Sterling Infrastructure, Inc.
STRL · Industrials · $20.3B mkt cap · FY2025 filings · Shallow moat ·
Doesn't clear the bar
The five investor questions
2021–2025 (latest 5 aligned FYs; v3 window cap 5): revenue $1.4B to $2.5B, increasing; diluted EPS 2.15 to 9.38, increasing.
Median gross margin 14.5% over 10y, variable.
Median ROIC 16.7%, above the 12% hurdle in 60% of years.
Net cash position — no leverage risk.
Owner earnings trend unclear.
Price vs. conservative owner-earnings floor
A cautious baseline, not a price target: what the shares may support if normalized owner earnings simply hold steady.
- Owner earnings (normalized)
- $139M
- Owner-earnings floor / share
- $50.21
- Capped-growth comparison / share
- $81.34
- Recent price
- $660.93
- Price vs. owner-earnings floor
- 1216% above owner-earnings floor
What today’s price assumes: owner earnings growing ~67%/yr over 5 years. The floor assumes owner earnings stay flat (0% growth).
How to read this
We solve for the constant annual change in owner earnings that would make the five-year floor equal today’s price. This keeps the existing model inputs and calculation unchanged; it is an expectations lens, not a forecast.
This floor assumes trailing owner earnings persist — unreliable for declining businesses. The recent FY revenue series does not trigger the three-consecutive-declines flag.
Among the current top-score group, the median current price is 239% above the floor across 48 of the current top 50 companies by Moat Score with both values.
Score records captured Jul 26, 2026.
Exactly which 50 companies?
FTNT, META, MEDP, IBEX, MSFT, GOOGL, LULU, ANF, IDXX, TXRH, FHI, QLYS, FFIV, ADBE, LLY, MANH, VEEV, GRMN, SSD, MNST, DOCS, MCO, CPRT, NTAP, LRCX, NVDA, CORT, SFM, MPTI, ULTA, SN, RMD, ROL, PAYC, IRMD, INTU, DECK, MORN, LGCY, DAL, GWW, ISRG, MPWR, CTAS, LOPE, MRK, CMG, FAST, BKNG, ORLY
Missing a usable price or floor: ANF, BKNG.
Model details under moat-index@3.0.0: zero-growth floor 11.1×, capped-growth comparison at no more than 18×; 9% discount rate; high-end growth 4% (capped at 4%) using min(5y revenue CAGR, 5y diluted-EPS CAGR), clamped to 0%–4%; maintenance capex uses min(capex, D&A); abstain when D&A is unavailable. This is a disclosed model range, not intrinsic value as fact.
18 years of fundamentals
The business, in plain English
Sterling Infrastructure, Inc. booked $2.5B of revenue in FY2025 in the Industrials sector and kept 23.0% of it as gross profit — a moderate-margin business by that measure. After every other cost, 11.7% of each revenue dollar reached the bottom line.
Across the filed record, revenue grew from $391M (FY2009) to $2.5B (FY2025) — about 12.3% a year compounded over 16 years.
It earned 30.0% on invested capital in the latest filed year, FY2025. Across the full 17-year measurable filed record, median ROIC was 10.8%. Over the v3 recent window (10 measurable filed years), median ROIC was 16.7%. The Returns on Capital filter above scores it 72/100.
The balance sheet carried $291M of total debt in FY2025 against $290M of owner earnings — roughly 1.0 years of owner earnings to retire it all. Balance-Sheet Safety scores it 100/100.
Put together: Business Trend is the strongest of the five filters (100/100) and Pricing Power the weakest (0/100), which is how STRL lands at 59/100 — a Shallow moat.
This breakdown is generated from the filed numbers and sub-scores above — no outside narrative, no estimates. Where a filing doesn’t disclose an input, the sentence that would need it is omitted instead of guessed.
Gaps in a line mean that item isn’t in STRL’s filings for that year — the series is never interpolated or estimated. The Table view lists every filed value, including operating and net margins, total debt, and share count.
Moat Score history
Breaks in the line mark methodology or normalizer upgrades — readings across versions aren’t compared, so a level shift there isn’t a change in the business.
Tier changesSame-methodology and same-normalizer crossings of the Wide / Narrow / Shallow bars
- Normalizer upgraded unstamped (version unknown)tomoat-xbrl-normalizer@1.1.0 — readings across versions aren’t comparedJul 26, 2026
- Methodology upgraded moat-index@2.0.0tomoat-index@3.0.0 — readings across versions aren’t comparedJul 23, 2026
- Methodology upgraded moat-index@1.2.0tomoat-index@2.0.0 — readings across versions aren’t comparedJul 20, 2026
Scores are logged append-only and never overwritten — this record cannot be reconstructed retroactively, which is exactly why it’s worth keeping.
Track record
How Sterling Infrastructure, Inc.’s moat rated in each of the years we can reconstruct from its filings — scored only on what was knowable at the time — and what its price and returns did afterward. The score never saw a price; the two are joined only in hindsight, for education, not as a signal.
How to read this: each dot is what the engine would have scored STRL on that December 31; the line below is its total-return price path (dividends reinvested) in the years since.
Two tracks, one timeline: the score has its own 0–100 scale (top), the price its own 100-based scale (bottom) — never a shared axis. The price path is a total-return (dividends reinvested) index built from the same data the forward returns use; gaps in the score line are years with no reconstructed rating (see the table for why). The Table view carries every value.
What followed, in the years it rated Wide
In the reconstructed history shown, STRL did not rate Wide-moat in any year, so there is no wide-moat track record to report. That absence is itself the honest answer — we don’t manufacture a comparison where the rating never earned one.
Industrials context
#114 of 428 scored Industrials companies, ranked by Moat Score.
Nearest peers by Moat Score
- #112GENC GENCOR INDUSTRIES, INC.59.7 out of 100, Shallow moatShallow moat
- #113PRLB Proto Labs, Inc.59.3 out of 100, Shallow moatShallow moat
- #115ZBRA ZEBRA TECHNOLOGIES CORPORATION58.9 out of 100, Shallow moatShallow moat
- #116ALH Alliance Laundry Holdings Inc.58.9 out of 100, Shallow moatShallow moat
Compare STRL with its nearest peers →All Industrials companies on the Index →
Common questions about STRL
- Does Sterling Infrastructure, Inc. have an economic moat?
- Based on its FY2025 SEC filings, the Moat Index scores Sterling Infrastructure, Inc. (STRL) 59.2 out of 100 — a Shallow moat. The five questions behind that score begin at 20% each; if exactly one genuinely lacks data, the other four weights are renormalized and disclosed. revenue and EPS trend 100, pricing power 0, returns on capital 72, balance-sheet safety 100, capital discipline 24.
- Is STRL trading below the conservative owner-earnings estimate?
- The conservative owner-earnings floor is $50.21 per share. It capitalizes normalized owner earnings at a 9% rate and assumes 0% growth. Versus a recent price of $660.93, that is 1216% above owner-earnings floor. The model also publishes a capped-growth comparison, but the floor is the cautious baseline. It assumes trailing owner earnings persist and is unreliable for declining businesses. This is an educational estimate from primary SEC filings, not intrinsic value as a fact or investment advice.
- How has STRL's Moat Score changed over time?
- The record logs 16 readings since Jul 17, 2026; the latest reads 59.2 out of 100 (shallow moat). No tier changes on record yet. (Methodology or normalizer upgrades on Jul 20, 2026, Jul 23, 2026, Jul 26, 2026 re-based the score; readings across versions aren't compared.) The history is append-only — readings are only ever added, never rewritten.