Is the SP Funds S&P 500 Sharia Industry Exclusions ETF (SPUS) Halal? The One Fund in This Series That Publishes Your Purification Number, and an Inception Date Its Own Returns Contradict: A Sharia Analysis for Muslim Investors (2026)

Author: Zaid Alissa, CTO and Halal Finance Researcher | Published: September 2026 | Updated: September 2026

Of the ten funds in this series, only two tell you how much of your dividend to give away, and SPUS is the one that puts the number on a public page with a calculator rather than inside a downloadable document. SP Funds publishes a purification factor for each of its ETFs every quarter, and the most recent published figure for SPUS is 1.81 percent for the first quarter of 2026. On 500 dollars of dividends that is 500 times 0.0181, or 9 dollars and 5 cents. The other fund that publishes a figure is the Wahed FTSE USA Shariah ETF, covered in the next article; no MSCI tracking fund and no Dow Jones tracking fund in this batch publishes one at all.

It is also the only fund in this series whose screen uses AAOIFI's divisor. SP Funds describes its index as selecting companies with "debt to market capitalization ratios below 30%", which is AAOIFI's ratio and AAOIFI's number, not the 33.33 percent of total assets that MSCI uses or the 33.333 percent of total assets that FTSE's Yasaar rulebook uses.

Both of those are real advantages and this article says so. It also finds an inception date on the provider's own page that the provider's own performance figures contradict by a year, and it shows the arithmetic.

What SPUS Actually Is

Item	Value
Full name	SP Funds S&P 500 Sharia Industry Exclusions ETF
Ticker and exchange	SPUS, NYSE
CUSIP	886364801
Index	S&P 500 Shariah Industry Exclusions Index
Expense ratio	0.45 percent a year
Net assets	3,128.73 million dollars
NAV	58.62 dollars
Shares outstanding	53,375,000
Premium or discount	0.00 percent
Median 30 day bid ask spread	0.02 percent
30 day SEC yield	0.40 percent as of 31 August 2026
Holdings	221
Distribution frequency	monthly

Fund facts from sp-funds.com, priced as at 2 September 2026, with the holdings count and distribution frequency from stockanalysis.com as at 3 September 2026.

The reported numbers reconcile. Shares outstanding of 53,375,000 at a NAV of 58.62 dollars gives 53,375,000 times 58.62, which is 3,128,842,500 dollars, that is 3,128.84 million against the reported net assets of 3,128.73 million. The difference of 0.11 million is 0.004 percent, which is rounding.

The top ten are 56.47 percent of the fund: NVIDIA 14.15, Apple 11.84, Microsoft 9.62, Alphabet class A 5.12, Broadcom 4.49, Micron Technology 2.69, Tesla 2.55, Eli Lilly 2.37, AMD 1.98 and ExxonMobil 1.66. Those add to 14.15 plus 11.84 plus 9.62 plus 5.12 plus 4.49 plus 2.69 plus 2.55 plus 2.37 plus 1.98 plus 1.66, which is 56.47. The top three alone are 14.15 plus 11.84 plus 9.62, which is 35.61 percent.

That is the highest concentration of any fund in this series, and it is worth knowing before the compliance discussion begins.

The Purification Number

Allah says in Surah Al-Baqarah, verse 275:

وَأَحَلَّ اللَّهُ الْبَيْعَ وَحَرَّمَ الرِّبَا

"But Allah has permitted trade and has forbidden interest [riba]." (Saheeh International)

A screened index does not remove riba. It caps it. Every fund in this series holds companies that earn some interest income, up to a limit, and the classical answer to the remainder is purification: the impure proportion of what you receive is given away rather than kept. Mufti Taqi Usmani puts the duty on the investor in "Principles of Shari'ah Governing Islamic Investment Funds", where the proportion of such income in the dividend must be given in charity and not retained by the shareholder.

The practical difficulty has always been the number. An investor holding 221 American companies cannot compute their aggregate impure income from their filings. Most providers leave him to guess.

SP Funds does not. Its purification page publishes a quarterly factor for each fund and states that the factors "are calculated quarterly at the last day of quarter and shared within 30 days of end of quarter". The published series for SPUS runs: 1.81 percent for the first quarter of 2026, 1.97 for the fourth quarter of 2025, 2.04 for the third, 2.12 for the second and 2.20 for the first, then 2.42, 2.05, 1.85 and 1.30 for the four quarters of 2024.

Average the four quarters of 2025: 2.20 plus 2.12 plus 2.04 plus 1.97 is 8.33, divided by 4 is 2.08 percent.

So a holder who received 500 dollars of SPUS dividends in the first quarter of 2026 owes 500 times 0.0181, which is 9 dollars and 5 cents, to charity. That is the whole calculation. It takes ten seconds and it turns an obligation most investors quietly ignore into one they can discharge exactly.

This is among the most useful things any provider in this series does, and it deserves to be said plainly rather than buried in a comparison table.

Where the Screen Sits Against AAOIFI

AAOIFI's thresholds, as Mufti Faraz Adam sets them out in "Making Sense of the 30% Rule in Islamic Finance" (Amanah Advisors, 14 December 2020), are interest bearing debt at or below 30 percent of market capitalisation, interest bearing deposits and securities at or below 30 percent, and prohibited income at or below 5 percent of total income.

SP Funds states the index screens for debt to market capitalisation below 30 percent, and titles its own product page "AAOIFI-Screened". Take that as the provider's claim, attributed to the provider, because the S&P Dow Jones Indices methodology document for this index could not be retrieved: spglobal.com returns HTTP 403 to automated requests. That limitation is real and this article states it rather than pretending to have read a document it could not open.

What the divisor difference is worth is best shown on the fund's largest holding, with every figure from stockanalysis.com on 3 September 2026. NVIDIA's market capitalisation is 5.52 trillion dollars, its total assets are 320,272 million dollars and its total debt is 38,860 million dollars on the trailing twelve month balance sheet to 26 July 2026.

AAOIFI's ceiling: 5,520 times 0.30, which is 1,656 billion dollars.
MSCI's Islamic Index Series ceiling, using its 33.33 percent of total assets: 320.272 times 0.3333, which is 106.75 billion dollars.
The ratio: 1,656 divided by 106.75, which is 15.51.

The company passes both comfortably. Its debt to market capitalisation is 38,860 divided by 5,520,000, which is 0.00704, that is 0.70 percent against a 30 percent limit. Its debt to total assets is 38,860 divided by 320,272, which is 0.12134, that is 12.13 percent against a 33.33 percent limit.

The point is not the pass. It is that for this company AAOIFI's rule permits more than fifteen times the debt MSCI's does, even though the headline numbers, 30 and 33.33, look almost identical. Anyone comparing Islamic funds on the headline threshold alone is comparing the wrong number. You can run the AAOIFI test on any individual holding with our stock screener.

The Inception Date That Does Not Add Up

SP Funds' product page gives "Fund Inception 12/29/2020". stockanalysis.com gives 18 December 2019. That is a year apart.

The fund's own performance table settles it. As at 31 August 2026 SP Funds reports a since inception cumulative return of 213.97 percent and a since inception annualised return of 18.60 percent. If both are correct, the elapsed period is the number of years n for which 1.1860 raised to the power n equals 3.1397. Taking natural logarithms, n equals the natural log of 3.1397 divided by the natural log of 1.1860, which is 1.14413 divided by 0.17057, which is 6.71 years.

Counting 6.71 years back from 31 August 2026 lands in the second half of December 2019. The fund's own returns support the 2019 date, not the 2020 date printed a few rows above them on the same page.

I raise it because it is the kind of thing that matters more here than elsewhere. A Muslim buying a Sharia screened fund is buying a compliance claim, and compliance claims rest on the provider's care with detail. A wrong inception date is trivial in itself. It is not trivial as evidence of how carefully the page is maintained.

The Gharar Question

AAOIFI Shari'ah Standard No. 31 on Controls on Gharar in Financial Transactions makes a contract defective where its object is not adequately knowable, and this is where the fund's record is mixed.

On dealing information it is the best documented product in the series. SP Funds publishes a median 30 day bid ask spread of 0.02 percent and a premium or discount of 0.00 percent, and explains its own IOPV as a calculation "disseminated by the stock exchange that approximates the Fund's NAV every fifteen seconds throughout the trading day". Those are precisely the numbers Ferri instructs an investor to check before trading, at precisely the fifteen second interval he describes (The ETF Book, 2008, p. 57, pp. 67 to 70). Our own piece on halal ETF liquidity explains how to use them.

On the screening rules it is weaker, through no fault of the provider. The authoritative statement of what the index does belongs to S&P Dow Jones Indices, and that document is not publicly retrievable by ordinary means. An investor who wants to verify the screen has to take the fund's summary of it on trust. Ferri's rule that "Detailed rules for index creation and maintenance should be published in the public domain" (p. 125) is the right standard, and here the fund is at the mercy of its index provider's access policy.

The Maysir Question

None in the fund. Long only, physically held US large capitalisation equities, no derivatives, no leverage, no short positions. Ferri's warnings about leveraged and inverse products (p. 248) do not apply.

The behavioural risk is the ordinary one, and a monthly distributing fund on a national index is a holding rather than a trade.

Ferri's Framework Applied

Cost. 0.45 percent a year, against the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF at 0.03 percent and the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust at 0.09 percent. The gap against the cheapest unscreened alternative is 0.45 minus 0.03, which is 0.42 percentage points, and on a 10,000 dollar holding that is 10,000 times 0.0042, or 42 dollars a year. Against the SPDR the gap is 0.45 minus 0.09, which is 0.36 percentage points. Set against Ferri's own category averages of 0.21 percent for market index ETFs and 0.51 percent for custom index ETFs (p. 200), SPUS sits inside the custom band at 0.51 minus 0.45, that is 0.06 percentage points below the average for its category. That is where a screened fund belongs on his taxonomy, and it is not an outlier within it.

Dealing costs. A median spread of 0.02 percent means 10,000 times 0.0002, or 2 dollars, on a 10,000 dollar trade at the median. For a fund of this size that is unremarkable in the best sense.

Concentration. Ferri notes that index caps are typically between 5 and 10 percent (p. 118). NVIDIA at 14.15 percent is above that range, the top three are 35.61 percent and the top ten are 56.47 percent. This is a concentrated fund and its risk profile is closer to a technology holding than to the S&P 500.

Structure and distribution. A US registered fund distributing monthly. Ferri's point that new funds pay proportionally more non qualified dividends because of lot ages (p. 96) is a US tax matter for US holders, and UK investors should note that a US domiciled ETF is generally not available through a UK broker and carries different withholding and estate tax treatment. The post does not extend Ferri's US tax analysis beyond US holders.

Where Scholars Differ

Whether matching AAOIFI on one ratio makes a fund AAOIFI compliant. The provider's framing is "AAOIFI-Screened". A screen that uses AAOIFI's debt divisor and threshold is doing something meaningfully closer to AAOIFI than a total assets screen. It is not the same as an index certified against the whole of Shari'ah Standard No. 21, and the distinction matters to an investor choosing between funds on the strength of a label.

The purification base. SP Funds computes a factor and applies it to dividends received. A stricter view holds that purification is owed on the investor's proportionate share of the company's impure income whether or not it was paid out, which for a US large capitalisation index yielding well under 1 percent is a much larger figure than a dividend based factor. Both approaches have contemporary adherents. This article gives the fund credit for publishing a number without deciding that the number is the right base.

Industry exclusions against financial screening. The index name leads with industry exclusions. Those two filters do different work: one removes prohibited businesses, the other removes prohibited balance sheets. A fund can be strict on one and ordinary on the other, and the label tells you which one the index provider chose to name.

Practical Guidance

Use the purification page every quarter. Multiply the dividends you received by the published factor and give the result away. On 500 dollars in the first quarter of 2026 that is 9 dollars and 5 cents. This is the fund's best feature and most holders never open the page.

Do not read 30 against 33.33 as a small difference. On NVIDIA it is a factor of more than fifteen in the amount of debt permitted. The divisor is the rule; the percentage is decoration.

Treat the concentration seriously. Fifty six percent in ten names is a real risk, and no screen mitigates it. Our portfolio design article covers sizing, and if part of your allocation is in digital assets the crypto screener applies the same discipline there.

Ask SP Funds about the inception date. It costs nothing and a provider that corrects a small error quickly is telling you something useful about how it handles large ones.

Conclusion

SPUS does two things almost no other fund in this series does. It screens on AAOIFI's divisor rather than a total assets divisor, which no other fund here does, and it publishes the number an investor needs to discharge his purification obligation instead of leaving him to guess, which only one other fund here does. Those are substantive, not cosmetic, and they are worth the 0.42 percentage point premium over an unscreened S&P 500 tracker to an investor who was going to purify anyway.

Against that, the index rulebook is not publicly retrievable, the fund is the most concentrated in this series at 56.47 percent in ten names, and the provider's own page carries an inception date its own return figures contradict by a year. None of those is fatal. All of them are the kind of thing an investor should notice before, rather than after, committing capital.

This article is educational and is not a fatwa. Consult a qualified scholar for a ruling on your own circumstances.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I calculate purification for SPUS?

Multiply the dividends you received in a quarter by the purification factor SP Funds publishes for that quarter. The most recent published figure is 1.81 percent for the first quarter of 2026, so 500 dollars of dividends gives 500 times 0.0181, which is 9 dollars and 5 cents to be given away. The factors are published within thirty days of each quarter end.

Is SPUS actually AAOIFI compliant?

SP Funds states that its index screens for debt to market capitalisation below 30 percent, which is AAOIFI's divisor and AAOIFI's threshold, and describes the fund as AAOIFI screened. That is the provider's claim and this article attributes it to the provider, because the S&P Dow Jones Indices methodology document could not be retrieved for independent verification.

Why does 30 percent matter more than 33.33 percent?

Because the two numbers use different denominators. AAOIFI divides debt by market capitalisation; MSCI's Islamic Index Series divides it by total assets. On NVIDIA, AAOIFI's ceiling works out at 1,656 billion dollars and MSCI's at 106.75 billion, a factor of 15.51. The headline percentages are nearly the same and the rules are not.

When did the fund actually launch?

The provider's page says 29 December 2020 and stockanalysis.com says 18 December 2019. The fund's own since inception figures, 213.97 percent cumulative and 18.60 percent annualised as at 31 August 2026, imply an elapsed period of 6.71 years, which places the launch in the second half of December 2019. The fund's own returns therefore support the 2019 date.

Is 0.45 percent expensive?

It is 0.42 percentage points more than the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF at 0.03 percent, which is 42 dollars a year on 10,000 dollars. Within its own category it is slightly cheap: Ferri puts the average custom index ETF at 0.51 percent, so SPUS is 0.06 points below that. The screen costs money and the honest comparison names the amount.

How concentrated is the fund?

Very. The top ten holdings are 56.47 percent of the fund and the top three are 35.61 percent, with NVIDIA alone at 14.15 percent. Ferri notes that index caps are typically between 5 and 10 percent; this index has no cap doing that work. An investor should size the position accordingly.

Can a UK investor buy SPUS?

SPUS is a US domiciled fund listed on the NYSE, and US domiciled ETFs are generally not available through UK brokers to retail clients, quite apart from the different withholding and estate tax treatment they carry. A UK investor looking for a Sharia screened US equity exposure will normally be choosing among the UCITS funds covered elsewhere in this series.