Retail
Retail Home Improvement
Home Depot is still almost twice Lowe's
FY2025: Home Depot $164.7B, Lowe's $86.3B. Home Depot's +3.2% sales print includes $6.3B of incremental SRS and GMS. Lowe's FBM closed in October 2025 and is not a full-year add yet.
Stores versus specialty-trade branches
Home Depot 2,359 retail stores plus more than 1,250 SRS locations. Lowe's 1,759 stores plus 540 branches. The branch bars are distributors, not warehouse stores.
Retail storesSpecialty / branch locations
Comps are flat. Margin is still retail.
Home Depot comps +0.3% and GAAP operating margin about 12.7% ($20.9B / $164.7B). Lowe's comps +0.2% and reported operating margin 11.77%. This is not a housing recovery print.
Comparable salesGAAP operating margin
Lowe's ticket is larger. Home Depot rings more often.
FY2025 average ticket: Lowe's $106.13 at retail locations, Home Depot $90.56. Home Depot ticket excludes HD Supply and SRS. These are not the same basket.
Home Depot still does twice the transactions
FY2025: Home Depot 1,601.5 million customer transactions, Lowe's 780 million. Home Depot excludes HD Supply and SRS. Lowe's restated the metric in Q1 FY2025.
Operating income is still a 2-to-1 story
FY2025 GAAP operating income: Home Depot $20.890B, Lowe's $10.153B. Net earnings were $14.156B and $6.654B. Same fiscal-year end window, different scale.
Three years of comps: a turn, not a boom
Home Depot comps were -3.2%, -1.8%, then +0.3%. Lowe's were -4.7%, -2.7%, then +0.2%. FY2025 is the first up year in this window.
Home DepotLowe's
Lowe's guide is an acquisition wrap, not a comp recovery
FY2025 sales $86.286B. FY2026 sales guide $92B to $94B after ADG ($1.3B, June 2025) and FBM ($8.8B, October 2025). Those dollars are purchase prices, not FY2025 sales of the targets.