What Is the Piotroski F-Score? A 9-Point Financial Health Checklist
The Piotroski F-Score is a simple 0-9 checklist that flags accounting-quality red flags across profitability, leverage, liquidity, and efficiency. Here's how it works.
Monminds Research Team
2 Sept 2026 · 6 min read
Where the F-Score comes from
The Piotroski F-Score was developed by accounting professor Joseph Piotroski in a 2000 study, designed as a simple, mechanical checklist to separate financially improving companies from deteriorating ones using only data already in a company's financial statements — no forecasts, no subjective judgment.
It scores a company from 0 to 9 by checking nine specific year-over-year signals across four categories: profitability, leverage/liquidity, and operating efficiency.
The nine checks
Profitability (4 points): positive net income, positive operating cash flow, an improving return on assets, and operating cash flow exceeding net income (a signal that earnings are backed by real cash, not just accounting adjustments).
Leverage & liquidity (3 points): decreasing leverage (debt relative to assets), an improving current ratio, and no new shares issued in the past year (dilution can quietly erode existing shareholders' stake even when the business itself is doing fine).
Operating efficiency (2 points): an improving gross margin and an improving asset turnover ratio — both signs a company is extracting more output from the same asset base.
What the score does and doesn't tell you
A higher score (7-9) indicates a company is improving across most of these accounting-quality signals; a lower score (0-2) flags multiple areas of deterioration worth a closer look. It's a screen, not a verdict — a strong score doesn't mean a company is a good value, and a weak score doesn't automatically mean trouble; it just means several of these specific year-over-year signals moved in the less favorable direction.
The F-Score also needs two full years of comparable annual data to compute, so it isn't available for very recently listed companies or ones with limited financial history.
Where to see it
Every tracked company's Piotroski F-Score, with the full nine-point breakdown, is available on its Financials tab on Monminds for Pro subscribers — computed automatically from the same underlying financial data used across the rest of the research page.
Editor's note
Monminds Research is an analytics, research-workflow, and decision-support platform — not a guaranteed-returns product, and nothing on this site is personalized investment advice.
Try it on a company you follow →