Top 20 pharma companies in 2026: revenue, R&D and Irish sites

The top 20 pharma companies by FY2025 revenue

Johnson & Johnson is the largest prescription-medicine company by revenue for fiscal 2025, the latest full year every company has reported, followed by Roche, Eli Lilly, Merck & Co and Pfizer. The ranking below uses each company's own audited or published figures, converted to US dollars at European Central Bank reference rates so that companies reporting in francs, euro, kroner, sterling and yen can be compared.

We count a company as a pharma company when most of its revenue comes from prescription medicines, including vaccines and plasma therapies. Johnson & Johnson qualifies because its Innovative Medicine segment sold USD 60.40bn of its USD 94.19bn total; Roche because its Pharmaceuticals Division sold CHF 47.7bn of CHF 61.5bn; Otsuka because pharmaceuticals were JPY 1,744.2bn of JPY 2,468.9bn.

Sources: SEC EDGAR XBRL filings (10-K and 20-F for fiscal 2025) for 15 companies; Roche results release of 29 January 2026; Boehringer Ingelheim release of 25 March 2026; Takeda 20-F for the year to 31 March 2026; Otsuka financial highlights; CSL Annual Report 2025. USD conversion: ECB euro reference rates, 2025 annual average (Takeda: mean of daily rates, April 2025 to March 2026). Irish sites: Priya Life Science Ireland pharma map, census checked 30 September 2026; registered companies from the Companies Registration Office. Our calculation, October 2026.

How the ranking was built

Every figure is the company's own. For 15 of the 20 we read the revenue and R&D lines from the XBRL data filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. For Roche, Boehringer Ingelheim, Takeda, Otsuka and CSL, which are missing from that dataset or had not yet filed for fiscal 2025 in it, we took the figures from the company's annual report, 20-F or results release. Novartis and Sanofi report net sales; the rest report total revenue or group sales.

Calendar-year figures are converted at the ECB's 2025 annual average rates against the euro: USD 1.12998, CHF 0.93703, DKK 7.46339, GBP 0.85679 and JPY 169.043 per euro. Takeda's year ran from April 2025 to March 2026, so we used the mean of the ECB daily rates over those twelve months (USD 1.15912 and JPY 174.761 per euro). CSL reports in dollars for its year to 30 June 2025. A different rate or date would move companies that are close together, such as Roche and Johnson & Johnson on R&D.

Who is left out, and why

• Medtech, tools and service companies: Thermo Fisher Scientific (USD 44.56bn), Abbott (USD 44.33bn), Medtronic, Stryker, Danaher, Boston Scientific, IQVIA and ICON would rank on revenue but earn it mainly from devices, laboratory products or contract research.
• Bayer: its Pharmaceuticals division sold EUR 17.83bn in 2025, 39% of group sales of EUR 45.58bn, so Bayer as a group fails our test. As a stand-alone division it would sit between Gilead and Teva.
• Merck KGaA: Healthcare sold EUR 8.61bn of EUR 21.10bn group sales, below the cut-off either way.
• Near misses: Viatris (USD 14.30bn) is 21st, USD 43m behind Regeneron. Astellas (JPY 2,139.2bn) and Daiichi Sankyo (JPY 2,123.0bn) for the year to March 2026 convert to about USD 14.2bn and USD 14.1bn.

Top pharmaceutical companies in the US

Nine of the 20 largest pharmaceutical companies are headquartered in the United States: Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly, Merck & Co, Pfizer, AbbVie, Bristol Myers Squibb, Amgen, Gilead Sciences and Regeneron. Together they reported USD 476.9bn of fiscal 2025 revenue, 52% of the top-20 total, and USD 92.2bn of R&D.

Lilly had the fastest growth in the group. Its revenue rose from USD 45.04bn in 2024 to USD 65.18bn in 2025, up 44.7%, which took it past Merck & Co by USD 168m. Pfizer and Bristol Myers Squibb reported slightly lower revenue than in 2024.

All nine US companies run at least one manufacturing site on the island of Ireland, according to our map. Their Irish operations are profiled on our company pages, for example Pfizer in Ireland and MSD in Ireland, which also list the clinical trials, approvals and shortages linked to each group.

Which top pharmaceutical companies spend most on innovative drug development

Merck & Co spent the most on research and development in fiscal 2025, USD 15.79bn, followed by Roche and Johnson & Johnson at about USD 14.7bn each. Ranked by R&D converted to US dollars, the top ten are:

1. Merck & Co: USD 15.79bn (24.3% of revenue)
2. Roche: CHF 12.2bn, about USD 14.71bn (19.8%)
3. Johnson & Johnson: USD 14.67bn (15.6%)
4. AstraZeneca: USD 14.23bn (24.2%)
5. Eli Lilly: USD 13.34bn (20.5%)
6. Novartis: USD 11.20bn (20.5%)
7. Pfizer: USD 10.44bn (16.7%)
8. Bristol Myers Squibb: USD 9.95bn (20.6%)
9. GSK: GBP 7.53bn, about USD 9.92bn (23.0%)
10. AbbVie: USD 9.10bn (14.9%)

As a share of revenue, Regeneron spends the most, 40.8%, followed by Merck & Co, AstraZeneca, Boehringer Ingelheim (22.9%, the company's own figure) and GSK. Teva (5.9%) and CSL (8.7%) spend the smallest shares.

R&D spending measures what a company puts in, not what it gets out, so these figures do not show which company is the most innovative. Definitions also differ: Johnson & Johnson, Lilly, Pfizer, AbbVie, Amgen, Gilead and Teva report R&D excluding acquired in-process R&D, the up-front cost of buying or licensing medicines in development, while other companies may include some of it. For outputs, our FDA approvals register and EMA approvals register show which companies' medicines are being approved, and the trial sponsor pages show who runs the most clinical trials.

Where the major pharmaceutical companies operate in Ireland

Fourteen of the 20 major pharmaceutical companies operate at least one manufacturing site on the island of Ireland, with 32 site entries between them on our pharma map, plus one Lilly plant in Limerick not yet producing. Cork has the most, eight, four of them in Ringaskiddy and two in Carrigtwohill; Dublin has six, two of them in Grange Castle. The Cork map page and our guide to pharma and medtech sites by county show the full spread.

Johnson & Johnson, MSD and AbbVie have the most entries, five each, and Takeda's 20-F lists Takeda Ireland Limited at Kilruddery, near Bray, as a production site. Six of the 20 have no manufacturing site on our map: Roche, Novartis, GSK, Boehringer Ingelheim, Otsuka and CSL. Roche, Novartis and GSK still have Irish-registered companies, but a registered company is a legal entity and may be a sales office or holding company rather than a plant. The directory of companies in Ireland lists more.

What the figures say about the pharmaceutical industry

The 20 largest pharmaceutical companies reported about USD 914bn of revenue and USD 175.5bn of R&D for fiscal 2025, so roughly 19 cents of every dollar of sales went back into research. The total mixes fiscal years ending between June 2025 and March 2026 and depends on the exchange rates used, so treat it as an order of magnitude, not an industry total.

Revenue at this level rests on a small number of products, and patents decide how long those sales last. Our drug patent expiry tracker shows when key protections end. How our registers are built is explained on the methodology page, and fixes are logged on the corrections page.