Free Cash Flow Calculator with live data

Free cash flow is the cash a company has left after paying to run and grow its business. It's the number valuation runs on, because it strips out accounting noise and shows real cash.

Both inputs come straight from the cash flow statement. Operating cash flow appears as "net cash provided by operating activities." Capital expenditures usually appears as "purchases of property, plant and equipment." Subtract the second from the first and you have free cash flow, the cash available to pay dividends, buy back shares, pay down debt, or reinvest.

When there's no clean cash-flow-statement figure, you can build FCF up from net income: start with net income, add back non-cash charges like depreciation and amortization, subtract the increase in net working capital, then subtract capex. Both routes should land in the same place.

"Free cash flow" means three different things depending on who's asking. Getting the right one matters, because they feed different valuation models.

The quick, everyday figure. Great for screening and trend analysis. Doesn't separate debt from equity effects.

Adds back after-tax interest, so it's the cash available to all capital providers before financing. This is what enterprise DCF valuation uses.

What's left for equity holders after interest and net debt movements. Used to value equity directly.

The logic: FCFF is bigger than simple FCF because it undoes the effect of interest payments, viewing the firm as if it had no debt. FCFE adjusts for actual financing, adding cash the company raised through new debt and subtracting what it repaid. If a company is a net repayer of debt (like Apple, which returns cash to shareholders), its FCFE comes out below its simple FCF.

A raw FCF number is hard to compare across companies of different sizes, so investors scale it two ways. FCF yield is free cash flow divided by market capitalization, it tells you how much cash you're buying per dollar of stock, and works like an inverse valuation multiple. A higher yield can signal a cheaper, cash-generative business. FCF margin is free cash flow divided by revenue, showing how efficiently a company converts sales into actual cash. Read both against the company's own history and its peers, not a fixed benchmark.

Not on its own. Negative FCF means a company spent more on operations and capital investment than it brought in as cash. For a mature company that's a warning sign. For a fast-growing one pouring money into expansion, it can be a deliberate bet that pays off later, Amazon ran years of thin or negative FCF while building out. What matters is the trend: is FCF moving in the right direction over several years, and is the spending producing growth? A single year tells you little; the 5-year trend chart in the calculator tells you more.