Nasdaq, Inc. is now tracked here, and the first thing to know about it is that its income statement carries two revenue lines that differ by more than a billion dollars a quarter — and only the smaller one is the company.
In the June 2026 quarter Nasdaq reported $2,532 million of total revenues. Below it sit two deductions: $712 million of transaction rebates and $320 million of brokerage, clearance and exchange fees. Subtract them and you get "revenues less transaction-based expenses" of $1,500 million — the number Nasdaq leads its own release with, the number every figure in its highlights is calculated on, and the basis this site stores.
The deduction is 40.8% of gross revenue, and it is not a cost in any useful sense. It is money that arrives from one market participant and leaves to another: rebates paid to the traders who post liquidity, fees collected on behalf of clearing houses. It moves with trading volume, it nets to roughly nothing, and a quarter where it doubles tells you nothing about whether Nasdaq had a good three months.
The exchange is now the small half
The more interesting consequence is what the net line reveals about the mix. Of that $1,500 million:
- Solutions revenue was $1,160 million, up 17% — the Capital Access Platforms division (listings, index licensing, investor-relations products) plus Financial Technology (regulatory reporting, risk management, anti-financial-crime software).
- Market Services net revenue was $340 million, up 11% — the US equities and options trading business. The stock exchange.
The exchange the company is named after is 22.7% of what the company keeps. The other 77% is software and data sold to the financial system, much of it on subscription: annualised recurring revenue reached $3.3 billion, up 11% on a reported basis and 12% organically.
That shape is recent and it is bought, not grown. The $10.5 billion acquisition of Adenza from Thoma Bravo — $5.75 billion in cash and 85.6 million Nasdaq shares — closed on 1 November 2023 and brought AxiomSL regulatory reporting and Calypso capital-markets software. In our stored series the effect is a single step: net revenue was $940 million in the September 2023 quarter and $1,117 million in the December one, an 18.8% jump in a quarter where nothing else changed. It followed the $2.75 billion purchase of Verafin in 2021 and the $3.8 billion OMX merger in 2008.
The quarter it listed the largest IPO ever
Nasdaq's June quarter also happens to be the one in which it listed SpaceX — in the company's own words, "the largest IPO in exchange history with an $86 billion raise." It reported 7 of the top 10 largest operating-company IPOs of the quarter, index ETP assets passing $1 trillion for the first time, and record net inflows of $51 billion.
We track the other side of that listing: SPCX has been covered here since before it priced, including what three vendor panels disagree about and how its lock-up tranches are counted. Nasdaq is the venue; the fee it earned for the listing is not separately disclosed, and nothing in the release lets anyone size it.
Where it scores
On the basis stored here — net revenue, GAAP diluted EPS, and free cash flow as operating cash flow less capital expenditure — the June 2026 quarter scores 57.1 on the Rule of 40: net revenue grew 14.9% against the same quarter a year earlier, and free cash flow of $634 million was a 42.3% margin on it. That is the quarter-level figure the ticker page shows, and it is flattered by a strong quarter.
The trailing twelve months are the steadier read and sit lower:
- Net revenue $5.614 billion, against $4.916 billion a year earlier: 14.2% growth.
- Free cash flow $1.951 billion, a 34.8% margin — free cash flow is lumpy quarter to quarter, and the September quarters of both 2024 and 2025 were under $200 million.
- The two together would score about 49 on the same rule.
GAAP diluted EPS was $0.89 in the quarter, up 14%; Nasdaq's own non-GAAP figure was $1.07, up 25%, and the series here is the GAAP one throughout. At $94.22 on 9 September 2026 the trailing multiple is roughly 27 times those four quarters of GAAP earnings.
Fourteen quarters of history are stored, from March 2023 forward, which spans the Adenza step in both directions.
What to watch
- Whether Market Services keeps shrinking as a share. It grew 11% in the quarter, so it is not declining — the software side is simply growing faster. The ratio is the story, not the trend in either line alone.
- ARR against total net revenue. $3.3 billion of annualised recurring revenue against $5.6 billion of trailing net revenue is the clearest measure of how much of this business is subscription rather than volume.
- The next print, expected around 21 October. Nasdaq has reported its September quarter in the third or fourth week of October in each of the last three years; the exact date is not yet announced, and the calendar here marks it approximate until it is.
Every figure for the June 2026 quarter — total revenues, transaction rebates, brokerage and clearance fees, revenues less transaction-based expenses, the divisional splits, ARR, GAAP and non-GAAP diluted EPS, the SpaceX listing description and the $1 trillion ETP and $51 billion inflow records — is from Nasdaq's own earnings release of 23 July 2026, filed as Exhibit 99.1 to an Item 2.02 current report. The fourteen-quarter net revenue series is read off the equivalent exhibit for each quarter; EPS, cash flow, capital expenditure, assets and debt are from SEC XBRL company facts, with quarterly cash flow derived by differencing the year-to-date figures Nasdaq files and fourth quarters derived as the full year less nine months. Ours: the 40.8% pass-through share, the 22.7% Market Services share, the trailing-twelve-month growth, free-cash-flow margin and Rule of 40 score, and the price-to-earnings multiple. The Adenza, Verafin and OMX deal terms are those transactions' own announcements. The $94.22 price is the 9 September 2026 close.
