Berkshire Hathaway's cash pile explained

It peaked at $397.4bn and has just fallen for the first time in four years. The direction matters more than the number — and how you treat a cash balance changes what you think a company is worth.

By Nathan Wickham-Hurd · Founder, Oak Growth · First-class Economics & Finance, MBA · Last reviewed September 2026

The short answer

Berkshire Hathaway held $365.5bn in cash and Treasury bills at the end of June 2026. That is down 8% from a record $397.4bn three months earlier — the first meaningful decline since early 2022. The fall is the story, not the size. For four years the pile grew because Berkshire could not find anything worth buying. It has now started to shrink.

Context, September 2026. Berkshire ended September 2025 with a then-record $381.6bn after an extended run of net equity selling, and the balance kept climbing to $397.4bn by 31 March 2026. The second quarter of 2026 — Greg Abel's second in charge — broke the pattern. On Berkshire's own preferred measure, which excludes BNSF's cash and adjusts for Treasury bills purchased but not yet settled, the balance fell 3.8% to $359.2bn.

Why a company would sit on that much cash

The usual explanation is that Buffett could not find enough businesses at prices he was willing to pay. That is broadly right, but it is worth being precise about the mechanism, because "waiting for a crash" is not quite it.

Size restricts the opportunity set. A position has to be enormous to move a company of Berkshire's scale. That rules out the great majority of listed businesses regardless of how attractively they are priced.

Cash has not been free to hold. With Treasury bills yielding meaningfully more than they did through the 2010s, sitting in cash has produced a real return rather than a guaranteed loss to inflation. The cost of patience fell sharply.

Buybacks are a valuation decision too. Berkshire repurchases its own stock only when management judges it to be below intrinsic value. Long stretches without buybacks are a statement about Berkshire's own price, not just about the market's.

What Abel spent it on

Berkshire spent $4.53bn buying back its own shares in the quarter, at roughly 1.4 times book value — book value being what a company is worth on paper, adding up what it owns and subtracting what it owes. Paying above that means management judged the business to be worth more than its accounts suggest. Berkshire's repurchase policy has no fixed price ceiling, so the level chosen is itself information about where management puts intrinsic value.

Berkshire also managed its debt during the period, repaying about $3.3bn of maturing borrowings in the first half of 2026, including ¥133.9bn (about $844m) in April, while issuing ¥272.3bn (about $1.7bn) of new yen-denominated senior notes maturing between 2029 and 2056 at a weighted average rate of 2.4%. Borrowing cheaply in yen while holding dollars is a long-running Berkshire habit and worth noticing separately from the equity story.

How to read a cash pile when you are valuing a company

Large cash balances are genuinely ambiguous, and the ambiguity is the useful part.

Cash is an asset, so mechanically it adds to what a company is worth. But cash earning a Treasury yield is not earning the return the business itself earns, so a company that holds a lot of it is dragging down its own return on equity. Whether that is prudence or a failure to allocate capital depends entirely on what happens next — and you only find out afterwards.

The practical test is to look at what the cash is doing over several years rather than at its size in one quarter. A balance that grows for four years and then falls sharply into buybacks and purchases is behaving like a war chest. A balance that simply accumulates indefinitely is behaving like an absence of ideas. Berkshire has just given the first piece of evidence in four years about which of the two it has been.

See what the business is worth

Oak Growth publishes a discounted cash flow intrinsic value and margin of safety for 1,000+ companies across eight markets, scored on moat, management, economics and value.

Explore the screener →

Common questions

How much cash does Berkshire Hathaway have?

$365.5bn in cash and Treasury bills as of 30 June 2026, down 8% from a record $397.4bn at the end of March. On Berkshire's own preferred measure, which excludes BNSF's cash and adjusts for unsettled Treasury purchases, the figure was $359.2bn.

Why does Berkshire Hathaway hold so much cash?

Chiefly because its size restricts what it can usefully buy — a position has to be very large to matter to a company of Berkshire's scale — and because Treasury yields have made waiting relatively painless. Berkshire also repurchases its own shares only when management considers them below intrinsic value, so long gaps in buyback activity reflect a view on Berkshire's own price.

Is Berkshire's cash pile falling?

Yes, for the first time meaningfully since early 2022. It fell 8% during the second quarter of 2026, which included $4.53bn of share buybacks at roughly 140% of book value.

Does a big cash balance make a company more valuable?

Mechanically yes, since cash is an asset. But cash earning a Treasury yield earns less than a good business earns on its own capital, so a large balance drags on return on equity. Whether it counts as prudence or poor capital allocation depends on what it eventually buys — which you can only judge in hindsight.

Also see: Is Buffett still running Berkshire? → · What stocks does Berkshire own? → · Free cash flow explained →