Search “most expensive stocks” and the same name sits at the top of every list: a single share of Berkshire Hathaway Class A that costs more than a house. The ranking is real, and it is worth knowing. What almost no list explains is why that number matters far less to a trader than it looks, and what actually changes when a share costs $728,000 instead of $72.
The most expensive US stocks right now
The list below reflects regular-session prices in late May 2026. These are snapshots, not fixed facts. Per-share prices move every session, and the order below the top name shuffles as stocks rise and fall. Berkshire Hathaway Class A is the lone outlier, sitting more than 100 times above the second name on the list.
| Rank | Company | Ticker | Approx. share price | Sector | P/E |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Berkshire Hathaway (Class A) | BRK.A | $728,641 | Insurance / holding | 14.5 |
| 2 | NVR | NVR | $6,037 | Homebuilding | 14.7 |
| 3 | Seaboard | SEB | $4,921 | Agribusiness / shipping | 8.1 |
| 4 | AutoZone | AZO | $3,407 | Auto-parts retail | 23.8 |
| 5 | White Mountains Insurance | WTM | $2,147 | Insurance | 5.3 |
| 6 | First Citizens BancShares | FCNCA | $1,992 | Banking | 11.5 |
| 7 | KLA | KLAC | $1,888 | Semiconductors | 53.5 |
| 8 | Markel Group | MKL | $1,858 | Insurance / holding | 13.4 |
| 9 | Comfort Systems USA | FIX | $1,828 | Industrial services | 52.8 |
| 10 | MercadoLibre | MELI | $1,664 | E-commerce / fintech | 44.0 |
A few things stand out immediately. The names span insurance, homebuilding, agriculture, auto-parts retail, banking, semiconductors, and e-commerce, with no single sector dominating. Most carry ordinary valuations: Berkshire trades near 14 times earnings, White Mountains near 5, and Seaboard near 8. The high price tag is not a valuation story. It is a share-count and corporate-policy story, which is the part worth understanding.
One scope note. This is a list of US-domiciled common shares. Some foreign companies listed on US exchanges, such as the Dutch chip-equipment maker ASML, trade above $1,600 a share and would slot into the upper range, but they sit outside a clean US ranking.
The list, name by name
Berkshire Hathaway Class A: the benchmark
Berkshire is the most expensive share on any US exchange, and it has been the reference point for this entire topic for decades. The reason is a decision, not an accident. Warren Buffett has refused to split the Class A stock, and the price simply compounded upward for more than half a century without ever being reset. The holding company owns businesses outright, from GEICO and Duracell to Dairy Queen and Fruit of the Loom, and holds large stakes in names like Apple, Coca-Cola, and American Express.
The high price is also the point. A six-figure share filters out short-term traders almost by definition, which is exactly the shareholder base Buffett wants. For everyone without several hundred thousand dollars to commit to one share, Berkshire created the Class B shares in 1996. Each B share carries a fraction of the price and 1/1500 of the voting rights, and it is how the vast majority of retail investors actually own the company.
The rest of the top ten
NVR is the second most expensive at around $6,000 a share. The homebuilder, founded in 1940, runs Ryan Homes, NVHomes, Foxridge Homes, and Heartland Homes, along with its own mortgage and settlement arms, and has built more than 365,000 homes. It has never split, and its share count is small, which is most of the explanation for the price.
Seaboard, near $4,900, is a Fortune 500 agribusiness and shipping conglomerate that most traders have never watched. AutoZone, around $3,400, is the auto-parts retailer with close to 7,000 US stores and a long record of aggressive buybacks that shrink the share count and lift the per-share price year after year. White Mountains and Markel are both insurance holding companies in the $1,800 to $2,200 range, and First Citizens BancShares is a regional bank near $2,000.
Three names break the pattern on valuation. KLA, near $1,900, makes process-control and inspection systems for chip manufacturing and has ridden the semiconductor build-out to a 50-plus earnings multiple. Comfort Systems USA, also near $1,800, is an industrial-services name whose stock has run hard enough to sit at a similar multiple. MercadoLibre, near $1,650, is the dominant e-commerce and fintech platform in Latin America. These three are where the high price comes with a high valuation rather than a small share count, and they are the only names in the group where the sticker price and a growth story actually line up.
“Expensive” means two different things
Here is the confusion buried in the whole topic. A stock can be expensive in two completely unrelated ways.
The first is the one every list uses, the nominal price of a single share. The second is valuation, what a buyer pays for each dollar of the company’s earnings, usually measured by the price-to-earnings ratio. These two numbers have nothing to do with each other.
The contrast is sharp once it is measured. Among the largest companies in the world, the cheapest names by valuation trade near 6 times earnings, while the most richly valued trade near 65 times. By that measure, Berkshire at roughly 14 times earnings is cheaper than a $400 retail stock at 24 times, and far cheaper than a $1,900 chip-equipment name at 53 times. The most expensive share on the exchange is, by valuation, one of the more reasonable names on its own list.
One caution travels with the P/E ratio. It falls apart when earnings are tiny or negative, because a company that barely earns anything can show a P/E in the hundreds or thousands, and the number stops meaning much. Valuation always needs context, never a single ratio.
Why a few stocks cost so much per share
A four- or six-figure share price comes from a short list of mechanics, and none of them involve the company being “better.”
Refusing to split is the biggest one. A stock split changes nothing about the business. Splitting 500 shares at $32 into 1,000 shares at $16 leaves the owner with the same $16,000 and leaves the company’s value untouched. Most firms split to keep their price in a familiar range, and many large US companies like the $25 to $75 zone. The handful that refuse, Berkshire chief among them, simply let the price run.
Small share counts do the rest. Market value is divided across however many shares exist, so a company with few shares outstanding carries a high price on each one. Long-term compounding, multi-class share structures, and steady buybacks that shrink the share count all push in the same direction. At the opposite end of the market, exchange rules cut the other way: a NASDAQ-listed stock generally has to hold $1 or more to stay listed, and one that drops below risks being pushed to the over-the-counter market. Price, high or low, is a policy and structure outcome, not a verdict on quality.
Price per share vs. company value
The cleanest way to kill the “expensive equals big” instinct is the formula itself. Market capitalization equals price per share multiplied by shares outstanding, so the price alone tells only half the story.
NVR makes the point. At roughly $6,000 a share it looks enormous, yet the whole company is worth about $16 billion, because it has so few shares. Compare that to a megacap trading near $420 a share that is worth more than $3 trillion. The cheaper-looking stock is the company nearly 200 times larger. Sticker price says nothing about size, and nothing about quality.
It also says nothing about returns. What moves a position is the percentage change, not the dollar change. A $20 stock that gains $2 and a $200 stock that gains $20 both returned 10%, and the same money put into each earns the same profit. The size of the number on the quote screen is noise.
What a high share price actually changes for a trader
For an active trader, the per-share price does have real consequences, just not the ones the headline implies.
Liquidity is the first. The most expensive names trade in tiny size. Berkshire Class A changes hands a few hundred shares on an average day, which means a thin order book and a bid-ask spread that can gap wide. Thin, wide markets are hard to move in and out of cleanly, and slippage on a six-figure share is measured in real money.
Cost is the second. A broker charging a flat per-trade fee buries that fee inside a $700,000 ticket but makes it punishing inside a $50 one, so fee structure interacts with price in ways worth checking. The old barrier, needing the full price of one share to participate at all, has mostly fallen away. Lower-priced share classes like Berkshire’s B shares, ADRs for foreign names, index funds and ETFs that hold the company, and fractional-share trading at most brokers all give exposure without the full sticker price. The one trap that remains is psychological, reading a big number as a sign of quality. That is a bias, not information.
Highest prices in history, and the rest of the world
The current list is not the all-time list. NVR closed above $9,900 in October 2024 before pulling back toward $6,000, and Seaboard peaked above $4,700 back in 2019. Other names ran into four figures and then reset: Amazon, Alphabet, and Chipotle all traded in the thousands before splitting their stock to bring the price down, which is why none of them sit near the top today.
The pattern is not uniquely American. Switzerland’s Lindt & Sprüngli has traded near $140,000 a share, using participation certificates worth a fraction of the main share, and India hosts several names in the tens of thousands of rupees. Cross-border comparisons come with a warning, though. Prices quote in local currency, share classes differ, and some high-priced listings are thinly traded registered shares, so a global “most expensive” ranking depends heavily on the exchange rate and the date it was pulled.
Bottom line
The most expensive stock is Berkshire Hathaway Class A, and the names behind it are a genuinely interesting cross-section of the market. As a screen for what to trade or own, though, the per-share price is close to useless on its own. It reflects split policy and share count, not size, quality, or value.
The questions that matter are the ones they always are: what the business does, how it is valued against its earnings, and whether the name’s liquidity and structure fit the way the trade is being put on. The price tag is where the curiosity starts, not where the decision ends.