27% if you can believe it.

I guess whether you believe it depends on what I’m talking about, right? (Right.)

That’s the final tally for aggregate S&P 500 YoY profit growth during the first three months of 2026.

You almost don’t need to know anything about the history of US corporate profits to recognize that number as large. All you really need to know is the definition of the word “profit” and understand that “YoY” means the growth rate for comparable periods.

I realize I’ve marveled at this before. And repeatedly. Why bring up old news? Two reasons: The final tally’s even higher than the “almost-final” (if you will) tally I cited previously and it serves as a nice lead-in to Q2 earnings, which is to say it sets up “new news.”

The figure below, from Goldman, shows you just how anomalous Q1 really was. 27% YoY profit growth actually matched Q4 2021, a remarkable feat considering corporates were lapping 2020 pandemic comps that year. 27% profit growth outside of a recession rebound is unheard of. Not really, but it’s rare enough that I can call it unheard of and anyone who wants to dispute that characterization would have to go check their charts first.

Look at the light blue bars. Those represent bottom-up consensus headed into earnings season. The bar — figuratively and literally — for Q1 2026 was 12%. Corporate America hurdled it with 14ppt worth of profit growth to spare.

In light of that blowout, the hurdle for Q2’s much, much higher. “Following the strength of Q1 earnings results, analysts have set a high bar for Q2,” Goldman’s Ben Snider remarked, in his latest.

Collectively, company analysts expect profit growth for the quarter ending June of 22% versus the same period last year. That’s pretty lofty and it underscores the notion we’re in a new paradigm where it’s possible for corporate America to sustain 20%+ earnings growth outside of recession rebounds.

You know the caveats, right? That 27% for Q1 wasn’t “really” 27%. It was actually 17%. As the figure below, also from Snider, reminds you, 10ppt was attributable to “other income” (i.e., write-ups) at Amazon, Alphabet and Nvidia.

Still, 17% ain’t bad, and 13% for the median stock — i.e., controlling for the mega-cap distortion — was healthy indeed. In fact, it matched aggregate index profit growth from the prior quarter. The estimate for Q2’s 9%.

If you think 22% — the aggregate EPS growth consensus for the quarter ending this week — sounds aggressive or unrealistic, Snider suggested otherwise.

If anything, he wrote, there’s upside risk to earnings this quarter given that analysts expect sales growth of just 5% against nominal GDP growth of 7%.