Home Depot's sales are lifted by customers who focused on smaller projects over the summer

Home Depot’s sales improved during the second quarter as customers focused on smaller projects during the summer months.

Revenue for the Atlanta company 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 earned $4.77 billion, or $4.79 per share, for the three months ended Aug. 2. 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.

Home Depot’s solid quarterly performance comes at a time when the housing market continues to pressure retailers.

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.

Home Depot still expects fiscal 2026 total sales growth of approximately 2.5% to 4.5% and comparable sales to be about flat to up 2%.