Berkshire Hathaway cash on hand: the $365 billion pile in charts (2026 update)

Berkshire Hathaway ended the second quarter of 2026 with $365.5 billion in cash and short-term Treasury bills, down from a record $397.4 billion at the end of March. It’s the first meaningful drop in years: under new CEO Greg Abel, Berkshire became a net buyer of stocks in Q2 for the first time in 14 quarters and stepped up share buybacks.

Even after that drop, cash still makes up around 55% of Berkshire’s cash plus disclosed equity portfolio. This article tracks Berkshire’s cash on hand since 2018, explains what “cash” actually means at Berkshire (mostly short-term Treasury bills), and shows how the cash-to-equities ratio has changed under Warren Buffett and his successor.

Berkshire Hathaway cash on hand: interactive chart

The chart below shows Berkshire’s cash and short-term Treasury position alongside its disclosed US equity portfolio (from 13F filings) for each year-end from 2018, plus the four most recent quarters. The line shows cash as a percentage of cash plus equities, a simple measure of how defensive Berkshire’s positioning is.

What “cash on hand” actually means at Berkshire Hathaway

When the financial media talks about Berkshire’s “cash pile”, it isn’t cash sitting in a bank account. The headline figure combines several items from Berkshire’s consolidated balance sheet:

• Cash and cash equivalents: bank deposits, money market funds and commercial paper maturing within 90 days. At Q1 2026, about $51.5 billion.
• Short-term US Treasury bills: government debt maturing in less than a year, by far the biggest part. At Q1 2026, about $339.3 billion.
• Other short-maturity instruments held by the railroad, utilities and energy businesses: small, but they bring the consolidated total to the headline figure.

So when you read that Berkshire has hundreds of billions in cash, most of it is US Treasury bills earning short-term interest. Berkshire treats them as cash because they are highly liquid and carry virtually no credit risk: they can be sold within a day if an opportunity comes up.

Different outlets sometimes quote slightly different figures. Berkshire itself prefers a measure that excludes the railroad’s cash and adjusts for Treasury bills bought but not yet paid for. On that basis, cash fell from about $380 billion at the end of March to about $365 billion at the end of June 2026. In this article, we use the headline figure from Berkshire’s earnings releases throughout, so the numbers are comparable over time.

Berkshire holds very little in longer-maturity bonds. Its fixed maturity securities (corporate bonds and longer Treasuries) are small next to the cash pile. Buffett long preferred Treasury bills to bonds: when rates are low, longer bonds don’t pay enough for the risk of rates rising, and when rates are high, bills capture most of the yield without that risk.

Berkshire Hathaway cash on hand: snapshot

Berkshire Hathaway cash on hand by year

What the data shows

Three periods stand out.

2018 to 2023: a stable cushion. Berkshire’s cash position stayed between $110 billion and $170 billion, around 30% to 40% of its combined cash and equities. That’s already defensive by most fund managers’ standards, but consistent with how Buffett ran the company for decades: he liked having options.

2024 to early 2026: the big build-up. Cash doubled from $168 billion to $334 billion in 2024 alone, the largest one-year increase in Berkshire’s history, and kept growing to a record $397.4 billion in March 2026. The driver wasn’t only the cash generated by its businesses: Berkshire sold more stock than it bought for 14 consecutive quarters, from late 2022 to early 2026. The most visible sale was Apple, where the stake fell from more than 900 million shares to about 228 million.

Q2 2026: the first turn under Greg Abel. In his second quarter as CEO, Abel reversed the trend. Berkshire bought about $23.5 billion of stocks and sold only $3.7 billion, adding notably to Alphabet and Delta Air Lines, and spent about $4.5 billion on buybacks, up from $235 million in the first quarter. Cash fell by about $32 billion. After the quarter ended, Berkshire also completed the $8.5 billion acquisition of homebuilder Taylor Morrison, on 24 July 2026, which will show up in the third-quarter figures.

Why has Berkshire been holding so much cash?

Berkshire has never given a single explanation for the size of its cash pile, but several factors contribute:

1. Treasury bills finally pay something: for most of the post-2008 era, short-term Treasuries yielded close to zero, so holding cash was costly. With bill yields around 4% to 5% in 2023 to 2025, the cash pile has earned well over $10 billion a year in interest, which lowers the cost of waiting.
2. Valuations looked stretched: Buffett repeatedly said that large acquisitions at sensible prices had become hard to find, and US stock valuations spent most of the period well above their historical averages.
3. Taxes on Apple: Berkshire’s Apple stake had risen by hundreds of billions of dollars. Selling part of it meant paying large capital gains taxes, which Buffett argued was sensible given the risk of higher tax rates in the future.
4. Succession: handing Greg Abel a strong balance sheet with plenty of flexibility, rather than a fully invested portfolio, gave the new CEO room to act on his own terms. In his first shareholder letter, Abel described the cash as “dry powder”.

Berkshire’s buyback policy also shows how much of the cash it considers truly spare: it will not repurchase shares if that would take its cash and Treasury bills below $30 billion, less than a tenth of the current level.

What this means for investors

A cash allocation of over 50% at one of the world’s most respected investment companies is a data point, not a recommendation. Berkshire is unusual: it has insurance float, dozens of operating businesses and tax considerations that individual investors don’t share, and its cash earns real interest at current yields.

Still, the trend tells you something. For three years, the people with the most flexibility to act sold more stocks than they bought. The Q2 2026 turn shows the new CEO is more willing to put money to work, through stocks, buybacks and acquisitions. Whether that marks a lasting change in pace, or a one-off, will become clearer over the next few quarters. You can follow the numbers in Berkshire’s quarterly reports (see the sources below).

FAQs

Sources

• Berkshire Hathaway annual and interim reports (10-K and 10-Q)
• Berkshire Hathaway news releases (quarterly earnings)
• Berkshire Hathaway Q1 2026 10-Q
• CNBC: Berkshire earnings rose and Greg Abel starts to deploy the cash pile (August 2026)
• CNBC: Abel puts a big chunk of Berkshire’s cash to work (August 2026)
• Berkshire Hathaway Q2 2026 13F holdings
• Fortune: Berkshire’s cash pile hits $397.4 billion (May 2026)
• Berkshire Hathaway 2024 shareholder letter
• SEC EDGAR: Berkshire Hathaway filings