Fiscal year vs calendar year: which companies report off-calendar, from their 10-K covers

A calendar year runs from January 1 to December 31; a fiscal year is the 12-month period a company chooses for its accounts, which can end on any date, and for many companies ends on a weekday near the end of a month rather than on a fixed date. In EDGAR's own records, 139 of the 500 companies in the site's S&P 500 tranche end their fiscal year on a day other than December 31, and so do 32 of the 76 companies behind CFO Voice's quotes.

The share is higher on the voice record, 42.1% against 27.8%. Either way, more than one company in four in the index names its quarters in a calendar of its own, and a reader comparing two releases has to translate before comparing.

The difference in two sentences

A fiscal year is named for the calendar year in which it ends: Cisco's fiscal 2026 ended in July 2026, and fiscal 2027 for a company whose year ends on June 30 runs from July 2026 to June 2027. A fiscal quarter is a quarter of that year, so "the fourth quarter" can mean May to July for one company and October to December for another.

The fiscal year end is printed on the cover of every 10-K and 10-Q and carried in the XBRL as the document's fiscal year focus and period. EDGAR keeps it in each company's submissions record as a four-digit month and day: "1231" for a calendar year, "0731" for Cisco, "1101" for Broadcom. That field is what this article counts.

The same information sits in each filing's XBRL cover data, in the document and entity information tags every filer uses. CurrentFiscalYearEndDate repeats the month and day. DocumentFiscalYearFocus gives the fiscal year the document belongs to, and DocumentFiscalPeriodFocus the period: Q1, Q2 or Q3 for a 10-Q, FY for a 10-K. There is no Q4 10-Q. The fourth fiscal quarter is reported only inside the annual report, which is why a company's fourth-quarter release often prints quarter figures that appear in no quarterly filing.

Those tags let a reader place any document without reading its cover. A 10-Q tagged Q1 for fiscal 2027 from a company whose year ends on June 30 covers July to September 2026; the same tags from a calendar-year company would mean January to March 2027.

Fiscal year-end months, counted

The counts below read the fiscalYearEnd field for the 76 companies on the record and for every company in the site's S&P 500 tranche, the list of constituents the record's roster desk works from. A company on a 52-53 week year can end its year in the first days of a month, as Broadcom's "1101" does; those are counted in the month before, where most of their final weeks fall.

December dominates; January, June and September follow

Companies; n = 500

The numbers

Fiscal year-end month	On the CFO Voice record (76)	S&P 500 tranche (500)
January	4	23
February	0	1
March	4	8
April	1	5
May	1	8
June	3	23
July	3	4
August	1	6
September	4	23
October	5	13
November	1	4
December	49	382

December is the month for 382 of the 500 index companies and 49 of the 76 on the record. After December, the most common months in the index are January, June and September, with 23 companies each, then October with 13. Only one company in the index ends its year in February.

December as a month is not the same as December 31. Intel's record reads "1226" and Hasbro's "1227": each keeps a 52-53 week year that ends a few days before the calendar's, so both are counted in December on the chart and as off-calendar in the totals. Off-calendar year ends on the record fall in every month but February. They run from Apple ("0926") and Applied Materials ("1026") to Veeva Systems ("0131") and Western Digital ("0703"), each with its own quarter names.

A date, or a day of the week

A fiscal year can end on a fixed date, the last day of a month, or on a rule such as "the last Saturday in July". The second kind is a 52-53 week year: it always ends on the same weekday, so most years have 52 weeks and, from time to time, one has 53. In EDGAR's records it usually shows as a fiscalYearEnd that is not a month end, though not always: Cisco's year, which ends on the last Saturday in July, is recorded as "0731".

At least 61 S&P 500 companies keep a 52-53 week year

Companies; n = 500

The numbers

How the fiscal year ends	On the CFO Voice record (76)	S&P 500 tranche (500)
December 31	44	361
Last day of another month	17	78
Not a month end (a 52-53 week year)	15	61

In the index, 361 companies end on December 31, 78 on the last day of another month, and 61 on a date that is not a month end. On the record the split is 44, 17 and 15. The code alone undercounts the third group. Read with each company's latest 10-Q as well, counting a quarter that ends on a day other than a month end or a 10-Q that describes a 52- or 53-week year, 20 of the 76 companies on the record keep a 52-53 week year, and 5 of them carry a month-end code: Ciena, Cisco, Everpure, Home Depot and Zebra Technologies. The index count reads the code only, so 61 is a floor. Cisco's 10-Q states its rule in one sentence:

is the 52 or 53 weeks¹ ending on the last Saturday in July². Fiscal 2026 and fiscal 2025 are each 52-week fiscal years³.

1. 1A 52-53 week year: the length changes so the year always ends on the same weekday.
2. 2The rule. EDGAR records Cisco's fiscal year end as "0731", the latest date the rule can fall on.
3. 3Which kind of year these were; a 53-week year adds a week to one quarter.

The extra week is not a detail. Starbucks reported a 13-week fourth quarter and a 52-week fiscal 2026, and its release for that quarter says that "fiscal year 2027 is a 53-week year instead of the usual 52-week year", with the 53rd week falling in the fourth quarter. A 14-week quarter compared with a 13-week quarter a year earlier has 7.7% more days of sales before anything else changes. Of the 76 latest 10-Qs on the record, 10 mention a 52- or 53-week year.

Which companies choose a fiscal year

The filings read here say how each fiscal year ends, almost never why. What they do show is where off-calendar years cluster. Grouped by SEC SIC division, using the SIC code in the same submissions records, the index splits sharply.

Retailers and wholesalers mostly report off the calendar; banks and insurers almost never

Companies; n = 499

The numbers

SIC division	Companies in the division	With a fiscal year not ending December 31
Construction	8	3
Finance, insurance and real estate	98	3
Manufacturing	203	78
Mining	13	0
Retail trade	29	19
Services	74	24
Transportation, communications and utilities	64	5
Wholesale trade	10	7

Wholesale trade has 7 of its 10 companies off the calendar, 70%, and retail trade 19 of 29, 65.5%. Manufacturing, the largest division with 203 companies, has 78 off the calendar, 38.4%. Construction has 3 of 8 and services 24 of 74. At the other end, finance, insurance and real estate has 3 of 98, transportation, communications and utilities 5 of 64, and mining none of 13. The chart leaves out divisions with fewer than five index companies; it covers 499 of the 500. Each bar pair reads the same way: the first bar is every index company in the division, the second the part of it whose fiscal year ends on a date other than December 31.

These are patterns in the data, not reasons any filing states, and the chart does not say why a company chose its year. The filings do show what a change involves: the cover of every 10-Q and 10-K carries a box for a transition report, the report a company files for the stub period when it moves its fiscal year end.

How a fiscal quarter maps to a calendar quarter

Three releases on the record show the translation:

1. Broadcom's release furnished on September 2, 2026 reports the third quarter of fiscal 2026, ended August 2, 2026. EDGAR records its year end as "1101", so its fiscal third quarter ends a month after the calendar's second.
2. Cisco's release furnished on August 12, 2026 reports the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026, ended July 25, 2026. A full fiscal year ended late in July, inside the calendar's third quarter.
3. Starbucks's release furnished on October 29, 2026 reports the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026, ended September 27, 2026, three days before the calendar's third quarter closed.

A June year end is the easiest to see whole. Coherent, one of 2 companies on the record whose year ends on June 30, reports the quarter ended September 30, 2026 as the first quarter of fiscal 2027. Its release furnished on November 4, 2026 is therefore a calendar third-quarter report that already speaks in fiscal 2027 terms, and its outlook covers the second quarter of fiscal 2027, which is October to December 2026. Microsoft, the other company on the record with a June 30 year end, follows the same calendar, so the two are directly comparable with each other and need translating against everyone else.

A fiscal year that ends on June 30, against the calendar

CFO quotes carry the company's own names for its periods, so a quote has to be read with the company's calendar beside it:

For our fiscal first quarter of 2027, at the midpoint of the ranges provided in the table below, we expect revenue of $4.1 billion, non-GAAP gross margin of 55.5%, and non-GAAP EPS of $4.00.

Kris Sennesael, CFO of WD, Western Digital, in the release furnished on August 5, 2026 (Exhibit 99.1; quote record).

Western Digital's record gives its year end as "0703", and its next release, furnished on October 22, 2026, reported the quarter ended October 2, 2026. That is the "fiscal first quarter of 2027" in the quote: a period that ended in the calendar's fourth quarter of 2026, months before the calendar year 2027 begins.

When off-calendar companies report

Off-calendar years spread the reporting season across the year. The latest 10-Qs of the 44 calendar-year companies on the record cover quarters ending in September or October 2026. The 32 off-calendar companies' latest 10-Qs cover quarters ending in every month from April to October 2026. The median 10-Q of the 76 was filed 32 days after its quarter ended, inside the 40-day deadline for large accelerated filers, so the spread in period ends carries straight into the filing calendar.

The releases behind the record's quotes show the same thing from the other side. Of the 120 releases, the 8 furnished in June 2026 and the 6 furnished in September 2026 all come from off-calendar companies; calendar-year companies released in July, August, October and November. A reader who follows the record month by month sees the off-calendar companies fill the gaps between the calendar-year seasons.

The site's season rule: calendar quarter of the release date

CFO Voice groups quotes into seasons by one rule: the calendar quarter of the release date. A quote from a release furnished on August 12, 2026 belongs to the third quarter of 2026, whatever fiscal quarter the release reports. By that rule Cisco's fiscal fourth quarter and Broadcom's fiscal third quarter both sit in the 2026 third-quarter season, beside the calendar-year companies that reported their second quarter in July.

The rule gives every quote one season without a fiscal calendar for each company, and it groups quotes by when they were said, which is when the market heard them. It also means a season often differs from the quarter a release reports, for calendar-year companies most of all, because results come out after the quarter closes. The script places each company's latest release twice: by its release date, and by the period end it prints, the first "quarter ended" or "three months ended" phrase with a full date in its opening. The date is read in 51 of the 76. In 36 of those, the season is later than the calendar quarter the release reports, including 24 of the 25 from calendar-year companies. Of the 15 that match, 14 are off-calendar companies whose quarter closed early enough to report inside the same calendar quarter, as Cisco's did on July 25. An off-calendar year adds a second difference: for the 27 companies on the record whose fiscal year does not close in December (a 52-53 week year that ends in the first days of January counts as December, as on the chart), the fiscal quarter's number is not the calendar quarter's either. The release keeps its own name for the period in every quote record; the seasons index shows how the record's quotes fall by calendar quarter.

What changes for a reader comparing two companies

1. Find each company's fiscal year end on its 10-K cover or in its EDGAR record. A year end that is not a month end is a 52-53 week year; a month-end year end can be one too, so read the 10-Q's note on its fiscal year.
2. Translate fiscal quarters to the calendar months they cover before comparing. A fiscal fourth quarter can end in any month.
3. Check the number of weeks. A 14-week quarter and a 13-week quarter are not like for like; releases usually say when a year has 53 weeks.
4. Line up guidance periods the same way. "Fiscal 2027" guidance from a June year-end company runs to June 2027, half a year ahead of a calendar company's 2027.
5. Use the release date, not the fiscal label, to place a quote or a result in time.

How guidance periods are named in releases is covered in the earnings guidance piece, and how a quarter's documents reach EDGAR in what an earnings report contains. The methodology explains how each quote reaches the site.