TJX Reports Wednesday, and Its Margin Guide Points Almost Exactly at the Margin Its Own 10-Q Implies for Last August

by Clara Borresen · August 16, 2026

Senior Earnings Analyst, Earnings Dispatch

The TJX Companies releases second quarter fiscal 2027 results on Wednesday, August 19, 2026, before the market opens, with a conference call at 11:00 a.m. ET. The company set that date itself: its August 5 scheduling release, distributed through Business Wire, says TJX "plans to release its second quarter Fiscal 2027 sales and earnings results on Wednesday, August 19, 2026, before 9:30 a.m. ET." The same release puts the call replay available through Tuesday, August 25. The number worth settling before the print is the one TJX guided to in May, because of where it sits relative to the quarter it will be compared against. In its first quarter release, dated May 20, 2026, the company wrote: "For the second quarter of Fiscal 2027, the Company is planning consolidated comparable sales to be up 2% to 3%, pretax profit margin to be in the range of 11.4% to 11.5%, and diluted earnings per share to be in the range of $1.15 to $1.17." That sentence carries no adjustment and no non-GAAP label.

Now open the year-ago quarter. TJX's Form 10-Q for the thirteen weeks ended August 2, 2025 reports net sales of $14.401 billion, cost of sales including buying and occupancy costs of $9.976 billion, selling, general and administrative expenses of $2.805 billion, income before income taxes of $1.647 billion, and a line labeled "Interest (income) expense, net" shown in parentheses at $27 million — that is net interest income, not expense, and the same line is net income rather than expense in every other period cited here. The 10-Q does not express any of this as a margin. Dividing the pretax line by net sales is our own calculation, and it gives 11.44% for the second quarter of fiscal 2026. The guidance range of 11.4% to 11.5% brackets that computed figure: the bottom of the range sits about four basis points below it, the top about six above.

That is a different posture from the quarter TJX just finished. In the thirteen weeks ended May 2, 2026, net sales were $14.323 billion against $13.111 billion, and income before income taxes was $1.721 billion against $1.346 billion. TJX published those as pretax margins of 12.0% and 10.3%, and its May 20 release describes the move as "1.7 percentage points above last year's first quarter pretax profit margin of 10.3%." Worked from the unrounded dollars rather than the rounded percentages, the expansion is 175 basis points, and that is the figure the rest of this piece decomposes. Diluted earnings per share went from $0.92 to $1.19, up 29%. The second quarter guide of $1.15 to $1.17 against last year's reported $1.10 implies growth of roughly 4.5% to 6.4%.

So the shape of the year TJX has guided to is front-loaded, and the filings let you see how much. First-quarter EPS of $1.19 plus the second-quarter range gives $2.34 to $2.36 for the first half, against $0.92 plus $1.10, or $2.02, a year earlier. That is first-half growth of about 16% to 17%. TJX's full-year fiscal 2027 EPS outlook, raised in May, is $5.08 to $5.15. Subtract the guided first half and the implied second half is roughly $2.72 to $2.81. Fiscal 2026's second half, taking the reported full year of $4.87 less the $2.02 first half, was about $2.85 on a GAAP basis. (Quarterly per-share figures do not always sum exactly to the annual figure, because the share count is weighted separately in each period, so treat the implied halves as close approximations rather than exact.)

Which raises the question of what base the full-year numbers are being measured against, and here the company's own reconciliation splits from the headline in an instructive way. TJX's fiscal 2026 ended Saturday, January 31, 2026 with net sales of $60.4 billion, up 7%, consolidated comparable sales up 5%, a GAAP pretax profit margin of 12.1% and GAAP diluted EPS of $4.87. The company also published an adjusted pretax profit margin of 11.7% and adjusted diluted EPS of $4.73 for the same year. Fiscal 2025's figures were 11.5% and $4.26, with no adjustment.

The gap is a lawsuit TJX won. Both the February 25, 2026 fourth-quarter release and the reconciliation of non-GAAP financial measures published with it say the company "entered into a settlement agreement to resolve litigation related to credit card interchange fees in which the Company was a plaintiff." The reconciliation is the document that carries the numbers: it puts the gross gain at $470 million, says it benefitted the company's SG&A costs, and reports $249 million of non-recurring settlement-related expenses against it — $116 million of incentive compensation, $82 million of discretionary bonus for eligible associates, and $51 million of legal expenses. Net benefit to fourth-quarter and full-year fiscal 2026 pretax profit: approximately $221 million.

The filed 10-Q describes the same event with a third number. In the notes to its quarterly report for the period ended May 2, 2026, TJX records a non-recurring gain of $419 million "net of legal expenses" in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026. These are not competing figures and neither document is wrong. The reconciliation lays out most of the bridge in a single paragraph of its own: $470 million of gain, $249 million of related expense, approximately $221 million of net benefit. The step it does not take, and the 10-Q does not explain, is the one that produces $419 million — the gross $470 million less the $51 million of legal expense, with the incentive compensation and the discretionary bonuses still to come out. Three documents, three defensible numbers, one settlement.

The per-share effect is the part that matters for reading Wednesday's guidance revision, if there is one. TJX's own reconciliation puts the settlement's impact at $(0.15) per share in the fourth quarter and $(0.14) per share for the full year, which is exactly the distance from $1.58 to $1.43 in the quarter and from $4.87 to $4.73 for the year. Measured against the GAAP $4.87, the raised fiscal 2027 EPS outlook of $5.08 to $5.15 is growth of 4.3% to 5.7%. Measured against the adjusted $4.73, it is 7.4% to 8.9%. The same guidance range, the same prior year, a spread of roughly three points of growth depending on which base is used.

The margin line has the same property. The full-year fiscal 2027 pretax margin outlook, raised in May to "in the range of 11.9% to 12.0%," sits below last year's reported GAAP 12.1% and above last year's adjusted 11.7%. TJX's original fiscal 2027 guidance, issued February 25 alongside the fourth-quarter results, was "consolidated comparable sales to be up 2% to 3%, pretax profit margin to be in the range of 11.7% to 11.8%, and diluted earnings per share to be in the range of $4.93 to $5.02." Both the margin and the EPS ranges have since moved up; the comparable sales outlook went to up 3% to 4%.

There is a second thing in the first-quarter documents that the headline does not carry. The consolidated income statement and the segment table partition the same $1.721 billion of pretax income two different ways, and they tell different stories about the quarter. On the income statement, gross margin went from 29.5% to 31.3% — the 1.8 percentage points TJX cited, which the release attributes to an increase in merchandise margin, a benefit from favorable inventory and fuel hedges, and expense leverage on sales. Against that, SG&A as a share of sales rose slightly, printed by TJX as 19.5% versus 19.4% and computed from the dollars as 19.51% versus 19.44%, a drag of about seven basis points. Net interest income added roughly two. Those three legs sum to the 175.

The segment table splits it elsewhere, and it ties. Divisional net sales and segment profit for the quarter were $8.650 billion and $1.269 billion at Marmaxx, $2.506 billion and $323 million at HomeGoods, $1.285 billion and $150 million at TJX Canada, and $1.882 billion and $87 million at TJX International, against $8.052 billion and $1.107 billion, $2.254 billion and $230 million, $1.144 billion and $122 million, and $1.661 billion and $72 million a year earlier. The four divisional sales figures sum exactly to consolidated net sales in both periods, and divisional segment profit less general corporate expense plus net interest income reproduces the $1.721 billion and $1.346 billion of pretax income on the face of the income statement in both periods. Total segment profit went from 11.68% of sales to 12.77% — an expansion of 109 basis points. Of the 66 basis points left over, general corporate expense supplies 64: $143 million against $215 million, a decline of $72 million on a sales base that grew 9%. Net interest income supplies the last two.

TJX does not itemize that line in the release, and it does not name it among the drivers of the quarter; "general corporate expense" appears in the tables and nowhere in the narrative. The release attributes the above-plan first-quarter margin to expense leverage on above-plan sales, favorable fuel hedges, and a stronger-than-expected merchandise margin — all operating explanations that live inside the divisions or inside cost of sales. The corporate line is presented as a single unbroken number. It fell by a third, and on the segment presentation it accounts for roughly 37% of the quarter's pretax margin expansion. Whether it repeats is the sort of thing the second-quarter segment table will answer and the second-quarter headline will not.

The other checkable details from the first quarter, for anyone holding the two prints side by side on Wednesday: comparable sales by division ran Marmaxx up 6%, HomeGoods up 9%, TJX Canada up 7% and TJX International up 4%, against consolidated 6%. Store count at the end of the quarter was 5,262 and gross square footage 137.4 million. Currency added a percentage point to net sales growth and one cent to first-quarter EPS, per the release. Weighted average diluted shares were 1.120 billion, against 1.132 billion in the year-ago first quarter; TJX said in February it expects to buy back $2.50 billion to $2.75 billion of stock in fiscal 2027 and to raise its dividend 13%.

Nothing here is a forecast of what TJX will report. It is a description of what the guidance is measured against, which is a separate question from whether the guidance is met. The one arithmetic fact that survives regardless of Wednesday's outcome is that the second-quarter margin range TJX gave in May sits on top of the margin its own filed 10-Q implies for the quarter a year before, and that the full-year comparison changes materially depending on whether the fiscal 2026 base includes a settlement the company itself removed.