What H1 and H2 Mean in Company Reporting

H1 and H2 are the two halves of a company's reporting year: H1 is the first six months, H2 is the second six. Q1 through Q4 cut the same year into quarters, with Q1 and Q2 sitting inside H1 and Q3 and Q4 inside H2. The trap sits underneath the labels. A reporting year does not have to begin in January, and for a sizeable minority of listed companies it does not.

What H1 and H2 mean in company reporting

The H stands for half. H1 is the first six months of the reporting year, H2 the last six. For a company that closes its books on December 31, H1 runs January through June. For a company that closes at the end of June, H1 runs July through December, a full six months earlier on the calendar than the first company's.

A few neighbouring labels travel with them. FY is the fiscal year, the whole twelve months. Q1 through Q4 are its quarters, numbered from the start of the fiscal year rather than from January. Interim reporting means anything covering a period shorter than the full year, a quarter or a half, and it is usually unaudited. Annual reporting is the audited full-year set.

None of that is hard. The confusion almost never comes from the letters. It comes from the calendar sitting underneath them.

Fiscal year versus calendar year

The calendar year runs January 1 to December 31 for everybody. A fiscal year, also called a financial year, is the twelve-month accounting period a company chooses for itself. It can end on the last day of any month, or on a fixed weekday near a month end, which is why some year ends drift by a few days from one year to the next. Retailers commonly close the books once the holiday selling season has been counted and the stock has cleared. Companies tied to a school year or a crop cycle pick an end date in their own quiet stretch.

A US issuer files its audited full-year set on Form 10-K, and the filing deadline sits 60 to 90 days after the fiscal year end, depending on filer size. The panel below counts the companies that filed one in each month of calendar H1 2026.

SELECT
    monthName(filing_date) AS filing_month,
    uniqExact(cik)         AS companies,
    round(100 * uniqExact(cik) / (
        SELECT uniqExact(cik)
        FROM global_markets.stocks_sec_edgar_index
        WHERE form_type = '10-K'
          AND filing_date >= toDate('2026-01-01')
          AND filing_date <  toDate('2026-07-01')
    ), 1)                  AS share_pct
FROM global_markets.stocks_sec_edgar_index
WHERE form_type = '10-K'
  AND filing_date >= toDate('2026-01-01')
  AND filing_date <  toDate('2026-07-01')
GROUP BY filing_month, toMonth(filing_date)
ORDER BY toMonth(filing_date)

February and March carry the bulk of the half, 1866 companies and 2684 companies, 35.7% and 51.3% of the six-month total. That is the shape a December 31 year end leaves on a filing calendar. The rest of the list is the point of this page: annual reports arrived in every other month of the half as well, 150 of them in June alone. Each one belongs to an issuer whose first half is not January to June.

Which household names close their year away from December

The next panel pins nine large, familiar issuers. It lists the calendar months in which their reported periods close, read from three years of income statements on file, next to the most recent close of all.

SELECT
    ticker,
    arrayStringConcat(
        arrayMap(m -> ['Jan', 'Feb', 'Mar', 'Apr', 'May', 'Jun', 'Jul', 'Aug', 'Sep', 'Oct', 'Nov', 'Dec'][m],
                 arraySort(groupUniqArray(toMonth(period_end)))),
        ', ')                      AS periods_close_in,
    uniqExact(toMonth(period_end)) AS distinct_months,
    uniqExact(period_end)          AS closes_on_file,
    toString(max(period_end))      AS latest_close
FROM
(
    SELECT
        arrayJoin(tickers) AS ticker,
        period_end
    FROM global_markets.stocks_income_statements
    WHERE period_end >= toDate('2023-07-01')
      AND period_end <  toDate('2026-07-01')
)
WHERE ticker IN ('AAPL', 'COST', 'HD', 'JNJ', 'KO', 'MSFT', 'NVDA', 'ORCL', 'WMT')
GROUP BY ticker
ORDER BY ticker

AAPL closes its reported periods in Mar, Jun, Jul, Sep, Dec, most recently on 2025-12-27. WMT closes in Jan, Apr, Jul, Oct, most recently on 2025-10-31. Same two letters. Different half of the year.

The year ends themselves sit in each issuer's own filings, and for this group they hold from one year to the next. Apple closes on the last Saturday of September. Microsoft closes on June 30. Walmart closes on January 31 and Nvidia on the last Sunday of January. Oracle closes on May 31, Costco on the Sunday closest to August 31. Coca-Cola and Johnson & Johnson run to the end of December, the case most readers assume by default.

The annual report carries the same fingerprint. The panel below takes the same nine issuers, matches each ticker to the filer identifier that appears on its financial statements, and reads back the most recent 10-K on file.

SELECT
    ticker,
    toString(max(filing_date))  AS latest_annual_report,
    monthName(max(filing_date)) AS filed_in,
    uniqExact(accession_number) AS annual_reports_on_file
FROM
(
    SELECT
        leftPad(toString(cik), 10, '0') AS filer_cik,
        filing_date,
        accession_number
    FROM global_markets.stocks_sec_edgar_index
    WHERE form_type = '10-K'
      AND filing_date >= toDate('2025-01-01')
      AND filing_date <  toDate('2026-07-01')
) AS annual
INNER JOIN
(
    SELECT
        ticker,
        argMax(leftPad(toString(cik), 10, '0'), period_end) AS filer_cik
    FROM
    (
        SELECT
            arrayJoin(tickers) AS ticker,
            cik,
            period_end
        FROM global_markets.stocks_income_statements
        WHERE period_end >= toDate('2023-07-01')
    )
    WHERE ticker IN ('AAPL', 'COST', 'HD', 'JNJ', 'KO', 'MSFT', 'NVDA', 'ORCL', 'WMT')
    GROUP BY ticker
) AS issuers USING (filer_cik)
GROUP BY ticker
ORDER BY ticker

AAPL filed its most recent annual report on 2025-10-31, in October. WMT filed on 2026-03-13, in March. A 10-K follows the year end by 60 to 90 days, so the filing month brackets the close it reports on.

How to read a label like FY26 Q3

Read FY26 Q3 from the outside in. FY26 names the fiscal year. US issuers name a fiscal year for the calendar year it ends in, so FY26 finishes at some point during 2026 (in several other markets, India among them, the label points at the year the period starts, which is worth checking once per issuer). Q3 is the third quarter of that fiscal year, counted from the fiscal start rather than from January.

Turning the label into months takes one more fact: the year end. For an issuer whose fiscal year ends in June, Q1 covers July to September, Q2 October to December, Q3 January to March, and Q4 April to June. For a December-year issuer, the fiscal quarters land on the calendar quarters.

Apple makes a clean worked example. Its fiscal year ends on the last Saturday of September, so fiscal 2026 opened in late September 2025. FY26 Q1 ran to late December 2025, the holiday quarter. FY26 Q2 ran to late March 2026, FY26 Q3 to late June 2026, and FY26 Q4 closes in late September 2026. Add Q1 and Q2 together and you have this issuer's H1: two quarters closed and reported before the calendar year was half over.

Why H1 2026 does not cover the same months for every issuer

Once the year end moves, everything measured on it moves too. An H1 revenue line, an H1 margin, an H1 headcount: each one is measured over whatever six months that issuer calls its first half. Walmart's H1 of fiscal 2026 covered February to July 2025. Microsoft's H1 of fiscal 2026 covered July to December 2025. Apple's covered late September 2025 to late March 2026. Three issuers, three first halves, no two of them the same six months, and not one of them the calendar half.

Index-level and market-wide writing sidesteps the problem entirely. An index has no fiscal year, so H1 2026 in a market piece means the calendar half, January 1 to June 30. That is the sense used in our H1 2026 market recap, in the H1 2026 IPO market review, and in the Treasury curve through H1 2026. Company filings are the ones that need a year-end check first. Shorter windows carry the same hazard in miniature: how monthly returns are measured covers the month-boundary version.

Interim reporting: quarterly in the US, half yearly in much of the world

US-listed domestic issuers file a quarterly report, Form 10-Q, for the first three fiscal quarters, and an annual report, Form 10-K, after the fourth. There is no fourth-quarter 10-Q. The annual report carries that period, which is why a company's Q4 figure is often quoted as the full year minus the first three quarters.

Foreign private issuers listed in the US file their annual report on Form 20-F and are not required to file 10-Qs at all. In the European Union the transparency rules require an annual report and a half-yearly report, with the mandatory quarterly requirement removed from the Transparency Directive in 2013 and applied from late 2015. The UK keeps the same half-yearly baseline. Japan moved the same way in 2024, replacing the quarterly securities report with a semiannual filing while the exchange continues to collect quarterly earnings summaries. In those markets the half is the reporting unit itself, and H1 and H2 do most of the work that Q1 through Q4 do in US filings.

The forms themselves show the split. The panel below counts three of them over calendar H1 2026: the 10-K annual report, the 10-Q quarterly report, and the 20-F, the annual report of a foreign private issuer.

SELECT
    form_type,
    uniqExact(cik)              AS companies,
    uniqExact(accession_number) AS filings
FROM global_markets.stocks_sec_edgar_index
WHERE form_type IN ('10-K', '10-Q', '20-F')
  AND filing_date >= toDate('2026-01-01')
  AND filing_date <  toDate('2026-07-01')
GROUP BY form_type
ORDER BY form_type

5442 companies filed at least one 10-Q in those six months, 6001 reports between them. 5234 filed a 10-K. 750 filed a 20-F. Those issuers file no US quarterly report; their interim disclosure arrives on Form 6-K, on whatever schedule their home market sets.

For the dates a specific company actually publishes on, work from its own filing calendar rather than a rule of thumb. Finding a stock's earnings date walks through the lookup.

FAQ

What does H1 mean in company reporting?

H1 is the first half of a company's reporting year, its first six months, and it contains fiscal Q1 and Q2. H1 equals January through June only when the company's fiscal year starts in January.

Is H1 always January to June?

No. H1 follows the fiscal year rather than the calendar. For an issuer whose fiscal year ends in June, H1 runs July through December. An index has no fiscal year, so in a market recap H1 does mean January through June.

What does FY26 Q3 mean?

It is the third quarter of the fiscal year labelled 2026. US issuers usually name a fiscal year for the calendar year it ends in, so FY26 Q3 at a June-year company covers January through March 2026. Check the issuer's fiscal year end before converting any FY label into months.

Why do some companies report half yearly instead of quarterly?

Their listing rules ask for it. US domestic issuers file quarterly on Form 10-Q, while the EU and UK transparency regimes require an annual and a half-yearly report, with quarterly reporting optional. A company is free to publish more often than its rules require.

What is the difference between interim and annual reporting?

Interim reporting covers a period shorter than the full year, a quarter or a half, and is usually unaudited. Annual reporting covers the full fiscal year and carries the audited financial statements.

Every panel here ships with the exact SQL underneath it. Open one to see how each fiscal period was counted, or ask the same question in plain English on the Strasmore terminal.