How Much Money Does Walmart Make in a Year?

Walmart makes $14.7 billion a year in profit and $482 billion a year in total revenue. That would make Walmart the 12th biggest country in the world, if it were a country.

Walmart makes $40 million a day in profit and $466 in profit every second. Contrast that with the typical Walmart employee making about $22,137 a year. Add that up across all of Walmart’s 2,200,000 though, adjusting for lower pay in the developing world, and you get an annual payroll of about $40 billion.

As far as spending goes, $15,288 gets spent at Walmart every second. Walmart pays on average $7.5 billion in taxes every year. That’s about half as much as it makes in annual profit, or about 1.6% of its total sales.

How Much Money Walmart Makes in a Year

Walmart makes $14.7 billion a year. That’s profit. Put another way, it’s net income after all costs and expenses, including taxes. To put that in perspective, that’s enough money to buy a brand new Ford F-150 with all the options for every man, woman and child in Boston, every year.

That’s just the profit side of the equation. Looking at how much money Walmart actually makes in a year in terms of all income, the numbers are a lot harder to fit into the human mind. Including all sales made by Walmart in a year, Walmart makes a total of $482 billion. That’s enough to buy that brand new Ford truck for everyone in Florida.

How much money Walmart makes in a year
$14,690,000,000
How much money Walmart makes in a day$40,246,575
How much money Walmart makes every second$466
How much money a typical Walmart employee makes in a year (US)$22,137
Total number of Walmart employees worldwide2,200,000
How much money all Walmart employees make in a year$39,845,828,571
How much money do all Walmart's customers spend in a year?$482,130,000,000
How much money gets spent at Walmart every second$15,288
If Walmart were a country, here's where its economy would rank12th
Number of Walmart stores in the U.S.5,229
Total number of Walmart stores worldwide11,527
Walmart cashier salary vs Starbucks barista salaryAbout the same
Walmart store manager salary vs Starbucks store manager salaryAbout double
How many typical American families could live on Walmart's annual earnings226,000
Walmart's annual taxes$7,500,000,000

The video below shows a huge drop in Walmart’s shares price. The company’s stock price has since rebounded.

Also see: How to Save Money With Walmart Savings Catcher

How Much Money Walmart’s Employees Make in a Year

Walmart money by yearThe typical Walmart employee makes about $22,000 a year.

Walmart takes a lot of flak for not paying its employees enough, but does it really deserve its reputation for low pay? In fact the typical retail associate nationwide makes about $26,000 per year. That means Walmart pays its front line workers about 16% less than other retail outlets. In concrete terms, Costco’s run of the mill cashier makes about $25,600 a year and Target’s makes $18,000. That means Walmart workers make 13.5% less than Costco’s and 19% more than Target’s.

So the answer is, yes, Walmart employees are at the bottom of the retail heap nationwide. Some stores pay workers significantly less, but the majority of stores pay a lot more. That said, whether a cashier makes $22,000 a year or $26,000 a year can seem like splitting hairs. Nobody in that line of work is making enough to support a family with any kind of comfort level.

Walmart’s Managers Do a Lot Better

Walmart’s managers do better than workers in similar positions at other stores. According to a Wall Street Journal article, Walmart cashiers make slightly less than Starbucks baristas. That said, Walmart store managers make about twice what managers at Starbucks make. A Starbucks store manager earns about $44,000 a year, while Walmart store managers make $95,000 a year on average.

That may not be comparing apples to apples. A Walmart store is significantly larger than a Starbucks. It’s also responsible for a lot more annual revenue. That being the case, a Walmart manager is captain of a significantly larger, more important ship in terms of earning power. Even so, a Starbucks regional manager only makes about $77,000 a year. That’s still 19% less per year than a Walmart store manager. The bottom line here is, Walmart seems to place a lot more value on its leaders than its front line workers.

How Much Money Walmart Made by Year

The table below shows Walmart’s revenue by year since 2008. On average, Walmart’s sales revenue has grown by about 3.75% per year. Compare that to Amazon, which is growing at about 20% per year and makes about 1/5th the amount of sales money per year as Walmart.

How much money Walmart made by year (sales dollars)
How much money Walmart made in 2008$373,000,000,000
How much money Walmart made in 2009$401,000,000,000
How much money Walmart made in 2010$405,000,000,000
How much money Walmart made in 2011$419,000,000,000
How much money Walmart made in 2012$443,000,000,000
How much money Walmart made in 2013$466,000,000,000
How much money Walmart made in 2014$474,000,000,000
How much money Walmart made in 2015$482,000,000,000

As the chart below shows, by 2026, Amazon will pass Walmart’s annual revenue. That depends on a couple of very big ifs however. The first is that Walmart’s growth rate would have to stay at 3.76% per year. It’s possible that Walmart’s sales will slow, but an increase in the sales growth rate is also possible. Walmart has physical stores to pay for and Amazon doesn’t. That said, the retail giant just invested $2 billion in improving its e-commerce offering. The second big if is Amazon. Will the company be able to continue growing at 20% per year? That’s possible but by no means proven.

Walmart vs Amazon money by year

How Much Money Walmart Customers Spend Per Year

Walmart’s customers worldwide spend a whopping $482 billion every year. That doesn’t all happen in the United States. Walmart has 11,527 stores worldwide and 5,229 stores in the United States. Even so, most of Walmart’s revenue comes from the U.S. In 2015, Walmart made $288 billion in sales in America. All consumer spending in the country in that year came to $12.4 trillion total. That means about 4% of all U.S. spending happens at Walmart. Put another way, four cents of every dollar spent in America gets spent at a Walmart store.

Over $22 million gets spent at Walmart every day, and $15,288 per second.

Also see: 5 Cheap, Healthy Foods You Can Prepare from Walmart Ingredients

If Walmart Were a Country

If Walmart were a country, it would be #28 on the list of the world’s most powerful economies. Austria, Thailand, Hong Kong, Denmark and Ireland all have smaller economies than Walmart. That’s in terms of GDP. Comparing tax revenue to sales revenue tells a different story.

Walmart makes about 1/7th as much money per year as the United States. That is, putting U.S. tax revenue against Walmart’s annual sales, Walmart makes about 15% as much as the United States of America per year.

Based on revenue alone, if Walmart were a country it would be the twelfth biggest economy in the world. That would put it behind the U.S. and China, Germany, Japan and France, but ahead of Russia, India, South Korea, Norway, Mexico and Sweden.

Walmart money by year vs world economies

 

How Much Money Does Walmart Pay in Taxes?

Walmart taxesWalmart pays $7.5 billion in taxes per year. Compared to how much money they make, that’s very small. Walmart takes in $482 billion a year in sales. That means Walmart pays about 1.6% of what it makes each year in taxes. The typical American pays about 16% in taxes. Looked at that way, Walmart pays only about 1/1oth of the typical American’s tax bill.

That’s oversimplifying things somewhat. Walmart may make $482 billion a year in sales, but they don’t “keep” that. They pay their employees about $40 billion a year. They also spend billions on the products that they sell, on equipment, store upkeep and expansion.

In terms of profit, Walmart makes $14.7 billion a year. Their $7.5 billion a year in taxes is about half their annual profit. The real question is, how does the other $467 billion a year Walmart spends affect the economy? Some have made the argument that since 80% of Walmart’s suppliers are based in China, it doesn’t help the U.S. economy much at all. Others claim that Walmart does help the economy by saving money for consumers that they can use elsewhere, by growing employment and earnings figures and by generally boosting productivity.

What if We Divided Up Walmart’s Money?

If all the money Walmart makes each year were given to consumers, what would it buy? We’ll assume Walmart needs most of the $482 billion it makes per year to cover costs. In other words, we’ll assume we can’t divide up all the $482 billion because then the company would go out of business. It wouldn’t have enough money to pay its workers, keep its stores in good repair, buy and distribute products that it sells and so on. That leaves $14.7 billion in annual profit.

Dividing $14.7 billion up would pay the annual budget for about 226,000 typical American families. That typical budget is about $65,000 a year. There are about 115,000,000 U.S. households. So if we divided up all of Walmart’s worldwide profit every year, it would pay the way of 1/1oth of 1% of all families in the United States.

Source:

Payscale.com

Statista.com