US business profits are booming no matter how you measure it, with strength in US corporate balance sheets hovering above historic norms for more than a decade.

New Commerce Department data released Thursday showed that total corporate profits in the first quarter of 2026 totaled $4.42 trillion on an annualized basis, a jump from $4.35 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2025.

Even through more measured lenses, these are outsized margins coming from America’s C-suites. 

Corporate profits, on an after-tax basis, represent 12.4% of US gross domestic product, the highest reading since the second quarter of 2021, when profits peaked as the COVID pandemic ebbed. It also marks the second-highest quarterly reading ever in the data, which goes back to 1947.

Compared against a closely linked measure of US gross domestic income, the total income earned by residents and businesses, corporate profits are even healthier, with a ratio of 12.2%, according to Axios, the highest figure since the early 1950s. 

No matter how you slice it, corporate profits in 2026 are soaring higher from what were already historically high levels as a variety of factors — from the AI boom to improved efficiency — have yielded even better returns for corporate America and its investors.

The abundance was clear throughout the recent earnings season. The latest example: Semiconductor company Micron (MU) reported GAAP net income this week of $28.24 billion for the most recent quarter, which helped send its stock up more than 6%.

Profits are also rising — as they did in 2021 — at a time of higher inflation, which has squeezed consumer pocketbooks for basics like food and gasoline. 

The contrast is drawing notice and criticism from politicians of all stripes. 

President Trump hit oil companies this week for not dropping prices at the pump quickly enough, alleging that energy producers are “gouging” consumers.

On the other end of the political spectrum, Senator Bernie Sanders greeted the news that Apple (AAPL) is raising the prices of MacBooks and iPads by posting Thursday that “corporate greed is Tim Cook [hiking prices at Apple] after it made $112 billion in profits last year.”

The heated rhetoric could be more than hot air. “You can be a red-blooded capitalist and still worry about the political stability of an economy in which ever more output flows toward shareholders instead of employees,” Wall Street Journal economics commentator Greg Ip recently wrote, highlighting the growing gap between corporate profits and worker wages.

AI is fueling the current profit boom

One key driver of the current uptick in corporate profits is artificial intelligence, specifically data center spending, which Barclays deemed a “structural tailwind” to the entire economy.

“The U.S. profit cycle — broadening, accelerating, and underpinned by the most ambitious infrastructure investment program in decades — remains the dominant force in global markets and the strongest argument for staying invested,” Barclays wrote in a note this week.

Alpine Macro, a part of Oxford Economics, projects that recent geopolitical developments could pad bottom lines further, writing that a ceasefire between the US and Iran is “outstanding news for global financial markets” with falling gas prices likely to end up “directly boosting corporate profit margins.”

The data also shows that high corporate profit margins have become a longer-term feature of the US economy for years now. From 1950 through 2010, corporate profits as a percentage of GDP were nearly always below 10%. 

But in the 16 years since, those margins have been above 10% nearly every quarter, outside of a modest dip during the early stages of the COVID pandemic.

Ben Werschkul is a Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance.

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