Every line of the valuation
The main essay builds the valuation in seven charts. This page is the underlying arithmetic: every holding, the profit it earns, the multiple applied to it, and the deductions and opportunities that turn one number into a range.
Valued line by line and not on a single multiple, Berkshire's operating businesses and its financial assets turn out to be worth roughly the same as each other, the conglomerate and the portfolio each carry about half the case.
- 1 Three of the 17 lines are most of the value. Public equities, the insurance cash pile and MSR come to $744 B between them, 70% of the base case.
- 2 Value and earnings do not sit in the same place. The operating businesses are 38% of the value but 47% of the normalised profit, which is the argument for valuing the parts separately instead of putting one multiple on the whole company.
- 3 The range is narrow because the assets are liquid. 62% of the base case is marked to market or held in Treasuries, so the spread from $458 to $525 is only 14% of the middle, far tighter than a conglomerate usually offers.
Why add the parts up at all
“If the conglomerate form is used judiciously, it is an ideal structure for maximizing long-term capital growth.”
Warren Buffett · 2014 Annual Report
A single earnings multiple works on a company that does one thing. Berkshire does three: it operates businesses, it owns pieces of other people’s, and it holds $369 B of cash and Treasury bills. Putting one multiple on all of that would value a Treasury bill as though it were a railroad.
So each holding is valued on its own terms. Operating businesses get a multiple of normalised after-tax profit. Marketable securities are carried at market. Cash is carried at cash. The three groups below are ordered by how readily each could be turned into something else, which is also the order of how much judgement each one requires.
The takeaway 62% of the estimated value is financial, marked to market or held in Treasuries. Only 38% rests on the multiples argued over below, which is why the range on this valuation is as tight as it is.
Every holding, ranked
Seventeen lines make up the valuation. Ranked by size, not by filing category, the shape of the company is obvious: the largest single holding is not a business Berkshire runs, and the second largest is a pile of Treasury bills sitting inside the insurance subsidiaries.
Where the earnings are, and are not
Value and earning power are not the same map. The operating businesses are 38% of the estimated value but produce 47% of the normalised profit. The financial half of the company holds more value and earns less of the income, because a Treasury bill yielding 3.6% is worth its face value whatever it earns.
How to read this. These are normalised figures, not reported ones. Insurance underwriting is carried at its 17-year average, not this year’s result; public equities contribute Berkshire’s share of the earnings of the companies it part-owns, not the dividends it receives.
The takeaway $53.2 B of adjusted after-tax earning power, or $24.63 a share, an earnings yield of 5.0% on the base case valuation.
From one number to a range
The base case is what the parts are worth as they stand. Two sets of adjustments turn it into a range. The deductions are things that would reduce the value in a worse world: capital the insurance regulators will not let leave, $23 B of debt at the parent, and a 10% drawdown applied to the quoted portfolio. The opportunities are what the cash could become if it were deployed well.
Note the asymmetry, because it is the most contestable thing on this page. The deductions are mostly arithmetic. The opportunities require Berkshire to deploy $100 B of cash at 1.5× what it pays, which it has done before, and which it has also failed to do.
The answer, as a range
Three scenarios, per share, against the $332.35 of book value the 2025 balance sheet reports. The curve is illustrative; it shows the three cases as a distribution and not as three points, because a valuation is a range with a middle, not a target price.
Book value per share was $348.26 at Q2 2026 (Q2 2026 Form 10-Q), 4.7% above the year end. The multiples here are struck against the 2025 figure because the valuation is too; the price comparison uses the newer one.
What the estimate implies about returns
Buy at a multiple of book value and sell at the same multiple, and the return is whatever book value compounded at in between. Berkshire’s has compounded at 10.5% a year for 26 years, and this analysis assumes approximately 10% a year continues. So the base case is not a forecast of the share price, it is the price at which a buyer should expect to earn about 10% a year. Pay more and you earn less than that; pay less and you earn more, because the multiple works for you as well as the compounding.
First half 2026: book value per share rose 4.7% to $348.26 (Q2 2026 Form 10-Q), an annualised 9.7%, in line with the assumption.
What this is dated to. The balance sheet is the anchor: asset values, share count and book value come from the 2025 Form 10-K, with book value per share updated to the Q2 2026 Form 10-Q. The assumptions applied to them are not a reading of that year. The earnings multiples, the normalised profit and the rate of compounding are long-run judgements, chosen because they should hold across a cycle and not because they describe 2025. Insurance underwriting, for instance, is carried at a 17-year average and not at whatever the latest year produced. A year of unusually good or bad results moves the anchor; it is not meant to move the estimate by much.
The whole thing, as a table
Everything above, in the form that is easiest to check against the filing. Every figure here is the same figure the charts use, they are generated from one source, so they cannot disagree.
| Holding | Revenue | Normalised profit | Multiple | Value | Per share | % of base |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Operating businesses | $405 B | $188 | 38% | |||
| Insurance Underwriting | — | $2.0 B | 10× | $20 B | $9 | 2% |
| BNSF Railway | $24 B | $5.5 B | 20× | $110 B | $51 | 10% |
| Berkshire Hathaway Energy | $26 B | $4.0 B | 18× | $71 B | $33 | 7% |
| Manufacturing, Service & Retail | $214 B | $13.6 B | 15× | $204 B | $94 | 19% |
| Investments | $295 B | $137 | 28% | |||
| Public Equities | — | $15.0 B | 20× | $298 B | $138 | 28% |
| Equity Method Investments | — | $1.8 B | — | $20 B | $9 | 2% |
| Fixed Income | — | $0.6 B | — | $18 B | $8 | 2% |
| Deferred Tax Liability | — | — | — | ($41 B) | ($19) | -4% |
| Cash & Treasuries | $369 B | $171 | 35% | |||
| Cash & T-bills — parent | — | $3.7 B | — | $127 B | $59 | 12% |
| Cash & T-bills — insurance | — | $7.0 B | — | $242 B | $112 | 23% |
| Base case intrinsic value | $1,069 B | $495 | 100% | |||
| Insurance liquidity reserve | — | — | — | ($30 B) | ($14) | — |
| Parent company debt | — | ($0.5 B) | — | ($23 B) | ($11) | — |
| Public equities haircut (10%) | — | — | — | ($30 B) | ($14) | — |
| Deferred tax relief on haircut | — | — | — | $4 B | $2 | — |
| Downside intrinsic value | $990 B | $458 | — | |||
| Improved operations | — | $1.0 B | 15× | $15 B | $7 | — |
| Value created by acquisitions | — | $10.0 B | 15× | $150 B | $69 | — |
| Cash used to acquire | — | ($3.0 B) | — | ($100 B) | ($46) | — |
| Upside intrinsic value | $1,134 B | $525 | — | |||
Download the series (.xlsx) Berkshire sum-of-the-parts valuation, FY2025, with sources and the date it was struck written into the file. This page’s series only; there is no combined download.