Three tags for one number: where "revenue" actually comes from in a 10-K
Ask a spreadsheet for "revenue" and you get a column. Ask the SEC's data for it and you get a choice: companies tag the same line under different names, and no single tag covers everyone.
One concept, several tags
Since 2009 US-listed companies have filed their financial statements in XBRL, a machine-readable format in which every number carries a tag from a shared dictionary (the US-GAAP taxonomy). The dictionary has grown for fifteen years, so the line most people call revenue can be tagged as Revenues, as RevenueFromContractWithCustomerExcludingAssessedTax (the tag introduced with the 2018 revenue-recognition standard), as SalesRevenueNet in older filings, or as RevenuesNetOfInterestExpense for banks. Each is legitimate; each means something slightly different.
Which tags this catalogue actually found
| XBRL tag | Companies | Share |
|---|---|---|
us-gaap:RevenueFromContractWithCustomerExcludingAssessedTax | 1593 | 55.5% |
us-gaap:Revenues | 919 | 32.0% |
ifrs-full:Revenue | 151 | 5.3% |
us-gaap:RevenueFromContractWithCustomerIncludingAssessedTax | 148 | 5.2% |
ifrs-full:RevenueFromContractsWithCustomers | 48 | 1.7% |
us-gaap:RevenuesNetOfInterestExpense | 11 | 0.4% |
How the site chooses
For every company all the candidate tags are read, and the largest value wins. That sounds crude until you see why: these tags are not synonyms, they are nested. The 2018 tag covers revenue from contracts with customers; rent does not arise from a contract with a customer under that standard, so a landlord's rental income is not in it. United Rentals filed $3.7 billion under that tag for 2025 and $16.1 billion under Revenues — the same year, the same company, a 77% difference. A subset can never be the company's total, so among the candidates the largest is the one closest to it.
Two tags are excluded from that contest and used only when nothing else exists: the variant that includes sales taxes collected on behalf of a government, which would inflate revenue by an amount the company never keeps, and the bank-specific one that is already net of interest expense. The tag that won is shown under the figure in the key-figures table, so you can see the choice rather than trust it.
Until 13 September 2026 this site took the first tag in a fixed order of preference instead, with the 2018 tag ranked first. That understated revenue for every insurer, bank, REIT and rental company in the catalogue — MetLife appeared with $2.4 billion instead of $77.1 billion — and it was hard to see precisely because the resulting rankings looked plausible: a "highest margin" list full of REITs is exactly what a reader expects. The correction moved 84 figures; the largest were insurers.
Foreign issuers filing on form 20-F or 40-F mostly use the IFRS taxonomy instead, where the equivalent tag is simply Revenue. They are read separately and converted to US dollars; their pages say so.
Why it matters
When two sources disagree on a company's revenue by a few percent, the usual explanation is not an error but a different tag: one includes excise taxes the other excludes, or one is the bank's total interest and non-interest income while the other is net of interest expense. Knowing which tag you are looking at is most of the work of comparing companies honestly.
Source: the XBRL frames and company-concept data published by the SEC. Counts reflect the companies currently in this catalogue and change with each data refresh.