RELX PLC (RELX): what the price assumes

In the published model solve dated 2026-Q2, anchored at $36.61, RELX PLC (RELX) is priced for +5.7% growth. boothcheck publishes no house fair value, target price, or buy/sell rating; individual model outputs and user-controlled scenarios are analytical inputs, not Boothcheck targets. Narrative composed 2026-07-24.

Generated: 2026-08-10 · Exported: 2026-08-12 · Source: https://boothcheck.com/report/RELX

Headline

What The Price Assumes (Inversion)

The assumption today's price embeds, recovered by inverting the valuation.

The operating-margin figure is value-band context at year 12: derived from the framework's value band, a separate calculation — not part of the priced-in solve.

Solve inputs: computed at a 7.9% cost of capital with 4% terminal growth over a 5-year stage; each 1pp of cost of capital moves the implied operating-profit growth ~7.1pp.

Reconcile: at the x-ray's 9.3% required return this reads ~14.7%/yr; the models below use their own rates.

How unusual the bet is: within-range (limited comparison data)

Valuation X-Ray

Asset, earnings-power and peer-multiple models all land far below the price; ONLY the growth-DCF reaches it. The bet is durable compounding the static frames structurally cannot price (a moat/durability premium).

How the valuation models price the stock relative to the market price. Price/FV above 1.0 means the market pays more than that lens defends (expensive); at or below 1.0 the lens can defend the price.

Families that justify the price: Growth Families that call it expensive: Asset, Earnings, Relative

The models below discount at their own flat-beta convention rates (cost of equity 9.3%, WACC 8.6%); the inversion above states its own rate.

Per-Model Detail (n=17)

Solvency

Bullet Takeaways

• All four businesses grew in the first half of 2026 on an underlying basis, with Legal up 10%, Risk up 8%, and Scientific, Technical & Medical and Exhibitions each up 6%, and profit grew faster than revenue.
• The same technology accelerating the Legal division is also the most credible substitute for what Legal and the scientific publishing business sell, which is organized access to a proprietary body of text.
• Capital return is running at scale: a £2,250m buyback for 2026 with £1,750m completed in the first half and the interim dividend lifted 7% to 20.9p.

Bull Case

Start with what a renewal actually is. A law firm that has built its research workflow on one platform, a university library that has catalogued a decade of licensed journals, an insurer whose underwriting rules call a specific fraud database, all face the same decision each year, and it is not really a purchasing decision. It is a migration decision. That is why RELX's revenue arrives with a predictability most businesses have to buy with discounts, and why the first half of 2026 looked the way it did: group revenue of £4,871m with underlying growth of 7%, and every division contributing, Risk up 8%, Legal up 10%, Scientific, Technical & Medical up 6% and Exhibitions up 6%.

The more interesting line is the one underneath. Adjusted operating profit reached £1,727m with underlying growth of 9%, and the company's adjusted operating margin moved to 35.5% from 34.8% a year earlier. Profit growing faster than revenue in a subscription business is the signature of price and mix doing the work rather than volume, and it happens when customers accept upgrades rather than merely renewals.

Artificial intelligence is the reason the upgrade cycle exists at all right now, and RELX sits on the right side of it for a specific structural reason: the models are useful in proportion to the quality of the corpus they run over, and RELX owns the corpora. Case law and its citation graph, peer-reviewed journals, identity and fraud records built over decades. The legal assistant products layer inference over material a general-purpose model cannot lawfully or reliably reproduce, and the Legal division's step up to double-digit underlying growth arrived alongside that rollout.

The economics show up as cash almost immediately. Cash conversion ran at 98% of adjusted operating profit in the half, which is what you get when the working capital cycle is a subscription invoiced in advance against costs that are mostly people. That cash is going straight back out: a £2,250m buyback for the year, £1,750m of it already done by mid-year with a further £100m since the start of July and £400m still to deploy, alongside an interim dividend raised 7% to 20.9p. The share count has been coming down about 1.2% a year since the end of 2021, so the per-share arithmetic gets a push before the business does anything at all.

The trailing operating margin of 31.6% on a reported basis is the blunt version of the same point. The bear will say correctly that this margin is why nothing static supports the price. The bull's reply is that a 31.6% margin earned on revenue that renews annually, from customers who would have to rebuild their workflows to leave, is not a margin that behaves like an average company's margin. What is being priced is the persistence, and persistence is the one thing this business has actually demonstrated across four separate end markets at once.

Bear Case

Every valuation method that refuses to extrapolate lands far below this price, and that is not an accident of a single bad model. It is what happens when a business has almost no book value and its entire worth sits in relationships and text files. Book value is roughly $1.65 a share. The methods that anchor on assets, and the methods that capitalize today's profit with no growth credited, therefore have nothing to grip. Only the methods that project cash flows forward reach the price at all, and they clear it by extending the compounding well past any horizon a customer contract covers.

Which makes the bear case a single question: what would break the persistence? There are three candidates, and the first is the one the bull is currently celebrating.

Generative models are the most credible substitute yet built for the core product in two of the four divisions. What Legal sells is organized, citable access to case law; what the scientific business sells is organized, citable access to research literature. Both are text-retrieval businesses with an authority guarantee attached. RELX's strategy is to run its own models over its own corpora and charge for the result, which works precisely as long as the corpus stays proprietary and the authority guarantee stays valuable. Neither is guaranteed. Open-access mandates keep pressing on the scientific publishing model from the funder side, and every improvement in general-purpose retrieval narrows the gap for the customer who only needed the answer, not the citation.

The second is that the four divisions are not equally durable. Exhibitions is 12% of revenue and is a cyclical events business wearing an information company's clothes; it grew 6% underlying in the first half, and it will not do that in a year when corporate travel budgets compress. Print and print-related activities are another 4%, structurally declining by definition. Roughly a sixth of the company is not the subscription flywheel the price is paying for.

The third is the price itself. It embeds operating profit compounding at about 3.3% a year and then continuing at a rate that never really stops. The rate is unremarkable set against what the company just delivered. The duration is the demanding part, and it is demanding in a way that does not show up in any single year's results, which is exactly what makes it easy to underwrite by accident. A durability premium is paid up front and settled over decades.

The balance sheet does not rescue the situation if persistence fails. Net debt runs at about 2.4 times operating income, which is entirely manageable for a cash generative business and entirely unhelpful as a floor: there is no net cash pile and no asset base to fall back on. When the value is the renewal rate, a fall in the renewal rate has nothing underneath it.

One more thing a dollar-based holder carries here without choosing to. The accounts are in sterling under IFRS and the New York line is a depositary receipt over the London-listed shares, so the exchange rate sits between the reported figures and the price on the screen.

Valuation

At $34.23, the market pays about 18 times what this business earns from operations, and the price requires operating profit to compound at about 3.3% a year from here before settling into a slower permanent rate. Held against the first half of 2026, when adjusted operating profit grew 9% on an underlying basis, that requirement looks almost undemanding. The difficulty is not the rate. It is that the price needs the rate to keep arriving more or less indefinitely.

The methods make the shape of the bet unusually clear. Only the ones that project cash flows forward reach the price, and they land just above it. Everything static sits well below: the price sits about 2.2 times where the asset value methods land, about 2.1 times where the earnings power methods land, and about 1.6 times where peer multiples land. That spread is the premium, and it has a name in plain English. It is what the market pays for a business it believes will still be collecting these subscriptions long after any forecast horizon anyone is willing to write down.

Those static lenses are low here for a structural reason worth stating rather than glossing. The company's balance sheet holds very little relative to what it earns, because the assets are citation graphs, editorial relationships and fraud databases that were expensed as they were built. A method that values the book has almost no book to value. A method that capitalizes this year's profit at a required return and credits nothing for renewal is answering a question about a business that does not exist. Neither is broken; both are simply blind to the specific thing being bought.

What the price is actually funding is visible in the mix. Risk is 36% of revenue, Scientific, Technical & Medical 28%, Legal 19%, Exhibitions 12% and print-related activities 4%. Three of those are annual subscription businesses selling into professional workflows, and the trailing operating margin of 31.6% is what those workflows convert at. The cohort this sits in, Thomson Reuters, S&P Global, Moody's, MSCI, Verisk, FactSet, Gartner and Morningstar, is priced on the same logic: recurring revenue against embedded data assets, where the multiple is a statement about renewal rather than about growth.

One basis note. The accounts are reported in sterling under IFRS and the New York line is a depositary receipt over the London shares, so sterling figures here are the company's own and dollar figures are translated.

The balance sheet is a supporting actor rather than a constraint. Net debt runs at roughly 2.4 times operating income, comfortably serviced, and the share count has been falling about 1.2% a year since the end of 2021 while the company works through a £2,250m repurchase programme for 2026. The leverage is a choice about capital structure rather than a symptom of strain. What the price rests on is not the balance sheet at all. It is the assumption that next year's renewal looks like this year's, repeated for longer than any model actually forecasts.

Catalysts

The first-half results published on 23 July 2026 are the freshest information here, and they reaffirmed the full-year outlook: another year of strong underlying growth in revenue and adjusted operating profit, with strong growth in adjusted earnings per share at constant currency. The next scheduled event of the same weight is the full-year statement, which the company has been publishing in mid-February, the 2025 figures having landed on 12 February 2026.

Between now and then the buyback runs on a published schedule: £100m completed since the start of July and £400m of the £2,250m programme still to be deployed before the year ends. That is a known, dated flow of demand for the shares, which is rarer than it sounds.

On the business itself, three things carry the most information. Whether Legal holds double-digit underlying growth is the clearest read available on whether customers pay for the AI-assisted products after the novelty passes. Whether the scientific division's step up in growth persists is the read on open-access pressure. And Exhibitions is the cyclical tell: it is the division that will show a change in corporate spending before the subscription businesses do, because its customers make that decision every year rather than by inertia.

Peer Cohorts (Per Segment, With Filing Citations)

Core business (reported)

• TRI (THOMSON REUTERS CORPORATION)
• FY2025 40-F: Common Shares TRI The Nasdaq Stock Market LLC 3.350% Notes due 2026 (1) TRI26 The Nasdaq Stock Market LLC 5.850% Notes due 2040 (1) TRI40 The Nasdaq Stock Market LLC 4.500% Notes due 2043 (1) TRI143A The Nasdaq Stock Market LLC 5.650% Notes due 2043 (1) TRI143B The Nasdaq Stock Market LLC 5.500% Debentures due 2035…
• FY2025 40-F: …the Registrant has submitted electronically every Interactive Data File required to be submitted pursuant to Rule 405 of Regulation S-T (§232.405 of this chapter) during the preceding 12 months (or for such shorter period that the Registrant was required to submit such files). Yes ☒ No ☐ Indicate by check mark…
• SPGI (S&P Global Inc.)
• FY2025 10-K: …market reports and commentary and analytics) along with other information products and software term licenses; • Sales usage-based royalties - primarily from licensing our proprietary market price data and price assessments to commodity exchanges; and • Non-subscription revenue - conference sponsorship, consulting…
• FY2025 10-K: …costs of $2 million. 2025 and 2024 include amortization of intangibles from acquisitions of $130 million. 2023 includes amortization of intangibles from acquisitions $131 million. 2025 Revenue increased 7% primarily due to continued demand for market data and market insights products driven by expanded product…
• MCO (Moody’s Corporation)
• FY2025 10-K: …utilized in our product offerings, which are more fully discussed in Note 22 to the consolidated financial statements. Operating margin 43.4%, up 280 BPS Adjusted Operating Margin 51.1%, up 300 BPS Operating margin and Adjusted Operating Margin (1) expansion reflects the 9% increase in revenue, partially offset by…
• FY2025 10-K: . and worldwide and on the Company's own operations and personnel; - other matters that could affect the volume of debt and other securities issued in domestic and/or global capital markets, including regulation, increased utilization of technologies that have the potential to intensify competition and accelerate…
• IT (Gartner, Inc.)
• FY2025 10-K: …our products and services. Such difficulties could negatively impact our ability to maintain or improve the various business measurements we utilize (which are defined in this Annual Report), such as contract value and consulting backlog growth, client retention, wallet retention, consulting utilization rates, and…
• FY2025 10-K: …territories, enabling us to cover vast aspects of business and technology on a global basis. Notwithstanding these differentiating factors, we face competition from a significant number of independent providers of information products and services. We compete indirectly with consulting firms and other data and…
• MSCI (MSCI INC.)
• FY2025 10-K: …of our content and competitors. Additionally, our indexes may include or exclude companies that are clients, shareholders, distributors of our content or competitors. These determinations could cause an impacted company to cease doing business with us, or may create perceptions of bias, lack of independence or…
• FY2025 10-K: …analysis. Additionally, the operating segment offers business intelligence products for real estate owners, managers, developers and brokers worldwide. The Private Capital Solutions operating segment provides a suite of tools to support investors in overseeing investment portfolios across public and private assets.…
• VRSK (Verisk Analytics, Inc.)
• FY2025 10-K: …business in 2016 and our specialized markets business in 2022, a net gain on the early extinguishment of debt in the prior year, the amortization of deferred issuance costs and original issuance discounts and redemption premium accrual in 2025 associated with the termination of the 2030 Senior Notes, 2036 Senior…
• FY2025 10-K: ") included acquisition-related contingent payments, for which the sellers of these acquisitions could receive additional payments by achieving the specific predetermined revenue, EBITDA margin, and/or cash EBITDA earn-out targets for exceptional performance . The current liability for acquisition-related contingent…
• FDS (FACTSET RESEARCH SYSTEMS INC.)
• FY2025 10-K: …of the end of the annual period covered by this report. In accordance with the guidance issued by the Securities and Exchange Commission, companies are permitted to exclude acquisitions from their first assessment of internal control over financial reporting following the date of acquisition. Excluding goodwill and…
• FY2025 10-K: …existing intellectual property laws may afford only limited protection. Research and Product Development Costs A key aspect of our growth strategy is to offer new solutions and enhance our existing products by making them faster and more robust with deeper data and insights. We continue to invest in AI solutions that…
• MORN (MORNINGSTAR, INC.)
• FY2025 10-K: …in second-party opinions. Morningstar Indexes revenue increased $3.0 million or 3.5%. Organic revenue increased 3.4% primarily driven by higher licensed data revenue. Market performance and net inflows over the trailing 12-months increased asset value linked to Morningstar Indexes of 19.6% to $252.3 billion.…
• FY2025 10-K: 4, partially offset by an $89.5 million increase in operating expense. During 2024, the company recorded a $64.0 million gain related to the company's sale of US TAMP assets. Operating margin was 21.5% in 2025, an increase of 0.2 percentage points compared with 2024 . Excluding the gain on the sale of US TAMP assets…

Methodology Note

• Priced-in inversion: the valuation is inverted on the current price to recover the operating-income growth, duration, and steady-state margin the price embeds (ROE for financials, FFO growth for REITs).
• Valuation x-ray: the valuation models, grouped into four families (asset, earnings, relative, growth). Each model is expressed as a price/FV ratio (distance from price), not a point fair-value estimate. The spread across families is the disagreement.
• Solvency: net cash/debt, net-debt-to-NOPAT, interest coverage, and share-count CAGR from EDGAR financials (net debt / FFO and fixed-charge coverage for REITs; regulatory-capital framing for financials).
• Peer cohorts: per-segment comparables with deep-linkable SEC filing citations.

Fundamentals sourced from SEC EDGAR filings. Current price from Databento. The priced-in inversion and valuation x-ray are computed by the boothcheck engine; narrative composed by AI from the structured data.