S&P 500 Forecast 2026: Where the Index Ends the Year

The S&P 500 closed Friday 28 August 2026 at 7,711.76, up 12.7% on price and 13.5% on total return so far this year (Yahoo Finance; Slickcharts, 28 Aug 2026). Published Wall Street year-end targets run from 7,100 to 8,400, with a median around 7,900 — roughly 2.4% above Friday's close. In other words, the consensus is not calling for much more index upside in the last four months of 2026; it is calling for earnings to keep doing the work while the multiple stays put.

What are Wall Street's S&P 500 targets for 2026?

The table below is the Reuters factbox of major brokerage year-end targets published 11 August 2026, updated for the two revisions that landed after it: UBS Global Wealth Management to 8,100 on 21 August, and Ed Yardeni to 8,400 on 26 August. Implied change is measured from the 7,711.76 close of 28 August 2026.

Strategist	Year-end 2026 target	Implied vs 28 Aug close
BofA Global Research	7,100	-7.9%
UBS Global Research	7,500	-2.7%
Jefferies	7,500	-2.7%
BNP Paribas	7,500	-2.7%
Canaccord Genuity	7,500	-2.7%
HSBC	7,650	-0.8%
Evercore ISI	7,750	+0.5%
Barclays	7,800	+1.1%
Seaport Research Partners	7,800	+1.1%
RBC Capital Markets	7,900	+2.4%
Wells Fargo	7,950	+3.1%
J.P. Morgan	8,000	+3.7%
Goldman Sachs	8,000	+3.7%
Morgan Stanley	8,000	+3.7%
Deutsche Bank	8,000	+3.7%
Societe Generale	8,000	+3.7%
Citigroup	8,100	+5.0%
Oppenheimer	8,100	+5.0%
UBS Global Wealth Management	8,100	+5.0%
Yardeni Research	8,400	+8.9%

Two things stand out. The distribution is tight — sixteen of twenty targets sit between 7,500 and 8,100 — and it has been dragged upward all year by the index itself. Strategist targets are a lagging read on sentiment far more often than a leading read on price; Yardeni has raised his three times in 2026 and still cautions against chasing AI names (Quartz, 26 Aug 2026). BofA's Savita Subramanian has held Wall Street's lowest number at 7,100 and taken criticism for it (TheStreet, 28 Aug 2026).

What each target actually assumes

A price target is only two numbers multiplied together: earnings and the multiple paid for them. That decomposition is where the disagreement lives, and it is worth doing yourself rather than reading the headline.

As of 28 August 2026, FactSet puts the forward 12-month P/E at 19.6. Against the 7,730.99 close FactSet used, that implies a forward 12-month EPS estimate of roughly $394. Holding that earnings base constant, here is the multiple each target requires:

Target	Implied forward P/E on ~$394 EPS	What has to happen
7,100 (BofA)	18.0x	Multiple compresses roughly 8% with earnings unchanged
7,900 (median)	20.1x	Multiple broadly holds; earnings do the work
8,000 (GS, JPM, MS, DB)	20.3x	Small re-rating on top of estimate creep
8,400 (Yardeni)	21.3x	Forward EPS to ~$429 at today's multiple, or a visible re-rating

Goldman Sachs Research is explicit about its own inputs: 8,000 for year-end 2026 built on EPS of $340 for 2026 (24% growth) and $385 for 2027 (13% growth), as of 26 May 2026. That is a fair template — most of the bull case is earnings, not a higher multiple. It is also why the bear case is not a crash call: getting to 7,100 needs the multiple to give back about two turns, which happens in ordinary risk-off episodes without any recession.

Are US stocks expensive right now?

By its own history, mildly. FactSet's 28 August 2026 Earnings Insight has the forward 12-month P/E at 19.6 — below the five-year average of 19.9 and above the ten-year average of 19.0. The trailing 12-month P/E of 26.4 is above both its five-year (24.4) and ten-year (23.5) averages, which is the normal signature of a market where earnings are growing quickly: trailing looks stretched, forward looks reasonable.

Earnings genuinely are growing quickly. Q2 2026 blended earnings growth came in at 52.0%, the highest since Q2 2021, with 86% of companies beating on EPS. Analysts project 31.2% earnings growth for calendar 2026 and 14.4% for 2027 (FactSet, 28 Aug 2026). The forward multiple has actually fallen since June because estimates rose faster than prices — the forward P/E was 20.4 on 30 June, and since then the index is up 3.1% while forward EPS is up 7.4%.

The uncomfortable comparison is against cash and bonds, not against history. At a 19.6x forward multiple, the earnings yield is about 5.1%. The 10-year Treasury yields 4.75% and the 3-month bill 3.73% (31 Aug 2026). That leaves an equity risk premium of roughly 0.35 percentage points — you are being paid very little extra for owning the earnings stream of the US corporate sector instead of lending to the US government. That is the single number we would watch hardest into year-end, and it is the reason our recent work on dividend stocks whose yields clear the T-bill matters more than usual.

Will the stock market crash in 2026?

Nothing in the current data supports a crash forecast, and we are not making one. What the data does support is a list of things that would produce a normal, painful 10-15% drawdown — the kind that happens in roughly half of all calendar years and would still leave 2026 positive.

• Multiple compression, not an earnings miss. With an equity risk premium near zero, a 50bp back-up in the 10-year yield does real damage to the multiple even if profits are fine. Yields near 4.75% are already the pressure point; we covered how that fed through in the bond-stress week in August.
• Concentration. The index's earnings growth is disproportionately AI-infrastructure driven. Communication Services and Information Technology carry the largest expected upside in analyst targets (+25.0% and +24.3%), which is the same thing as saying the index's return depends on a handful of results. Our NVIDIA earnings work is index analysis at this point, not single-stock analysis.
• Guidance turning. Q3 guidance is currently better than normal — only 36% of the 98 companies guiding for Q3 guided lower, versus a five-year average of 58%. That is a strength today and a fragility later: it is a high bar to clear in October.

The honest framing is that the bear case is about what investors are willing to pay, not about whether corporate America is earning money. Positioning for a crash has been an expensive trade all year.

Does September seasonality matter?

It is real and it is weak evidence. Since 1928 the S&P 500 has averaged -1.17% in September and finished the month lower in 56% of years — the only month with a negative long-run record (The Motley Fool, 27 Aug 2026). That is a coin-flip with a small tilt, measured across 98 years that include the Depression, two oil shocks and 2008.

Treat it as a reason not to be surprised by a soft month, not as a reason to trade. A 44% chance of a positive September is not a signal; the Fed calendar is. If you want the actual dates that move the index, the economic calendar and the earnings calendar are more useful than the almanac.

What moves the index between here and December

Three FOMC meetings remain in 2026: 15-16 September, 27-28 October and 8-9 December, with Summary of Economic Projections at September and December (Federal Reserve). September carries the most weight, both because of the projections and because the market has already priced a path — our read on that is in will the Fed cut rates in September.

After that it is Q3 earnings in October, against the highest bar of the cycle: analysts expect 28.2% growth in Q3 and 25.8% in Q4. Beating a 28% growth estimate is a different exercise from beating a 12% one, and the market's reaction function to in-line results is usually the tell.

Bottom-up analyst price targets on the individual constituents aggregate to 9,204, or 19.1% above the index — a reminder that the sum of single-stock optimism is always well above what strategists will put their name to on the index. When those two numbers disagree by that much, the strategists have historically been closer.

Our read, and what would change it

We think the median target is the right centre of gravity for a reason that has nothing to do with consensus-following: at a ~0.35pp equity risk premium, index upside has to be paid for out of earnings, and earnings estimates are already rising at 30%+. Something close to flat-to-modestly-higher into year-end, with a wider distribution of outcomes than the tight target range implies, is the honest base case.

What would move us more constructive: the 10-year sustainably back under 4.25%, which widens the risk premium without anything happening to profits. What would move us defensive: forward EPS estimates flattening for two consecutive months while the index holds — that combination is multiple expansion into deteriorating fundamentals, and it is the setup that precedes most of the drawdowns worth avoiding.

If you trade the index rather than hold it, our desk publishes levels on the majors through the indices signals hub, and you can open a trading account to access them live. Index exposure through funds instead is covered in our 2026 ETF guide.

This article is information, not investment advice. Index forecasts are estimates that depend on assumptions stated above; markets can and do move outside every published target range. Figures are as of the dates cited and will change.