Is Netflix Stock Halal?

AAOIFI's business activity screen excludes companies whose primary operations involve producing or distributing entertainment media, alongside alcohol, tobacco, pork, gambling, conventional finance, and adult content. The reasoning is not that storytelling itself is forbidden. It is that mainstream film and television production and distribution, at the scale Netflix operates, routinely and unavoidably includes content that normalizes or depicts prohibited behavior: intoxication, gambling, immodesty, and themes that conflict with Islamic values, mixed throughout a catalog with no meaningful separation. A shareholder in Netflix owns a claim on the profits of that catalog as a whole. Unlike a retailer that sells a small percentage of alcohol alongside groceries, Netflix does not have a "clean" product line running alongside the content business. The content business is the only business. Netflix operates one segment, "Streaming revenues," reported as a single line in its income statement, with no manufacturing, no cloud services, no advertising-only division that could be separated out and evaluated on its own.

Netflix reported $45.18 billion in total revenue for fiscal year 2025, up 16% year over year, alongside net income of $11.0 billion and operating margin of 29.5%. All of it comes from streaming subscriptions (standard and ad-supported tiers) and the advertising sold against that same content. Netflix's 2025 ad revenue grew to more than $1.5 billion, but that advertising is inseparable from the entertainment programming it runs alongside: it is not a distinct advertising-agency business like Meta's or Alphabet's, it is commercials placed inside the same catalog of shows and films. The only revenue that falls outside the "entertainment content production" bucket is a small non-operating line, interest and other income, which came in at roughly $172 million (about 0.38% of revenue) in FY2025. There is no manufacturing arm, no enterprise software division, no logistics network. Compare this to Amazon, where Prime Video is one growing but still secondary segment inside a much larger e-commerce and cloud computing business. Netflix has no such buffer.

For a company like Meta or Alphabet, non-permissible income is incidental, interest earned on a cash balance the business happens to hold, and a hypothetical decision to hold less cash could shrink it further. Netflix has no equivalent lever. Reducing its impure revenue percentage would require Netflix to stop being a content producer and distributor, which is to say, stop being Netflix. There is no divestiture, no segment sale, no restructuring that separates a "clean" Netflix from an "impure" one, because the entertainment content is not a division bolted onto a permissible core business; it is the entire business. Public halal screeners reflect this split verdict in the data: Zoya lists Netflix as "questionable" while flagging that the concern is not financial ratios but the underlying product, and Musaffa and Islamic Finance Guru both classify Netflix as not Shariah-compliant. PureInvest's position, following AAOIFI's business activity screen literally, is that Netflix is non-compliant, not borderline questionable, because more than 99% of its revenue derives from a listed non-permissible activity.

We calculate a purification figure below purely for educational comparison, the same way we do for JPMorgan, not as a suggestion that donating a percentage of returns makes Netflix holdings permissible. It does not. When impure revenue sits at 99.62%, the purification framework breaks down: you would be donating almost the entire value of any dividend or gain back to charity, which is not purification, it is an admission that the investment itself should not have been made. The appropriate action for a Shariah-conscious investor holding NFLX shares is complete divestment, not a calculated annual donation. Investors looking for exposure to technology and consumer platforms with genuinely incidental non-permissible income, rather than content production as the core business, should look at names like Meta or Alphabet, both of which pass the same AAOIFI screen with wide margins. Consult a qualified Shariah advisor before making a final decision on any existing Netflix position.