Guide · 20 filers read from SEC EDGAR on 2 November 2026
Net debt: why adding up every debt tag overstates it
Net debt is total debt minus cash, and the cash side is the easy half. The debt side is
where a valuation quietly goes wrong, because the US-GAAP debt tags are not separate line items. They
nest. LongTermDebt already contains LongTermDebtCurrent.
DebtCurrent already contains the current part of long-term debt, the commercial paper
and the short-term borrowings. A filer can tag the total and its parts on the same balance sheet, and
most large ones do.
So the obvious approach, find every debt tag the filing answers and add them up, counts the same dollar two or three times. We checked how far off that sum lands for the same 20 large filers surveyed in the earlier guides on this site, read live from SEC EDGAR at each company's latest annual balance-sheet date. For 13 of the 18 that can be compared, the naive sum is at least 1.8 times the real figure. The median is 2.0 times.
How the tags nest
LongTermDebt = LongTermDebtNoncurrent + LongTermDebtCurrent
DebtCurrent = LongTermDebtCurrent + CommercialPaper or
ShortTermBorrowings, plus any other debt due within a year
DebtLongtermAndShorttermCombinedAmount = all of it, when a filer reports one total
Each tag is correct on its own. The error only appears when they are combined, and nothing in the
data warns you. Every value is a positive number in USD at the same date, and so is their sum. Apple
tags LongTermDebt of $90.7bn and also its two halves, $78.3bn noncurrent and $12.4bn
current. Add the three and Apple's term debt becomes $181.4bn before its $8.0bn of commercial paper is
even counted.
The check is cheap where a filer tags all three: LongTermDebt should equal
the noncurrent part plus the current part. It did, within 1%, for every company in this survey that
tags all three except Alphabet, where the two halves come to $0.5bn less than the total. A gap like that
is a reason to open the debt note in the filing, not to pick whichever figure looks right.
Trap one: the sum can flip the sign
Doubling a large company's debt does not only lower a fair value. When a company holds roughly as much cash as debt, it changes which side of zero net debt lands on.
Amazon and Nvidia: net cash on one path, net debt on the other. Amazon's debt at its 31 December 2025 balance sheet is $69.3bn against $86.8bn of cash and cash equivalents, so it is $17.5bn net cash. Add up every debt tag and the debt becomes $137.7bn, and Amazon becomes $50.9bn net debt. Nvidia goes the same way on a smaller scale: $8.5bn of debt and $10.6bn of cash is $2.1bn net cash, while the naive $17.9bn makes it $7.3bn net debt. In a DCF that difference moves straight from enterprise value into the value per share.
Trap two: a tag that still answers is not a tag that is still used
The second way to get net debt wrong is the one the first guide on this site found for free cash flow. A filer stops using a tag, and the old facts stay in EDGAR forever. Ask for the newest value of each tag and you get a mix of balance sheets from different years.
14 of 20 filers carry at least one abandoned debt tag. AT&T last tagged
LongTermDebtNoncurrent and LongTermDebtCurrent for 2011. JPMorgan last tagged
LongTermDebt for 2013. Coca-Cola stopped using LongTermDebt,
LongTermDebtNoncurrent and LongTermDebtCurrent after 2023 and moved to
LongTermDebtAndCapitalLeaseObligations. Read each tag only at the date of the balance
sheet you are valuing, and a tag with no fact on that date simply drops out.
AT&T is the largest error in absolute terms. At its 31 December 2025 balance sheet it tags five debt figures, and they add up to $279.8bn. One path through them gives $134.7bn, so the naive sum is $145.1bn too high.
Debt of 20 large filers, every tag added up versus one path, read 2 November 2026
| Company | Balance sheet | Debt tags | Every tag added | One path | Overstated | Net debt |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apple | 2025-09-27 | 4 | $189.3bn | $98.7bn | 1.92× | $62.7bn |
| Microsoft | 2026-06-30 | 3 | $80.6bn | $40.3bn | 2.00× | $19.4bn |
| Nvidia | 2026-01-25 | 4 | $17.9bn | $8.5bn | 2.12× | −$2.1bn |
| Amazon | 2025-12-31 | 4 | $137.7bn | $69.3bn | 1.99× | −$17.5bn |
| Alphabet | 2025-12-31 | 4 | $97.6bn | $49.1bn | 1.99× | $18.4bn |
| Meta | 2025-12-31 | 2 | $117.5bn | $58.7bn | 2.00× | $22.9bn |
| Tesla | 2025-12-31 | 2 | $8.2bn | not compared | — | — |
| JPMorgan | 2025-12-31 | 1 | $64.8bn | not compared | — | — |
| Exxon | 2025-12-31 | 5 | $59.0bn | $43.5bn | 1.36× | $32.9bn |
| Johnson & Johnson | 2025-12-28 | 5 | $99.9bn | $47.9bn | 2.08× | $28.2bn |
| Walmart | 2026-01-31 | 4 | $82.9bn | $44.8bn | 1.85× | $34.0bn |
| Procter & Gamble | 2026-06-30 | 4 | $45.4bn | $34.1bn | 1.33× | — |
| Coca-Cola | 2025-12-31 | 3 | $45.4bn | $45.4bn | 1.00× | $35.2bn |
| Pfizer | 2025-12-31 | 4 | $67.8bn | $64.8bn | 1.05× | $63.7bn |
| Intel | 2025-12-27 | 5 | $95.7bn | $46.6bn | 2.05× | $32.3bn |
| Chevron | 2025-12-31 | 5 | $58.7bn | $50.7bn | 1.16× | — |
| AT&T | 2025-12-31 | 5 | $279.8bn | $134.7bn | 2.08× | $116.5bn |
| Boeing | 2025-12-31 | 3 | $107.9bn | $53.8bn | 2.00× | $42.9bn |
| General Electric | 2025-12-31 | 5 | $61.5bn | $20.5bn | 3.00× | — |
| Merck | 2025-12-31 | 4 | $100.9bn | $49.3bn | 2.05× | $34.7bn |
"Debt tags" is how many of the nine debt tags checked carry a fact at the balance-sheet
date. "One path" follows the rule below. "Net debt" is one path minus
CashAndCashEquivalentsAtCarryingValue; a negative figure is net cash, and a dash means the
filer has no fact for that cash tag at that date (Procter & Gamble, Chevron and General Electric).
Short-term investments are left out of cash on purpose, which is why Pfizer's cash is only $1.1bn.
Leases are excluded from every column. JPMorgan and Tesla are read and published but not compared:
JPMorgan tags only ShortTermBorrowings among these tags at that date, so no bank-level total
can be built from them, and Tesla tags only LongTermDebt and DebtCurrent, which
cannot tell you on their own whether the first already contains the second.
The rule, in order
- Fix one balance-sheet date first, the latest annual one, and read every tag at that date only. A tag with no fact on that date is not current, however recent its last fact looks.
- If the filer reports a single total,
DebtLongtermAndShorttermCombinedAmount, use it and stop. General Electric and Merck do. - Otherwise take the noncurrent part and add
DebtCurrent, which already holds the current portion, commercial paper and short-term borrowings. - With no
DebtCurrent, takeLongTermDebt, which already holds its current portion, and add short-term borrowings or commercial paper once. - Never add
LongTermDebtCurrenttoLongTermDebt, and never add commercial paper or short-term borrowings toDebtCurrent. - Where the total and both halves are tagged, check that they agree. If they do not, read the debt note before trusting either.
- Decide on leases separately and say which way you decided. Whether an operating lease is debt is a modelling choice, and it should never enter a total by accident.
Check this yourself
Every figure above comes from one script hitting SEC EDGAR, and both the script and its output are published rather than described:
- net-debt-survey.json, the full result for all twenty companies: every debt tag at the date, the abandoned tags with their last date, leases and cash.
- net-debt-survey.py, the script that produced it. Run it and the numbers regenerate. If it disagrees with this page, the script is right and the page is stale.
Read from SEC EDGAR on 2 November 2026 · leases excluded, cash is cash and cash equivalents only · corrections welcome at [email protected]
Want the arithmetic without the plumbing? The calculator names the tag behind every figure it fills in, so you can see which debt tags went into the number.
Open the calculator