How to find a company's CapEx in a 10-K

Capital expenditure is rarely labelled 'CapEx'. Here's where it sits in the cash flow statement, the names companies use, and how to read it per quarter.

Capital expenditure — the cash a company spends on property, plant and equipment — is one of the most useful numbers in a filing and one of the more annoying to locate, because almost no company labels the line 'CapEx'. It lives in the cash flow statement under a name that varies by company and industry.

Where it sits

CapEx is in the investing-activities section of the cash flow statement, not the income statement. It's an outflow, so it's reported as a negative number. The most common line is 'Purchases of property, plant and equipment', but you'll also see 'Payments for capital expenditures', 'Additions to property and equipment', or capitalised-software costs broken out separately.

The label problem

In the SEC's structured data, most companies tag this as the us-gaap concept PaymentsToAcquirePropertyPlantAndEquipment. But capital-light businesses sometimes report only a broader investing line, and capital-heavy ones split maintenance from growth CapEx in the footnotes rather than on the face of the statement. If you're comparing companies, make sure you're pulling the same concept for each.

Reading it per quarter

Rather than open every 10-K and 10-Q and hunt for the line by hand, you can read CapEx straight from the SEC's structured data. Finterm is a free SEC EDGAR viewer that pulls PaymentsToAcquirePropertyPlantAndEquipment from companyfacts and lays it out quarter by quarter next to revenue and cash flow, so the trend is visible without touching a spreadsheet.

CapEx is also the second half of free cash flow — see how to calculate free cash flow from a 10-K for the full picture.