SP500_FORWARD_PE
S&P 500 Forward 12-month P/E — price ÷ analyst-consensus next-12m EPS
Latest value
21.3700
as of 2026-04-01
All-time percentile
69th
1-year change
-5.1%
Time series
Showing 31 of 31 data points
About this series
The most-cited forward valuation number on financial TV. Numerator: current S&P 500 level. Denominator: bottom-up consensus analyst estimate of next-12-month operating earnings. Tracks where the market is pricing equities relative to what Wall Street expects, not what already happened.
Why it matters: Every other valuation tile on this dashboard looks backward — CAPE smooths over 10y of past earnings, P/E TTM uses the last 12 months, P/B and Buffett use realised balance-sheet figures. Forward P/E is the only one that asks "given what the consensus is for the next year, how is the market priced?" When forward and trailing P/E diverge meaningfully, the gap reveals the market's expectation of earnings inflection — forward < trailing means Wall Street expects EPS growth (so forward earnings are higher than current); forward > trailing means contraction is priced in.
How to read it: Long-run normal range is roughly 14-18. Extremes: ~32 in early 2008 (forward EPS being slashed faster than price), ~13 in 2009 (post-crisis revaluation), ~22-23 in the current regime.
Caveats: This series is currently a one-shot historical import — 116 monthly readings spanning 2008-01 to 2026-04, scraped from a public chart. Not auto-updating. Once a reliable live source is wired in (the actual project bottleneck for this datapoint), the same series will refresh automatically on the regular schedule. Until then, the latest reading lags by however long since the last manual import.