Technology sector valuation
The U.S. technology sector trades at 38.59 times trailing earnings, 70.95 times its ten-year average of inflation-adjusted earnings, and 14.10 times book value.
That last figure is higher than 99% of its readings since 1979, against a record of 15.28 set in May 2026. The sector has also compounded earnings at 15.4% a year for a decade. This page is about whether those two facts cancel out.
United States The four headline readings below are for the U.S. technology sector. The same six measures for the global and global ex-U.S. technology sectors are in the table that follows.
| Measure | United States | Global | Global ex-U.S. | U.S. premium |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Trailing P/E | 38.59 | 32.49 | 21.54 | +79% |
| Forward P/E | 21.59 | 17.88 | 11.52 | +87% |
| CAPE | 70.95 | 67.90 | 59.66 | +19% |
| EV/EBITDA | 25.39 | 21.29 | 14.00 | +81% |
| Price to book | 14.10 | — | — | — |
| Dividend yield | 0.51% | — | — | — |
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 on one axis, from 1979, drawn logarithmically. The P/E reached 983.0 in April 2001 — not because prices rose but because earnings nearly vanished — and on a linear axis that one episode would flatten four decades to make room for itself.
The same four measures, side by side in each market published. The premium widens rather than narrows when you move from trailing to forward earnings.
| Year | Trailing P/E | CAPE |
|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 39.91 | 64.46 |
| 2024 | 41.53 | 58.96 |
| 2023 | 36.68 | 48.56 |
| 2022 | 23.04 | 34.42 |
| 2021 | 34.24 | 56.94 |
| 2020 | 35.06 | 50.06 |
| 2019 | 25.76 | 38.88 |
| 2018 | 17.04 | 29.98 |
| 2017 | 23.82 | 34.80 |
| 2016 | 22.00 | 27.97 |
The full monthly history from 1979, and the global and global ex-U.S. series, are available to subscribers.
United States, Aug 2026
U.S. sector against its own history
The case that CAPE is the wrong measure here
CAPE divides price by ten years of inflation-adjusted earnings, on the reasoning that one year of profits tells you where the cycle is rather than what a business earns. That reasoning holds when earnings oscillate around a level.
This sector's earnings have not oscillated. They have compounded at 15.4% a year for ten years, and at 17.2% over five. A ten-year average of a series growing at that rate sits far below where the series now is, so the denominator describes a sector a fraction of its present size.
On that argument a CAPE of 70.95 is not a measurement of expense. It is an artefact of using a trailing average against a genuinely growing base, and the trailing P/E of 38.59 — or better, the forward P/E of 21.59 — is the more honest number.
This is a serious argument and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
The case that it is not
The same argument was available, in the same words, in 1999. Earnings had compounded for a decade, the average was said to describe a sector that no longer existed, and the trailing multiple was said to be the honest one.
What the series records: CAPE peaked at 178.59 in March 2000. The trailing P/E reached 983.0 in April 2001 — not because prices rose, but because earnings very nearly disappeared, which is the failure mode the ten-year average exists to survive.
We are not forecasting a repeat, and this page will not tell you which argument is right. What we can do is publish both numbers, for four decades, on a consistent method, and let the record be the third participant in the argument.
The American premium is not about debt
U.S. technology trades +79% above global ex-U.S. on trailing earnings and +81% above on EV/EBITDA. Those two measures treat capital structure differently — P/E ignores it entirely, EV/EBITDA prices it in — and they produce almost the same premium.
When that happens, financing is not the explanation.
On forward earnings the gap is wider still: 21.59 against 11.52, a premium of +87%. The market is not only paying more for American technology today, it expects the gap to grow.
One measure dissents. On CAPE the premium is +19% — 70.95 against 59.66 — because the international sector has re-rated against its own decade of earnings nearly as sharply as the American one. Measured against their own pasts, the two are far closer than measured against each other.
Price to book at 14.10 times
The sector's price to book is 14.10, against a median of 3.78 across 561 months, and higher than 99% of them.
The standard objection is fair: book value understates a business whose main assets are intangible, so a high price-to-book is partly an accounting artefact rather than a valuation signal. Software does not appear on a balance sheet the way a refinery does.
That objection explains why the ratio should be high. It does not explain why it should be several times its own median, on accounting standards that applied for most of the period. The direction is not ambiguous even if the level is arguable.
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 Discretionary · Consumer Staples · Energy · Financials · Health Care · Industrials · 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 technology 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.
- EV/EBITDA — Enterprise value over EBITDA, a monthly snapshot rather than a daily calculation.
- Coverage — U.S. series from 1979; global and global ex-U.S. from 1997. The three are comparable as levels but not as history, because they do not span the same period.
- 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.
- 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). Technology sector P/E, CAPE and EV/EBITDA — U.S. and global [Data set]. Retrieved 31 August 2026, from siblisresearch.com/data/technology-sector-valuation/
@misc{siblis_technology_sector_valuation,
title={Technology sector P/E, CAPE and EV/EBITDA — U.S. and global}, author={{Siblis Research}},
year={2026}, url={https://siblisresearch.com/data/technology-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.