Average P/E Ratio by Sector (2026)

A stock's price-to-earnings ratio only tells you half the story if you compare it to the wrong benchmark. Technology companies trade at structurally higher multiples than utilities or energy producers because investors price in faster growth and higher reinvestment potential. Using a single market-wide P/E cutoff — say, “only buy stocks under 20×” — would systematically exclude the entire technology sector while accepting mediocre businesses in slow-growth industries.

The right comparison is sector-relative: measure a stock's P/E against the median P/E of its own sector, not the whole market. A 25× P/E is cheap for technology, where the sector median runs near 34×. That same 25× would be expensive for utilities, where the median sits closer to 17×. Sector-relative P/E answers the real question: is this stock being priced at a discount or a premium to its direct peers?

The table below shows the current median P/E for each of the 11 GICS sectors, computed weekly from more than 4,000 US-listed companies. Each sector's row also shows how many stocks currently trade below their sector median — a simple first-pass filter for finding relative value. Numbers are drawn from the Tessera Alpha factor panel, which is rebuilt nightly from licensed fundamental data and updated to the latest available fiscal period.