January's 15% was backed by results; if it lands below that line, August will stand as the high-water mark of the forecast. A forecast is a number analysts rewrite, and a final figure is money companies took in. The price on the index today rests on the first of those two.