MCDMcDonald's
Is it safe?
Nothing alarming, nothing pristine: comfortable debt (A) and steady price behavior.
Investment-grade balance sheet. A rule of thumb on leverage, not a credit rating.
Relatively steady, low volatility. Worst drawdown -37% · now 26% below its 52-week high.
Where this answer is blind. Altman sits structurally low for utilities and pipelines; Beneish runs high for fast growers, since sales growth alone lifts it; banks and REITs are excluded.
Can MCD take a bad year?
McDonald's carries $39.0B of net debt at 2.59× EBITDA: a load its earnings can carry.
Net debt · as at Q2 2026 · between two and four years of EBITDA, normal for a stable business
- Net debt / EBITDA
- 2.59×
Net debt / EBITDA · 2.81× a year ago · the load is coming down
- Interest cover
- 7.88×
Interest cover · operating profit covers the interest bill several times over
- Annualised volatility
- 19%
Annualised volatility · S&P 500 16% · close to the market's own swing
Details›
- Total debtQ2 2026
- $39.9B
- Cash and short-term investments
- $822M
- Net debt
- $39.0B
- EBITDA, trailing twelve months
- $15.1B
- Operating profit, trailing twelve months
- $12.8B
- Total debt / EBITDA
- 2.65×
- Annualised volatilitytwo years of daily moves
- 19%
- Worst drawdown on file
- −37%
- Below its 52-week high
- 26%
Balance sheet from SEC filings; drawdown and volatility from end-of-day closes; Altman Z from the filed statements.
The balance sheet
What it owes against what it owns, and how close that comes to trouble.
How far can it fall?
How much the price moves, how deep and how long its falls have run, and what each unit of risk has paid.
Restaurants
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