The largest US companies by public float, year by year

How the list is made

• Public float is the market value of the common stock held by non-affiliates, as each company states it on the cover of its 10-K: shares held by officers, directors and large holders are left out (companies draw that line themselves; Walmart, for one, counts every holder of 5% or more). It is not the market capitalization.
• The date is the last business day of each company’s second fiscal quarter: June 30 where the fiscal year is the calendar year, late March for Apple, July for Walmart and Nvidia, November for Oracle and December 31 for Microsoft. So one year compares values from different months; the table of the latest year gives each date.
• Insiders lower the rank. Where founders, families or another company own many shares, the float is far below the market value and the company ranks lower here than by market capitalization: Walmart (the Walton family), Meta (Mark Zuckerberg), Alphabet (its founders’ Class B shares), Oracle (Larry Ellison), Tesla (Elon Musk), Berkshire Hathaway (Warren Buffett), Dell (Michael Dell).
• Today’s members only: companies that left the S&P 500, were taken over or failed are missing, also from the early years, so the ranks are among the companies in the index today.
• Coverage: ranked among the companies with a value that year — 240 in 2009, when only the larger companies tagged their reports in XBRL, 486 in 2025. A year is added once nearly every company has reported it: 2026 follows when the last annual reports with a date in 2026 are in (where the second quarter ends in December, that report comes the next summer).
• Missing values: Wells Fargo (2009), AT&T (2010), GE Aerospace (2011), Alphabet (2015). The XBRL data of those reports repeat another year’s value or give none, so the company is left out of that year.
• Share classes count once (Alphabet’s Class A and C). Values are in US dollars before inflation.

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