Costco Closed Fiscal 2026 With $9.2 Billion in Profit as Membership Fees and Online Sales Kept Climbing

Costco closed its 2026 fiscal year with net income of 9.226 billion dollars, up 13.9 percent from the year before, as the warehouse retailer's membership model and a fast-growing online business continued to outpace the broader retail sector. A recap of the results put full-year net sales at 297.2 billion dollars, up 10.1 percent from 269.9 billion dollars the prior year, with diluted earnings per share rising to 20.76 dollars from 18.21 dollars.

A strong finish to the year

The fourth quarter alone delivered net income of 2.998 billion dollars, or 6.75 dollars a diluted share, on net sales of 93.9 billion dollars, an 11.2 percent increase over the same sixteen-week period a year earlier. A separate summary of the quarter highlighted comparable sales growth of 9.4 percent company-wide, with digitally-enabled sales, Costco's online and app-based business, climbing 19.5 percent for the quarter and 20.9 percent for the full year, a pace that continues to run well ahead of the retailer's in-warehouse growth.

A one-time boost from tariff refunds

The quarter's results included a non-recurring benefit of 0.15 dollars per diluted share from refunds of tariffs the company had paid under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, an amount Costco said it partly reinvested in lower prices and other value for members rather than keeping in full. Stripped of that one-time item, net income still rose 12.3 percent and diluted earnings per share climbed 12.4 percent from the prior year, a sign that the underlying business, not the tariff refund, drove most of the improvement.

Membership income keeps compounding

Membership fee income, the recurring subscription revenue that underpins Costco's entire business model and one of the clearest signals of customer loyalty in retail, reached 1.85 billion dollars for the quarter and 5.907 billion dollars for the full year. That steady climb in membership revenue, alongside a warehouse count that grew to 939 locations worldwide, including 647 in the United States and Puerto Rico, points to a retailer still finding room to expand even after decades of growth, with online sales now doing an increasing share of the work that used to depend entirely on getting shoppers through a warehouse's doors.