Home Depot’s sales improved during its fiscal second quarter as customers focused on smaller projects during the summer months with the U.S. housing sector still mired in a slump.
Revenue increased to $47.86 billion from $45.28 billion, edging out the $47.24 billion that Wall Street had expected, according to a survey by FactSet.
Globally, sales at stores open at least a year, a key indicator of a retailer’s health, climbed 1.7%. In the U.S., comparable store sales rose 1.3%.
“Our second quarter results exceeded our expectations,” Chief Financial Officer Richard McPhail said Tuesday. “We saw broad based demand across the business as customers continued to engage in smaller projects.”
Customer transactions slipped 1% in the quarter, but the amount shoppers spent rose to $92.50 per average receipt from $90.01 a year earlier.
Home Depot also announced on Tuesday that it is launching express delivery nationwide. The service will get orders to customers within three hours or less. It will be available for a small flat fee in the U.S., with no subscription or membership required.
For the three months ended Aug. 2, Home Depot earned $4.77 billion, or $4.79 per share. A year earlier the home improvement retailer earned $4.55 billion, or $4.58 per share.
Excluding one-time items, earnings were $4.92 per share. That’s much better than the $4.73 per share that Wall Street predicted.
The Atlanta company has posted solid back-to-back quarterly performances this year though many Americans have struggled to buy a home. Despite the solid performance, Home Depot stuck with its earlier sales growth guidance for fiscal 2026 of between 2.5% and 4.5%. It also left unchanged its expectations that comparable sales will be flat to up 2%.
Home Depot said that its outlook includes tariff refunds, which are expected to partially offset higher fuel, energy, and other product input costs throughout the year. Last year, the company said that it didn't expect to raise prices because of tariffs, but executive Billy Bastek said at the time that some products that were on Home Depot shelves may disappear.
The U.S. housing market has been in a slump dating back to 2022, the year mortgage rates began climbing from historic lows that fueled a homebuying frenzy at the start of this decade.
While the average long-term U.S. mortgage rate fell slightly for the first time in six weeks last week, it is still up from last year and borrowing costs remain steeper than they were a year ago.
Sales of previously occupied U.S. homes slowed again in July as record prices and the highest mortgage rates in a year prove to be an insurmountable hurdle for many prospective buyers. Existing home sales fell 1.7% last month from June to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.06 million units, the National Association of Realtors said last week.
Home prices continued to rise, hitting unprecedented levels for the month of July, NAR said. The U.S. median sales price increased 2% from a year earlier, to $434,100.
The company's stock rose more than 2% before the market open.
Keep Reading
The Latest
Featured
