Zombie Companies List 2026: 4 Debt Ratios

Last updated: October 2026

A zombie company earns too little to pay the interest on its debt, let alone repay it. It stays alive by borrowing more. This screen looks for them among companies worth more than US$1 billion worldwide: the worst 50% by Net Debt to EBIT, a Piotroski F-Score below 5, and asset growth paid for with outside money. The screen ran on 15 October 2026. The 4 tables below rank them by different debt indicators.

Zombie company, definition:
A company whose operating profit (EBIT) does not cover its interest bill. The Bank for International Settlements (Banerjee and Hofmann, 2018) counts a listed firm as a zombie when its interest cover is below 1 for 3 years in a row and the firm is at least 10 years old.

A company on these lists is a red flag to research, not a sell or short signal. These are screen results on one date. This is general research, not personalised advice. Read our full disclaimer.

What the zombie screen looks like

This is what the zombie stock screen looks like:

• All companies worldwide
• Market value of more than a billion U.S. dollars
• Select the 50% of companies with the worst Net Debt to EBIT ratio
• Piotroski F-Score of less than five
• Financial statements updated recently - in the past six months
• An External Finance ratio (Change in Assets - Cash from Operations) / Total Assets) greater than zero. This means a company was not able to finance their asset growth - from internally generated funds (cash from operations)

Choose your own ratios

Before we get to the list of companies. Remember, this is just a list of the best zombie finding ratios I came up with.

The stock screener has many other ratios you can use.  You can find a full list and their description here: Glossary of ratios to find zombie companies

What the screen finds

As you can imagine, this screen gives you a list of companies that show signs of financial stress. You could of course use any ratio to sort the results to give you the worst zombie companies. I sorted this list using four different ratios to give you an idea of what you can do with the screener.

Sorted by leverage ratio

Firstly, I sorted the screen from high to low by Leverage Ratio. The Leverage Ratio = Total debt / (Average Total Assets)

It is thus the total debt to average total assets of the company over the past two years.

Here is the list:

Run the zombie screen on data from a year ago

Your free demo has every filter in this screen, including Net Debt to EBIT, the Piotroski F-Score and External Finance. The demo runs on data from twelve months ago, so it gives you the zombie list the screen would have produced a year ago. Look up today's prices for five of those names and see for yourself what happened to them.

Run the zombie screen

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Sorted by Net Debt to EBIT

Next, I sorted the list from high to low by Net Debt to EBIT.

Net Debt to EBIT is equal to (Long-term debt + Short term debt – Cash) / Earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT).

This ratio shows you how able a company is to pay interest and capital on its debt. The smaller the ratio (means the company has a low amount of debt compared to EBIT), the healthier the company, and the other way around.

For example, the highest value below is 1227.6.

This means that Net Debt equals 1227 times EBIT or that EBIT only makes up 0.08% of Net Debt (1/1227). With this EBIT, this company cannot even make an interest payment of 1%!

Here is the list:

Sort by Free Cash Flow to Debt

To see if the company generated enough cash to pay interest or repay debt, I sorted the results from low to high by Free Cash Flow (FCF) to Total Debt .

This ratio gives you an idea of how high the company's total debt is compared to its free cash flow (Cash from operations minus Capital expenditure).

The worst-rated company, with a value of -2126 had HIGH negative free cash flow, not good news if they have to service debt.

Here is the list:

Sorted by Debt to Equity

To not leave out the classic debt ratios I also sorted the list from high to low with the Debt-to-Equity ratio. It equals Total Debt / Common Shareholders Equity.

As you can see, the worst-rated company has debt equal to 68.7 times its equity.

Here is the list:

This is just a starting point

I am sure you know this already, a screen is just a starting point in your research. There may be a good reason a company on the list is not a zombie, but if it is on the list, it is a red flag that you should take a closer look at.

Build your own zombie filter in five minutes

These five filters are only my choice. The screener has more debt and quality ratios, and you can add, remove or re-sort any of them. Sort by the ratio that worries you most and you have your own list of companies to research or avoid.

Start the free 30-day demo

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Wishing you profitable investing!