65% operating margin.
$20B in cash a year.
No factories.
Some of the most boring math in business — and that's the whole point.
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✦ The bottom line
Visa keeps roughly 63¢ of every revenue dollar as operating profit. After everything, about $22B in real cash a year. Almost all of it goes right back to shareholders.
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✦ Teach me
Cents kept per dollar of revenue
After paying every cost of running the business — employees, technology, marketing, network operations — what's left as actual operating profit. For Visa it's exceptionally high because the network does the work; there's no factory, no inventory, no fleet.
A business at 65% is rare. Most great businesses run at 20–30%.
Wall Street calls this
Operating margin
When margins are this high *and* durable, the cash compounds whether the business grows or not. That's the engine of every great long-term return.
Operating margin · latest quarter
~64
%
$7.2B of operating profit on $11.2B of net revenues. Among the highest margins in the S&P 500 — the network has fixed costs; every incremental transaction is nearly pure profit.
66% operating margin is the factory floor of the business. But operating profit isn't cash yet — taxes, working capital, capital expenditure all happen between the income statement and the actual money. For a capital-light business like Visa, very little leaks out at each step. Almost all of operating profit converts to real cash. So how much actually shows up at the bank?
Cash from operations · last fiscal year
$23
B
Real cash the business produced in FY25 (year ended Sep 2025). Almost no leakage from operating profit. After modest , free cash flow is ~$22B. The cash spigot is wide open.
$20 billion in cash a year is what the business generates. The next question is what the company does with it. Some businesses reinvest aggressively (Nvidia builds new chips). Some buy other companies. Some pay dividends. Visa does mostly one thing: it sends the money back to its owners — via and — in volume so reliable it's almost mechanical.
Capital returned to shareholders · last fiscal year
$23
B
$18B in + $5B in = almost the entirety of FY25 cash flow returned to owners. Buybacks shrink the share count year after year; each remaining share owns a slightly bigger slice.