Consumer Discretionary sector valuation
The U.S. consumer discretionary sector trades at 24.87 times trailing earnings and 38.14 times its inflation-adjusted ten-year average — a ratio of 1.53 between the two.
Aggregate earnings grew 29.1% over the last twelve months against 7.3% a year over ten. This is the sector where the ten-year average is doing precisely the job it was designed for.
United States The four headline readings below are for the U.S. consumer discretionary sector. The same six measures for the global and global ex-U.S. consumer discretionary sectors are in the table that follows.
| Measure | United States | Global | Global ex-U.S. | U.S. premium |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Trailing P/E | 24.87 | 21.97 | 17.69 | +41% |
| Forward P/E | 23.92 | 19.72 | 14.45 | +66% |
| CAPE | 38.14 | 27.89 | 17.90 | +113% |
| EV/EBITDA | 18.98 | 14.64 | 9.93 | +91% |
| Price to book | 8.67 | — | — | — |
| Dividend yield | 0.64% | — | — | — |
Global covers developed markets, emerging markets and the United States. Global ex-U.S. is the same universe with the United States removed, and still includes both developed and emerging markets. Dividend yield and price to book are published for the U.S. sectors only. Free to reuse with attribution.
Trailing P/E and CAPE, U.S., from 1979, drawn logarithmically. The P/E line moves far more than the CAPE line, which is the whole argument for averaging the denominator.
The same four measures, side by side in each market published. The American premium is much wider on EV/EBITDA than on earnings.
| Year | Trailing P/E | CAPE |
|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 32.98 | 40.28 |
| 2024 | 32.99 | 41.11 |
| 2023 | 28.95 | 34.19 |
| 2022 | 25.66 | 25.73 |
| 2021 | 39.62 | 45.83 |
| 2020 | 44.68 | 41.28 |
| 2019 | 24.99 | 33.27 |
| 2018 | 19.63 | 30.28 |
| 2017 | 22.77 | 34.52 |
| 2016 | 19.52 | 31.24 |
The full monthly history from 1979, the dividend yield and price-to-book series, and the global and global ex-U.S. figures are available to subscribers.
United States, Aug 2026
U.S. sector against its own history
The sector CAPE was built for
The standard objection to CAPE is that a ten-year average of earnings understates a business that has genuinely grown. It is a serious objection, and in technology it is the central question on the page.
Here it has much less force, and the reason is in the numbers above. Earnings in this sector do not compound steadily — they surge and stall with consumer spending. Over the last twelve months aggregate earnings grew 29.1%. Over five years the rate is 14.2% a year, over ten 7.3%, and over twenty 7.9%. Since 1979, in the 512 months where a year-on-year comparison is possible, earnings were below their year-earlier level 30% of the time.
A denominator that averages across that is more informative than one that takes a single year of it. The trailing P/E of 24.87 is calculated on earnings 1.53 times their own decade average — so it is the flattering number, and the CAPE of 38.14, at the 85% percentile of its history since 1984, is the one that has already absorbed the swing.
The trailing multiple is not wrong. It is answering a narrower question than most readers think they are asking.
The premium that appears only when debt is counted
U.S. consumer discretionary trades +41% above the rest of the world on trailing earnings. On EV/EBITDA it trades +91% above.
P/E ignores capital structure entirely; EV/EBITDA adds net debt to the price and strips financing costs out of the earnings. When the whole-company premium is far wider than the equity-only premium, the international sector is carrying more debt relative to what it earns, and the equity-only comparison is flattering it.
For a sector this exposed to the consumer cycle, that is not a footnote. Leverage is what turns a soft year in retail or autos into a solvency question, and a screen built on P/E alone will not see it. The same divergence appears, more sharply, in communication services.
What price to book adds
Price to book is 8.67, at the 89th percentile of its history since 1979, and it is one of the higher readings among the eleven sectors.
The usual defence of a high price-to-book — that book value understates a business whose assets are intangible — applies here only partly. Retailers and manufacturers do carry real assets, and a large part of this sector's book value is inventory, property and plant that is recorded at something close to what it cost.
The measure is published for the U.S. sectors only, so it cannot settle the international comparison above. It does, however, agree with CAPE about the domestic one.
The cycle in the multiple
Sorting every month since 1979 by this sector's own trailing P/E: in the cheapest fifth, aggregate earnings fell over the following twelve months 44% of the time, median +2.7%. In the dearest fifth, 28% and +35.6%.
The asymmetry is the cycle showing through the multiple, and it is the practical reason the argument at the top of this page matters. A low trailing P/E in a cyclical sector is often a statement about where earnings are, not about what they cost.
Choosing a measure
No single ratio answers every question about a sector. Each of these pages covers the same eleven sectors — what changes is the question the measure is good at, and how far the coverage reaches.
| Measure | The question it answers | Why that one |
|---|---|---|
| EV/EBITDA | How does one sector compare across markets? | Sits above tax and debt, so it survives crossing borders. The only measure here that makes an international sector comparison sound. |
| P/E and earnings | How fast are a sector’s earnings growing? | Trailing and forward multiples with the earnings behind them, so the multiple and its denominator can be read together. |
| CAPE | Is a sector expensive against its own history? | Averages a decade of real earnings, which smooths the cycle out of the denominator. |
| Price to book | What is the market paying for the assets? | Works where earnings-based measures break down — asset-heavy sectors, and banks in particular. U.S. sectors only. |
| Dividend yield | Which sectors pay, and how much? | Income rather than valuation, but it moves inversely with price and is read alongside the multiples. U.S. sectors only. |
Communication Services · Consumer Staples · Energy · Financials · Health Care · Industrials · Technology · Materials · Real Estate · Utilities
All eleven side by side: sector valuations. To compare them on one measure: P/E and earnings · CAPE ratios · EV/EBITDA · Dividend yields · Price to book.
Where this data is used
Some examples. Siblis valuation data appears in peer-reviewed journals, central bank publications and the financial press.
The whole consumer discretionary history, every trading day
This page publishes ten year-ends and the current reading. The database carries every month back to 1979, for all eleven sectors and every market.
How this is calculated
Every ratio is calculated on the aggregate: the total market capitalisation of the sector's constituents divided by their aggregate earnings, book value or EBITDA, rather than as an average of the constituents' own ratios.
- Trailing P/E — Aggregate normalised net income over the previous twelve months. Major purely accounting gains and losses are removed.
- Forward P/E — Consensus estimates for the next twelve months, aggregated the same way.
- CAPE — Price divided by the average of ten years of inflation-adjusted aggregate earnings.
- Earnings growth — Calculated on aggregate sector earnings, not a per-share figure, so it is unaffected by buybacks. The one-year figure compares two month-ends. Rates over five years and longer compare the average of the twelve months at each end, so that one unusual month at the start does not set the whole rate.
- Quintile figures — Every month-end since 1979 is ranked by the sector's own trailing P/E; the cheapest and dearest fifths are compared with the change in aggregate trailing earnings over the twelve months that followed.
- Coverage — U.S. series from 1979; global and global ex-U.S. from 1998. Dividend yield and price to book are U.S. only, from 2005 and 1979. The universes are comparable as levels but not as history, because they do not span the same period.
- Percentiles — The share of month-ends in that series' own history with a lower reading than the current one.
- Revisions — Figures are point-in-time. If a company later restates its results, the historic reading is left exactly as first published.
Cite this page
Siblis Research. (2026). Consumer Discretionary sector P/E, CAPE and EV/EBITDA — U.S. and global [Data set]. Retrieved 31 August 2026, from siblisresearch.com/data/consumer-discretionary-sector-valuation/
@misc{siblis_consumer_discretionary_sector_valuation,
title={Consumer Discretionary sector P/E, CAPE and EV/EBITDA — U.S. and global}, author={{Siblis Research}},
year={2026}, url={https://siblisresearch.com/data/consumer-discretionary-sector-valuation/},
urldate={2026-08-31}} Charts on this page may be reproduced free of charge with attribution to Siblis Research and a link to this page.