Walmart's Q2 Lands Thursday. Check the Fiscal Year, and Check Whose Consensus You're Quoting

by Leah Avraham · August 15, 2026

Previews Correspondent, Earnings Dispatch

Walmart reports its next quarter before the opening bell on Thursday, August 20. It is the largest single earnings event of the week, and it arrives six days after the Census Bureau said American retail spending went backwards in July. The temptation over the next five days will be to treat Walmart's print as the tiebreaker on that report. It is not, and the reasons why are worth setting out before the number lands — starting with the fact that a good deal of the coverage will get the name of the quarter wrong.

Walmart's fiscal year ends January 31, not December 31. The company's most recent annual report covers "the fiscal year ended January 31, 2026" and is labelled fiscal 2026 throughout. That offset means the three months ending late this July belong to fiscal 2027, and Walmart labels the coming report exactly that: its investor-relations events listing for the release is titled "FY2027 Q2 Earnings Release." Neither that listing nor the August 13 announcement prints the quarter-end date, so we are deriving it: with the fiscal year closing January 31 and the year-ago comparison — Walmart's fiscal 2026 second quarter — ended July 31, 2025, the quarter now closing ended July 31, 2026. This is Q2 of fiscal 2027, not "Q2 2026," which is what a large share of previews will call it, and which refers to a quarter Walmart closed a year ago.

The mechanics: Walmart said in an August 13 announcement that it will host its second-quarter conference call at 7 a.m. CDT on Thursday, August 20 — 8 a.m. ET — with earnings materials posted at approximately 6 a.m. CDT. John Furner, president and chief executive officer, and John David Rainey, executive vice president and chief financial officer, are down to host the call and take questions.

Now the harder question: what is Walmart expected to earn? There is no single answer, and the divergence is not trivia. Zacks Investment Research carries an estimate of $0.73 per share on $186.3bn of revenue; Zacks does not label the basis, but the year-over-year change it prints alongside, +7.4%, is measured off last year's adjusted 68 cents rather than the GAAP result, which fixes it as an adjusted number. Kiplinger's week-ahead earnings calendar lists Walmart at 74 cents, and credits its estimate data to Refinitiv, an LSEG business, via Yahoo Finance and to S&P Global Market Intelligence via Briefing.com. Benzinga, writing on August 12, said Wall Street expects adjusted earnings of 74 cents, up from 68 cents a year earlier, without naming the provider behind it. A Barchart preview carried on Yahoo Finance dated July 24 also used $0.74, described as a profit "on a diluted basis, up 8.8% from $0.68" — again with no provider named. Earnings Dispatch is adopting none of these as "the" consensus. If you see a single confident number in a headline this week, the useful question is whose.

There is a specific reason to be careful with $0.74. Walmart guided second-quarter adjusted earnings per share to a range of $0.72 to $0.74 when it reported first-quarter results on May 21. A street estimate that lands precisely on the top of a company's own guided range is not independent confirmation of anything; at minimum it is impossible to tell apart from the range, rounded up. That is a caution about how much weight the figure can bear, not proof that anyone copied it. The same anchoring problem does not arise at the full-year level, and that is more interesting: the July 24 Barchart preview put fiscal 2027 consensus EPS at $2.89, above the top of Walmart's own full-year adjusted range of $2.75 to $2.85, and Bank of America's own model, per Benzinga, sits at $2.90. On those two data points the street is carrying a full year the company's own outlook does not reach.

The revenue consensus has a subtler problem, which is that it is not measuring the same thing the guidance measures. Walmart guides net sales in constant currency. The published consensus figures are for total revenue, in nominal dollars. Those differ twice over. They are different lines: in the first quarter, total revenue of $177.8bn sat above net sales of $175.7bn, the roughly $2.1bn difference being membership and other income. And they are measured in different currency terms: that $177.8bn was up 7.3% nominally but 5.9% in constant currency, a foreign-exchange tailwind of about 1.4 percentage points. Now run it forward, and be clear that the next two steps are ours and not the company's. Against a year-ago total revenue base of $177.4bn, the Zacks figure of $186.3bn implies growth of about 5.0% in nominal dollars — the same 5.03% Zacks itself prints. Subtract a currency tailwind of the size seen in Q1 and you land near 3.6%, below the 4.0% to 5.0% Walmart guided, on a line that is not the line the guidance describes. The comparison is illustrative only, not arithmetic the company would endorse, but it illustrates why a nominal revenue "beat" and a constant-currency guidance range can point in opposite directions on the same morning.

Walmart's own guidance, as most recently issued, is the cleanest benchmark available. On May 21, alongside first-quarter results, the company carried its full-year fiscal 2027 targets forward unchanged from the guidance originally given on February 19, 2026: net sales growth of 3.5% to 4.5% in constant currency, adjusted operating income growth of 6.0% to 8.0% in constant currency, and adjusted EPS of $2.75 to $2.85. For the second quarter specifically the release guides constant-currency net sales growth of 4.0% to 5.0%, constant-currency operating income growth of 7.0% to 10.0% — that line is labelled operating income, not adjusted operating income, unlike the full-year line — and adjusted EPS of $0.72 to $0.74. Whether that full-year range moves on Thursday is a bigger event than the quarter itself.

One more trap worth flagging in advance, because it caught coverage a year ago. In the fiscal 2026 second quarter, Walmart reported GAAP EPS of $0.88 and adjusted EPS of $0.68 — a 20-cent gap driven mainly by net investment gains of $0.26, alongside legal charges of $0.05 and restructuring of $0.01. Every consensus figure cited above is on an adjusted basis: Benzinga says so outright, and the Zacks, Kiplinger and Barchart figures each carry a year-over-year change computed off 68 cents rather than 88. Anyone who lines up a $0.73 or $0.74 adjusted estimate against last year's $0.88 GAAP result will report a large decline that did not happen. On a like-for-like adjusted basis, the comparison is against $0.68.

The operating baseline going in: in the first quarter of fiscal 2027, ended April 30, 2026, Walmart US comparable sales excluding fuel rose 4.1% and Sam's Club US comparable sales ex-fuel rose 3.9%, with global eCommerce up 26%. GAAP operating income of $7.5bn rose 5.0%, and adjusted operating income rose 5.1% in constant currency. Rainey told the May call the company absorbed roughly $175m — about 250 basis points of operating income growth — from higher-than-planned fuel costs in its global distribution and fulfillment operations, and flagged pricing as the thing to watch, saying that "if the current elevated cost environment persists, we'd expect somewhat higher retail price inflation in Q2 and the second half of the year." He hedged the read-across in the same session, telling analysts that "if fuel prices persist at this level, you may see some upward pressure on average unit retail prices" while cautioning that he did not "want to ascribe all of that to macro." That matters for how you read a comparable-sales number, because inflation in the basket shows up as comp growth without a single extra unit moving.

Against that, here is what Census actually reported on Friday morning. Advance estimates put July retail and food services sales at $763.6bn, down 0.6% (±0.4%) from June and up 5.0% (±0.5%) from July 2025. Economists polled by Reuters had looked for a 0.1% increase, with the range of estimates running from a 0.5% decline to a 0.7% gain; it was the first monthly drop since last October and the largest in fourteen months, and June's headline gain was left unrevised at 0.2% — a figure Census itself asterisks, noting that the 90 percent confidence interval on that May-to-June change includes zero. No such asterisk attaches to July's decline. Core sales, excluding autos, gasoline, building materials and food services, fell 0.4% against expectations of a 0.3% rise, after a June increase revised slightly down to 0.4% from 0.5%.

So why can't Walmart settle it? Three reasons, all structural. First, timing: Walmart's quarter ends July 31 and spans May, June and July — months Census has already published. The company will be describing a period the statistical agency has already measured, not adding a month to it. Second, definitions: the Census series is nominal and seasonally adjusted, while comparable sales is a company-defined measure that Walmart reports excluding fuel, on its own store-inclusion rules, unadjusted for seasonality. They are not the same quantity expressed two ways. Third, and most concretely, the July weakness did not land where Walmart lives. General merchandise stores rose 0.3% on the month and 3.7% on the year; department stores were essentially flat at 0.1%. The category that actually fell hardest was nonstore retailers, down 2.2% on the month — even as they remain up 7.7% on the year, and even as Walmart's own eCommerce grew 26% last quarter. A single company taking share can grow through a category that is shrinking.

The mix problem compounds it. Walmart US generated net sales of $483.0bn in fiscal 2026, which the 10-K puts at 68% of consolidated net sales of $706.4bn, and the filing organises that segment into three strategic merchandise units: grocery, general merchandise, and health and wellness. The filing does not break Walmart US sales down by merchandise unit, so we cannot tell you what share grocery is — and we are not going to guess. What the 10-K does describe is the contents: grocery covers dry goods, snacks, dairy, meat, produce, deli and bakery, frozen food and beverages, plus consumables such as health and beauty aids, pet supplies, household chemicals and paper goods. That is a staples list. To whatever extent a comparable-sales figure rests on it, in a quarter management has already warned may carry higher retail price inflation, it is a poor instrument for measuring discretionary demand. It can be strong for reasons — trade-down, share gain, price — that have nothing to do with consumers feeling better off.

Which is why the week is best read as a set, not a single print. Home Depot reports Tuesday, August 18 before the open; Lowe's, Target and TJX all report Wednesday, August 19 before the open; Walmart lands Thursday morning; Ross Stores follows Thursday after the close; and BJ's Wholesale closes the week Friday, August 21 before the open, per Kiplinger's calendar. Benzinga reported on August 12 that Bank of America Securities analyst Christopher Nardone has a Buy rating and a $144 price target on Walmart, modelling adjusted EPS of 74 cents and constant-currency net sales growth of 4.6% against the company's guided 4.0% to 5.0%, and that the firm cut its Walmart US comparable-sales forecast excluding fuel to 3.5% from 4%. Nardone's case, as Benzinga paraphrases it, is that e-commerce and other revenue streams — global advertising revenue grew 36% last quarter, Marketplace sales nearly 50% — could lift profitability even if core US comparable-sales growth stays in the 3% to 4% range. That rating and target are his and his firm's, not ours, and nothing here is a recommendation. Set the off-price names against the home-improvement names against the mass merchants and you get something closer to a demand signal than any one of them gives alone.

The survey backdrop is soft, and Friday's tape did not obviously reflect it. Preliminary August consumer sentiment from the University of Michigan came in at 51.0, down from a July final of 55.2 and from 58.2 a year earlier, with year-ahead inflation expectations at 4.3% and long-run at 3.3%. Surveys of Consumers director Joanne Hsu wrote that consumer sentiment "fell about 8% this August, ending two consecutive months of improvement." She added that views of personal finances slipped only slightly while expectations for business conditions fell sharply — about 11% for the short run and 17% for the long run — and noted that only 8% of consumers expect income growth to outpace inflation over the coming year, down from 18% in December 2024. Equities barely flinched: on Friday, August 14, the S&P 500 closed at 7,785.76, down 13.23 points or 0.2%; the Dow finished at 53,732.41, off 107.58 points; the Nasdaq composite ended at 26,729.16, down 73.86 points or 0.3%; and the Russell 2000 actually rose 15.57 points, or 0.5%, to 3,068.42. The single most informative thing Walmart can do Thursday is not beat by a penny against a consensus that has no single owner. It is to move, or refuse to move, the full-year range it has now left untouched since February.