Stock Split Statistics (2026)

A forward stock split divides each existing share into more shares at a proportionally lower price. In a 10-for-1 split, one $1,200 share becomes ten $120 shares. Your total value, the company's market capitalization, its earnings, and your ownership percentage are all unchanged.

Because nothing fundamental changes, a split is often described as making change for a dollar: you have more pieces of exactly the same pie. The purpose is cosmetic, to reset the per-share price into a range that feels more accessible to retail buyers and option traders.

Splits have gone from commonplace to rare. About 102 S&P 500 companies split their shares in 1997, but only 5 did in 2019, and years like 2017 and 2023 saw as few as 4 (see the chart and table below). Across the whole market the share of firms splitting fell from a peak near 23% in 1982 to under 1% by 2009 (per Nasdaq).

The raw count of all splits on all US exchanges can still run into the hundreds each year (stockanalysis.com listed about 525 split actions in 2024), but most of those are tiny micro-caps and reverse splits. Large-cap forward splits, the kind that make headlines, now number only a handful annually.

The decline tracks a series of market-structure changes. Decimalization in 2001 and Reg NMS in 2005 shrank trading costs, algorithmic and high-frequency trading made a stock's nominal price largely irrelevant to liquidity, and the historical reason to split (keeping a round lot of 100 shares affordable) faded.

Fractional-share investing, now offered by most brokerages, finished the job: a retail investor can buy $50 of a $1,200 stock without any split at all. So many high-flyers simply let their share prices climb into the thousands, which is why splits are now more a confidence signal than a necessity.

The headline statistic comes from Bank of America's Research Investment Committee: stocks that announced a split returned an average of 25.4% over the following 12 months, more than double the S&P 500's roughly 12% over the same windows (see the chart below). BofA also found split stocks beat the market in each of the past four decades.

That is a striking gap, and it is why 'stock-split stocks' get so much attention. But the number needs careful reading: companies choose to split after their shares have already surged, so the split is a symptom of strength, not the cause of it.

The most reliable interpretation is the signaling hypothesis: management tends to split only when it is confident the higher price range is sustainable, so a split announcement quietly conveys optimism. It is a self-selected sample of already-winning companies.

That means an investor cannot mechanically 'buy the split' and expect 25.4%. The right question is always why the stock ran up in the first place, whether earnings growth, market position, or momentum, and whether that story still holds at the new, split-adjusted price.

The averages hide a wide spread. Of the 54 S&P 500 stocks that split in the decade to mid-2024, 34 (about 63%) were higher a year later but 20 were lower, and 8 of those fell more than 15% (see the chart and table below). Roughly 30% actually gained 21% or more.

So while the tilt is positive, a split is no guarantee. A third of recent splitters lost money over the following year. The lesson is that the split ratio tells you nothing about valuation, and a hot stock at a lower nominal price is still the same hot stock.

The academic literature broadly supports a post-split drift. The most cited study, Ikenberry, Rankine, and Stice (1996), examined 1,275 two-for-one splits and found excess returns of 7.93% in the first year and 12.15% over three years, on top of a 3.38% announcement pop, evidence the market underreacts to the split signal.

A follow-up (Ikenberry and Byun, covering 1927 to 1996) reached similar conclusions, with abnormal returns larger for small splitting firms than for large ones. Later researchers have debated the methodology, so treat these as suggestive of a real but modest and hard-to-capture effect, not a free lunch.

Nvidia is the modern poster child for splitting. It has split six times since 2000 (in 2000, 2001, 2006, 2007, 2021, and 2024), for a cumulative factor of 480-for-1, so one share from the 1999 IPO era now equals 480 shares (see the table below).

The June 2024 split was its biggest ever, a 10-for-1 that cut the price from over $1,200 to about $120. Announced May 22, 2024 with a record date of June 6 and split-adjusted trading from June 10, it came alongside a 150% dividend increase, from $0.04 to $0.10 a share.

Apple has split five times: 2-for-1 in 1987, 2000, and 2005; a 7-for-1 in 2014; and a 4-for-1 in 2020, for a cumulative 224-for-1 (see the table below). One share owned before 1987 would be 224 shares after the 2020 split.

The 2014 7-for-1 was strategic: it lowered the price enough to qualify Apple for the price-weighted Dow Jones Industrial Average, which it joined in 2015. The most recent split, announced July 30, 2020, took shares split-adjusted from August 31, 2020.

Tesla has split twice, both in late August: a 5-for-1 effective August 31, 2020 (announced August 11, with the stock near $2,213 pre-split) and a 3-for-1 effective August 25, 2022 (announced August 5, near $891 pre-split). Together they produce a cumulative 15-for-1 factor (see the table below).

Both splits followed enormous run-ups and, notably, both were quickly followed by pullbacks, a real-world reminder that the post-split average masks plenty of losers. Tesla shares fell sharply in the months after the 2022 split.

The 2024-2025 wave was concentrated in a few names. Nvidia (10-for-1) and Broadcom (10-for-1) led 2024; 2025 brought Fastenal (2-for-1), Interactive Brokers (4-for-1), O'Reilly Automotive (15-for-1), and Netflix (10-for-1) (see the table below).

O'Reilly's 15-for-1 was the largest forward split of 2025: the stock had gained roughly 65,000% since its 1993 IPO and would trade north of $1,565 unsplit. These few marquee splits, not the hundreds of micro-cap actions, are what drives 'stock-split stock' headlines.

A reverse split does the opposite, consolidating shares to raise the price, and it usually signals distress rather than strength. The most common trigger is a listing rule: Nasdaq and the NYSE require a $1.00 minimum bid price, and a struggling company will often do a 1-for-10 reverse split to stay listed.

Regulators have tightened the rules: since an October 2024 Nasdaq change, a company that falls back below $1 within a year of a reverse split can face an immediate delisting determination rather than a new grace period. Lucid Group's 1-for-10 reverse split in September 2025 (from about $2 to $20) is a recent example.

The counterexample is Berkshire Hathaway. Warren Buffett has never split the Class A shares, which traded around $743,510 in mid-2026, making BRK.A the most expensive listed stock in the world (per market reports). Buffett argues a high price attracts long-term, investment-minded owners and discourages speculation.

Berkshire's compromise was creating cheaper Class B shares in 1996 (and later splitting the B shares 50-for-1 in 2010) so smaller investors could buy in without touching the Class A price. It shows the whole exercise is about signaling and access, not underlying value.

A split changes the price tag, not the business. The 25.4% post-split average is real but reflects self-selection (companies split after winning), so 'buy the split' is not a strategy on its own, and a third of recent splitters still fell over the next year. Judge the company, not the share count.

With fractional shares, a high nominal price is no longer a barrier, so you can own any company at any dollar amount regardless of whether it splits. If a split-driven run-up interests you, the discipline is the same as always: define your thesis, size the position to your plan, and rebalance to your targets rather than chasing the announcement.