Casey's will report after Tuesday's close against an outlook that stops at EBITDA

by Leah Avraham · September 8, 2026

Previews Correspondent, Earnings Dispatch

Casey's General Stores will publish fiscal first-quarter results after the close on Tuesday, with a conference call to follow. The company set the timing in a 19 August notice distributed through Business Wire, saying it would issue first quarter 2027 results "after the market closes on September 8th, 2026" and would "hold a conference call and webcast on Wednesday, September 9th at 7:30am central to review the results." Nothing about the quarter is known yet; what is known is the frame the company set for the year in June.

That frame is unusual enough to be worth reading closely. In the fourth-quarter and full-year release filed as an exhibit with the Securities and Exchange Commission on 9 June, Casey's wrote: "Casey's expects the following performance during fiscal 2027. The Company expects inside same-store sales to increase 2% to 5% with an inside margin above 42%. The Company expects same-store fuel gallons sold to be negative 1% to positive 1%. Total operating expenses are expected to increase approximately 5% to 7%. The Company expects EBITDA to increase 8% to 10%, which would imply 35% on a two-year stack basis at the midpoint of the range."

The outlook then adds store openings of at least 120 units, net interest expense of approximately $95 million, depreciation and amortisation of approximately $490 million, purchase of property and equipment of approximately $800 million and a tax rate of approximately 24% to 26%. Ten lines in total. None of them is a net income figure or an earnings-per-share figure, and none of them is a total revenue figure.

EBITDA is the only earnings-shaped item on the list. It is itself a non-GAAP measure, but in Casey's case it is defined straight off the GAAP income statement rather than being an adjusted figure carrying discretionary add-backs: the release defines EBITDA as net income before net interest expense, income taxes, and depreciation and amortisation. That definition matters, because with net interest, depreciation and amortisation and the tax rate all separately specified in the same outlook, the guide brackets a bottom line without printing one.

The arithmetic is straightforward. Fiscal 2026 EBITDA was $1.484 billion. Growth of 8% to 10% puts fiscal 2027 EBITDA at roughly $1.602 billion to $1.632 billion. Subtract the approximately $490 million of depreciation and amortisation and approximately $95 million of net interest expense that Casey's specified, and pretax income lands at roughly $1.017 billion to $1.047 billion. Apply the 24% to 26% tax range and net income falls somewhere in the region of $753 million to $796 million.

Against fiscal 2026 GAAP net income of $714.4 million, that is growth of roughly 5% to 11% - a wider and slightly lower-anchored band than the 8% to 10% EBITDA growth it is derived from, because depreciation and amortisation and interest are guided as fixed dollar amounts rather than as percentages. On the fiscal 2026 diluted weighted average share count of 37,281,653, the same arithmetic maps to roughly $20.19 to $21.34 a share against fiscal 2026 GAAP diluted EPS of $19.16. This is arithmetic on Casey's own published outlook lines, not a company forecast, and it takes no account of buybacks.

Buybacks are a live variable. The June release disclosed that on 4 June 2026 the board authorised an expansion leaving $1 billion remaining under its updated share repurchase authorisation, after the company spent $200.5 million on repurchases during fiscal 2026. The board also raised the quarterly dividend 14% to $0.65 a share, which the release described as the 27th consecutive annual increase.

For a baseline on Tuesday's numbers, the comparable quarter is the fiscal 2026 first quarter, reported last September and filed with the SEC. That quarter produced total revenue of $4.567 billion, GAAP net income of $215.4 million, GAAP diluted EPS of $5.77 and EBITDA of $414.3 million, up 19.8% year over year. Inside same-store sales rose 4.3% at an inside margin of 41.9%; same-store fuel gallons rose 1.7% at a fuel margin of 41.0 cents per gallon. The store count stood at 2,895 at 31 July 2025.

The first quarter is Casey's seasonal high point, and by some distance. That $414.3 million of EBITDA represented about 27.9% of the $1.484 billion the company went on to earn across all of fiscal 2026 - so a quarter that runs hot or cold against the annual guide carries more weight than a simple quarter-of-the-year reading would suggest.

The exit rates from the fourth quarter are also running above the fiscal 2027 guide. In the January-to-April quarter Casey's posted inside same-store sales of 5.5%, an inside margin of 42.4%, same-store fuel gallons up 1.5% and a fuel margin of 46.9 cents per gallon, with EBITDA of $350.3 million, up 33.2%. Full-year fiscal 2026 landed at inside same-store sales of 4.2%, an inside margin of 42.2% and a fuel margin of 42.6 cents per gallon on 2,944 stores. Set against a fiscal 2027 guide of 2% to 5% inside same-store sales and 8% to 10% EBITDA growth, the outlook assumes deceleration from that exit rate.

There is one omission in the guide that will do a lot of the explaining on Tuesday night. Casey's guides same-store fuel gallons - a volume line - but publishes no cents-per-gallon fuel margin line at all. Fuel margin moved from 41.0 cents in the first quarter of fiscal 2026 to 46.9 cents in the fourth and 42.6 cents for the year; a swing of that size on Casey's gallon volumes is a meaningful share of quarterly EBITDA, and it sits entirely outside the guided ranges.

Consensus, for whatever it frames rather than predicts, sits at $6.59 in earnings per share for the quarter, up 14.2% year over year, on revenue of $5.65 billion, up 23.8%, according to a Zacks Investment Research preview published on 2 September and carried by Yahoo Finance. The revenue growth figure needs its own asterisk: the same preview models fuel dollar sales up 44.2% while fuel gallons sold rise to 936.86 million from 911.78 million, an increase of about 2.8%. Almost all of the modelled top-line surge is fuel pricing passing through, which is why Casey's guides gallons and EBITDA rather than revenue.

That preview also models a period-end store count of 2,968 against 2,895 a year ago and against the 2,944 at which fiscal 2026 closed, with grocery and general merchandise same-store sales of 3.6% and prepared food and dispensed beverage same-store sales of 4.3%.

One piece of context on how conservatively this guide has read in the past: the fiscal 2026 outlook carried in Casey's first-quarter fiscal 2026 release called for EBITDA growth of 10% to 12%, an inside margin of approximately 41%, inside same-store sales of 2% to 5% and operating expense growth of approximately 8% to 10%. The year finished with EBITDA of $1.484 billion against $1.200 billion, up 23.6%, an inside margin of 42.2% and inside same-store sales of 4.2%. The fiscal 2027 operating expense guide of 5% to 7% is a step down from that 8% to 10%.

Chief executive Darren Rebelez framed the year just ended in the June release by saying: "Casey's delivered another record fiscal year as our team closed out the three-year strategic plan on an extremely high note, reaching $714 million of net income and nearly $1.5 billion in EBITDA." That release did not set out a successor plan, which leaves Wednesday morning's call as the next scheduled opportunity for management to describe what comes after it.

A note on timing. US markets were closed on Monday for Labor Day, making this a four-session week, and the session was still open as this preview went out at about 11:20 a.m. ET on Tuesday; no share-price figures appear above. Casey's results themselves are not out and every figure here is either a fiscal 2026 actual, a published outlook line or arithmetic derived from them.