Current ratio

Whether a company’s short-term assets cover the bills it has to pay within a year.

How it’s calculated

Current assets (cash, money owed by customers, stock and other assets expected to turn into cash within a year) ÷ current liabilities (amounts due within a year).

How to read it

Above 1.0× means short-term assets exceed short-term obligations. Below 1.0× means the company is leaning on future cash coming in. Some businesses — supermarkets, for example — run comfortably below 1.0× because customers pay them immediately while they pay suppliers later.

Banks and insurers don’t report a meaningful current ratio, so it is often missing for them.

How StockDecks scores it

Higher scores better. On the general benchmark, 0.5× counts as weak, 1.0× as typical and 2.0× as strong.

It is one of the measures behind the Financial Health rating. Every measure, benchmark and weighting is set out on the methodology page.

Real examples

Across the 101 companies StockDecks has a page for with this figure available, as of 24 October 2026, the middle value is 1.14×.

Lowest

RELX 0.45× · J Sainsbury 0.56× · Land Securities 0.57×

Highest

Palantir Technologies 7.23× · 3i Group Ord 6.56× · Shopify 5.35×

Figures from Yahoo Finance, captured 24 October 2026. Being high or low on one measure says little on its own — each company page shows how this measure sits alongside the others.