Who tops the Fortune 500? The 10 biggest U.S. companies by revenue

The Fortune 500 measures one thing: total annual revenue. Profit, market value, headcount and brand recognition have no bearing on where a company lands. That single rule explains why the largest U.S. companies by revenue look nothing like the most valuable ones. Walmart $WMT, a grocery-heavy retailer working on thin single-digit margins, has outranked every technology firm in the country for more than a decade. The list rewards the dollar volume passing through a business, not what the business keeps.

A Fortune 500 edition labeled 2026 does not yet exist in verified form. Fortune builds each ranking from full-year results that companies report months after their fiscal years close, so an edition carrying one year's name reflects the previous year's revenue. What follows draws on the most recently published and checkable ranking, which measured fiscal 2023 revenue. The top tier moves slowly. The same companies have traded places inside the top 10 for several years, and the order rarely shifts by more than a spot or two between editions.

Three sectors control the upper ranks. Retail accounts for Walmart and Amazon $AMZN. Healthcare accounts for UnitedHealth $UNH Group and CVS Health $CVS, plus McKesson $MCK and Cencora — two pharmaceutical distributors that sell to pharmacies and hospitals rather than to the public, and that, together with Cardinal Health $CAH, handle most prescription drugs sold in the country. Energy accounts for ExxonMobil $XOM, whose placement climbs and slips with crude prices. Apple $AAPL and Alphabet $GOOGL carry the technology sector, one on device sales and the other on advertising. Berkshire Hathaway $BRK.B sits in the group as a conglomerate whose revenue is the combined output of dozens of unrelated subsidiaries.

Taken together, the top 10 shows where money moves through the American economy and how concentrated retail, healthcare and drug distribution have become. These companies employ millions of people and shape national arguments over drug pricing, wages, antitrust enforcement and energy policy. The slides ahead cover each company's revenue figure, the business lines behind it and why its position holds.

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Walmart $WMT ranked first on the most recent verified Fortune 500 list with annual revenue of about $648 billion, a position the retailer has held for more than a decade. Groceries and general merchandise sold across roughly 10,500 stores worldwide, operating under the Walmart and Sam's Club names, account for that volume.

Sam Walton opened the first Walmart in Rogers, Arkansas, in 1962, and the company still runs from Bentonville in the northwest corner of the state. The model has changed little in principle: keep prices low, move goods in large quantities and lean on a distribution network built to strip cost out of every shipment. Groceries now make up roughly 60% of U.S. sales, which is the clearest explanation for the top-line figure. Food carries slim margins, so a retailer selling a great deal of it books high revenue without the profit a technology firm would generate on comparable sales.

Walmart is also the largest private-sector employer in the U.S., with about 1.6 million workers domestically and some 2.1 million globally. A payroll that size turns the company's wage decisions into something close to a national benchmark, and its purchasing terms shape how thousands of suppliers price, package and schedule production.

Recent growth has come from areas the company once trailed in. Walmart has built out online grocery pickup and delivery, expanded its marketplace for third-party sellers and developed Walmart Connect, an advertising arm that sells placement against shopper data. Membership programs, including Sam's Club and Walmart+, add recurring fee income. Abroad, the business is concentrated in Mexico and Central America through Walmex, with further operations in Canada and China, though the U.S. still supplies the overwhelming share of sales.

Profit tells a different story than revenue. Walmart's net margin typically sits in the low single digits, normal for grocery-weighted retail. On an earnings ranking rather than a sales one, it would not lead — the Fortune 500 sorts strictly by revenue.

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Amazon $AMZN sits at number two on the most recent verified Fortune 500 ranking, with annual revenue of roughly $575 billion. No other company on the list assembles that scale from such a mix of businesses: first-party online retail, fees from third-party sellers, cloud computing, advertising, subscriptions and physical grocery stores.

Jeff Bezos founded the company in 1994 as an online bookstore, and it is still headquartered in Seattle. Retail generates the largest share of revenue, but not the largest share of profit. Amazon Web Services, the cloud division launched in 2006, accounts for a modest slice of total sales while producing most of the operating income in a typical quarter. AWS remains the largest provider of cloud infrastructure worldwide, ahead of Microsoft $MSFT Azure and Google $GOOGL Cloud.

The marketplace is a second engine. The majority of units sold on Amazon come from independent sellers, and the listing, fulfillment and shipping fees they pay reach Amazon as service revenue rather than product sales. That structure lets the company book income on merchandise it never owns.

Advertising is the fastest-climbing segment. Sponsored placements on search results pages convert shopper intent into ad inventory, and Amazon now ranks among the largest sellers of digital advertising alongside Google and Meta $META. Margins there far exceed anything in retail.

Logistics ties the rest together. Amazon runs its own fulfillment centers, sortation hubs, delivery vans and air cargo fleet, which has reduced its reliance on UPS, FedEx $FDX and the U.S. Postal Service. The capital that network demands is one reason Amazon's profits have swung more sharply than Walmart $WMT's while revenue climbed almost without interruption.

Prime, the subscription program that bundles fast shipping with video and music, adds recurring revenue that neither retail nor cloud contracts supply. Other holdings widen the footprint: Whole Foods Market, acquired in 2017, Prime Video, the Kindle and Echo device lines, and artificial intelligence tools sold through AWS.

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Apple $AAPL reported roughly $383 billion in annual revenue in the most recent verified Fortune 500 ranking, the strongest showing by any company whose core business is designing and selling consumer devices. The iPhone alone accounts for about half of that figure, a concentration no other firm in the top 10 matches in a single product line.

The Cupertino, California, company was founded in 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, and its modern revenue structure rests on two pillars. Hardware sales carry the volume, while a services division covering the App Store, Apple Music, iCloud storage, Apple TV+ and payment services carries the margin. Services is Apple's second-largest reporting segment and earns a far higher gross margin than devices.

Macs, iPads, AirPods and the Apple Watch fill out the product lineup. Each is a substantial business by ordinary standards, and each is secondary to the iPhone in Apple's accounts. The company also holds one of the largest corporate cash positions of any company in the world, which it has directed primarily toward share repurchases and dividends rather than acquisitions in unrelated industries. Apple's purchases tend to be small and technical — component teams, mapping firms, chip design talent — rather than conglomerate-building deals.

The economics separate Apple from the two retailers above it on the list. Walmart $WMT and Amazon $AMZN convert enormous sales volume into comparatively slim profits. Apple sells fewer units at premium prices and keeps a far larger share of every dollar, which is why it routinely ranks among the most profitable companies in the world while sitting third by revenue.

Geography is the other distinguishing factor. A large share of Apple's sales comes from outside the U.S., with Greater China and Europe among its biggest regional markets, and most of its manufacturing runs through contract assemblers in Asia. That dual exposure leaves revenue sensitive to currency swings, tariffs and trade restrictions in a way the domestically concentrated retailers and healthcare firms on the list are not.

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UnitedHealth $UNH Group reported roughly 372 billion dollars in annual revenue in the most recent verified Fortune 500 ranking, the largest figure posted by any health insurer in the U.S. Two divisions account for it. UnitedHealthcare sells coverage, and Optum handles pharmacy benefits, data analytics and direct patient care.

The Minnetonka, Minnesota company covers tens of millions of people through employer-sponsored plans, Medicare Advantage policies and state Medicaid managed care contracts. Each channel works differently. Employer plans bring in premiums negotiated with corporate benefits departments. Medicare Advantage and Medicaid revenue arrives largely as per-member payments from federal and state governments. A substantial share of UnitedHealth's top line therefore depends on public program spending.

Optum has driven much of the growth over the past decade. The division owns physician practices and outpatient surgery centers. It runs OptumRx, one of the country's largest pharmacy benefit managers. It also sells analytics and administrative software to hospitals and to rival insurers, including some that compete directly with UnitedHealthcare.

One corporation financing care, managing the drug benefit and employing the clinicians who deliver treatment has drawn sustained attention. The Justice Department, members of Congress and state insurance regulators have all examined that structure on competition and cost grounds.

The Change Healthcare ransomware attack in February 2024 showed how much of the system runs through a single Optum-owned subsidiary. Claims processing and payments were disrupted across U.S. healthcare for weeks.

Scrutiny has also focused on how often the company denies or delays claims. That complaint is aimed at the whole insurance industry, but UnitedHealth's share of the market amplifies it.

Revenue has climbed in nearly every year of the past decade regardless. Overall U.S. healthcare spending keeps rising, and older Americans keep shifting from traditional Medicare into privately administered Medicare Advantage plans. UnitedHealth's rank among the five largest U.S. companies says as much about the size of the national medical bill as it does about insurance itself.

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Berkshire Hathaway $BRK.B recorded roughly 365 billion dollars in annual revenue in the most recent verified Fortune 500 ranking, a figure assembled from dozens of unrelated businesses rather than one operating company. Warren Buffett, its longtime chairman and chief executive, built that structure through acquisitions across insurance, freight rail, utilities, manufacturing, retail and consumer brands.

Insurance supplies both revenue and capital. GEICO and Berkshire Hathaway Reinsurance Group collect premiums the company holds before paying claims, a pool the industry calls float, and Buffett has spent decades deploying that money into stocks and outright purchases of companies. BNSF Railway, one of the largest freight rail networks in North America, contributes heavily to the top line. So does Berkshire Hathaway Energy, which owns regulated utilities and power generation assets in several states.

The consumer-facing subsidiaries are more familiar than the parent. See's Candies, Dairy Queen, Duracell and Fruit of the Loom all sit under the same corporate roof with little outward connection to one another. Buffett's decentralized approach leaves subsidiary managers to run their own operations with minimal interference from Omaha, Nebraska, where the holding company keeps a small head-office staff.

Berkshire also holds one of the largest disclosed equity portfolios of any American company, with stakes in Apple $AAPL, Coca-Cola $KO, American Express $AXP and Bank of America $BAC among its best-known positions. Accounting rules require unrealized gains and losses on those holdings to flow through net income. That can swing reported profit sharply from quarter to quarter even when the underlying subsidiaries perform steadily. Revenue stays comparatively stable, which is part of why the company's Fortune 500 placement moves so little.

Berkshire has paid a shareholder dividend only once, in 1967, directing cash instead toward acquisitions, share buybacks and the investment portfolio. That reinvestment is the mechanism behind its climb into the upper tier of the ranking, where it sits beside retailers and insurers that do one thing at enormous scale rather than many things at once.

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CVS Health $CVS reported roughly 358 billion dollars in annual revenue in the most recently published Fortune 500 ranking, a total assembled from three businesses that rarely sit inside the same corporation: a retail drugstore chain, a pharmacy benefit manager called Caremark, and the health insurer Aetna.

The Aetna purchase, completed in 2018, moved CVS from a large drugstore operator into the upper tier of the list. Insurance premiums count as revenue. A national insurer collects them from millions of members, so the deal added a top-line stream far larger than anything the front of a drugstore could produce. Caremark works in a comparable way, since the drug spending it administers for employer and insurer clients flows through the company's books.

Headquartered in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, the company runs thousands of pharmacy locations across the U.S., many paired with MinuteClinic sites that handle vaccinations, screenings and minor illness visits without an appointment. Those stores remain the public face of the business even though they account for a shrinking proportion of what it earns.

Caremark has drawn political scrutiny. Pharmacy benefit managers negotiate rebates with drugmakers and set the terms independent pharmacies are paid under. Both functions have prompted congressional hearings and state legislation aimed at the fees and rebate structures involved. CVS Health, Express Scripts and Optum Rx together administer prescription benefits for most insured Americans, which is why criticism of the model lands heavily on all three.

The retail footprint has been shrinking by design. CVS Health has closed hundreds of stores in recent years, citing overlapping locations and changing shopping patterns, while directing capital toward primary care through acquisitions including Oak Street Health and the home-visit provider Signify Health.

That approach parallels Optum's at UnitedHealth $UNH Group: own the insurance plan, the drug benefit and the clinic, and collect at each step. It lifts revenue reliably. Margins on dispensing prescriptions stay thin regardless.

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ExxonMobil $XOM is the highest-ranked oil and gas producer on the Fortune 500, with annual revenue of roughly $345 billion in the most recent verified edition of the list. That figure places it ahead of Alphabet $GOOGL, even though refining and chemicals carry nothing like the margins of digital advertising.

The company sells crude oil, natural gas, refined fuels and petrochemicals. Its upstream segment finds and produces hydrocarbons. The downstream segment turns them into gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and lubricants. ExxonMobil Chemical manufactures plastics, polymers and other industrial feedstocks. Covering the chain end to end means money arrives from exploration, from the refinery gate and from chemical customers, which steadies the business when one link weakens.

ExxonMobil traces back to the 1911 court-ordered breakup of Standard Oil, which produced the predecessor firms Jersey Standard and Socony. Those became Exxon and Mobil, and the two recombined in a 1999 merger. The headquarters sits in Spring, Texas, north of Houston, after a move from Irving completed in 2023.

Revenue here swings harder than anywhere else in the top 10. Crude and gas prices set the top line, and those prices answer to OPEC production decisions, war, sanctions and global demand. The energy price surge that followed Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 lifted the results of every major producer, and softer prices pull them back just as quickly. A grocery chain's annual revenue tends to move by single-digit percentages. An oil major's can move by tens of percent in either direction.

Strategy has stayed pointed at hydrocarbons. European rivals including BP $BP and Shell $SHEL made larger early commitments to renewable power generation, while ExxonMobil argued that oil and gas demand will persist for decades and kept its capital in production and refining. Carbon capture and lithium extraction have been added as adjacent lines, though both remain small against the core business.

Its placement near the top of the list is a reminder of how much U.S. economic activity still runs on fuel sold by the barrel.

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Alphabet $GOOGL, Google's parent company, reported roughly $307 billion in revenue in the most recent verified Fortune 500 ranking. That is the strongest showing by any company whose core product is advertising rather than goods. Search ads, YouTube and the Google Display Network supply the bulk of the total.

The holding structure dates to 2015, when Google reorganized itself so the search and advertising operation sat apart from longer-horizon projects. Those projects, grouped under the Other Bets label, include the autonomous driving company Waymo and the life sciences arm Verily. Both remain financially marginal against the advertising engine that funds them.

Google Search is still the dominant entry point to the web worldwide, and the ads sold against search queries anchor the company's results. YouTube has become the second pillar, earning through advertising and through subscriptions sold as YouTube Premium and YouTube TV. Google Cloud has grown quickly but sits third in cloud infrastructure, behind Amazon $AMZN Web Services and Microsoft $MSFT Azure. Hardware — Pixel phones, Nest devices, Fitbit wearables — contributes a comparatively small slice.

Margin is what separates Alphabet from the retailers, insurers and distributors clustered around it in the ranking. Selling attention costs far less per dollar earned than selling groceries, filling prescriptions or refining crude. Alphabet therefore converts a much larger share of revenue into profit than Walmart $WMT, CVS Health $CVS or ExxonMobil $XOM.

Artificial intelligence has reshaped the company's spending priorities. AI features have been folded into Search, the Workspace productivity suite and Cloud as Alphabet competes with Microsoft and OpenAI. The buildout requires heavy capital investment in data centers and custom silicon, including the Tensor Processing Units Google designs for its own servers.

Regulatory pressure has run alongside the growth. Antitrust authorities in the U.S. and the European Union have brought cases targeting Google's position in search distribution and in advertising technology. Potential remedies could force changes to how parts of the business operate. Revenue has kept climbing through the litigation.

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McKesson $MCK reported annual revenue of roughly $309 billion in the most recent verified Fortune 500 ranking, built almost entirely on distributing medicines it does not manufacture. The company buys drugs in bulk from manufacturers and delivers them to retail pharmacies, hospitals, clinics and physician offices, recording the full value of those shipments as revenue.

That accounting convention explains why drug wholesalers sit so high on the list. A distributor's sales figure captures the price of every pill and vial moving through its warehouses, not the slim fee it collects for handling them. Operating margins in the trade run well under 2%, a sliver of what Apple $AAPL or Alphabet $GOOGL keep on each dollar of sales.

McKesson dates to a New York drug and chemical house founded in 1833, which makes it one of the oldest firms in the upper tier of the ranking. It moved its headquarters to Irving, Texas, in 2019 after decades in San Francisco. Together with Cencora and Cardinal Health $CAH, it forms a trio that handles the overwhelming majority of prescription drugs reaching American patients.

The business reaches past logistics. McKesson runs oncology and specialty provider networks, including the US Oncology Network, and sells software and analytics tools that pharmacies and medical practices use for inventory, billing and treatment records. Specialty distribution — cancer drugs, biologics and other high-cost therapies that need temperature control and tight chain-of-custody tracking — has grown faster than its traditional pharmacy supply work.

Opioid litigation reshaped the company's finances. McKesson joined Cencora and Cardinal Health in a multistate settlement over claims the distributors failed to flag suspicious painkiller orders, with the three committing to payments spread across 18 years. The company has also sold its European operations and agreed to exit Canadian retail pharmacy, narrowing its focus to the U.S. market.

Its place in the top 10 says less about McKesson's strategy than about the volume of prescriptions the country fills each year.