Retail Earnings Week (August 18-20): Home Depot, Target, Lowe's, Walmart and Deere Dates, Times and What to Watch

TL;DR

• The big-box week runs August 18-20: Home Depot Tuesday the 18th, Target and Lowe's Wednesday the 19th, Walmart and Deere Thursday the 20th, all before the open.
• It is the first corporate verdict on the consumer since July payrolls fell 23,000, and it lands four days after Friday's July retail sales print.
• The consensus bars: Home Depot $4.71 EPS, roughly flat; Target about $2.21-2.23, up around 8%; Lowe's about $4.25, down roughly 2% from $4.33; Walmart $0.74, sitting at the very top of its own $0.72-0.74 guide.
• Target is the one with a story to defend: Q1 comps ran +5.6%, the best evidence yet that the turnaround is real, into a market that has started believing it.
• Deere is the odd one out and the useful one: a fiscal Q3 where construction demand has been carrying a farm slump, against a full-year net income guide of $4.5-5.0 billion, raised from $4-4.75bn at Q1 and held at Q2.

Updated August 12. Lowe's confirmed its Q2 2026 earnings call for 9:00am ET on Wednesday, August 19, the same morning as Target, so the board now carries five names instead of four.

UPDATE (August 18): Home Depot is in, and it beat. Adjusted EPS of $4.92 cleared the $4.73 consensus, revenue of $47.86 billion (up 5.7%) beat the roughly $47.23 billion Street figure, and comps rose 1.7%, well ahead of the 0.9% expected and the best print since fiscal Q3 2022. Full-year guidance was reaffirmed rather than raised. Shares rose modestly, up about 0.7% to the $340s in Tuesday's morning session. Full detail and the trade log in the Home Depot preview. Target and Lowe's report Wednesday morning, Walmart and Deere Thursday.

UPDATE (August 19): Wednesday's morning is in, and the consumer split along ticket size. Target comped +3.8% on traffic up 3.6%, its second straight positive quarter, and printed $4.11 of EPS with $994 million of tariff refunds, worth $1.65 a share, inside it. The operating number is about $2.46, up 20%, still a clear beat, and the full-year guide moved to $9.90-10.90 including the refunds, roughly $8.25-9.25 on operations, through the old $8.50 ceiling. The stock fell about 1.6% premarket anyway. TJX comped +4%, earned $1.36 against the $1.18 consensus, and raised its year to $5.31-5.36, past the Street's $5.22; a Q3 guide of $1.30-1.32 against $1.35 sent it down about 3% premarket. Lowe's is the weak print: comps of 0.2%, an adjusted beat at $4.40, and a full year cut to the bottom of every range ($92 billion of sales, flat comps, $12.25 of EPS) on soft DIY and big-ticket renovation demand. Shares fell more than 3% premarket. Estée Lauder beat its own guide ceiling with $0.39 of adjusted EPS and guided fiscal 2027 up 24-34%; it rose more than 7% premarket.

So the answer to the consumer question this hub was built around: people are showing up where the ticket is small. Traffic at Target, comps at TJX, fragrance at Estée Lauder. The spending that needs a mortgage or a contractor is where the cut landed, at Lowe's, with Home Depot's held guide the better half of that pair. The Target, Lowe's, TJX and Estée Lauder previews carry full results. Walmart and Deere report Thursday before the open.

UPDATE (August 19, 4:15pm ET): three of the four premarket moves reversed by the bell. Only TJX finished where the premarket pointed.

Name	Premarket read	Regular-session close	Change
Target	-1.6%	$159.00	+4.28%, a 52-week high, after a $146.21 low
Lowe's	-3%	$220.74	+2.37%, after a $212.38 low
TJX	-3%	$144.50	-4.21%, the day's low $141.94
Estée Lauder	+7%	$98.01	+16.30%
Home Depot (Tuesday)	+0.7%	closed Tuesday	see the preview

The premarket tape read Target's tariff refunds as a low-quality beat and Lowe's guidance cut as a downgrade, and by the close it had reconsidered both. My read is that the operating numbers survived a second look: Target's ex-refund $2.46 beat a $2.33 bar and its raise cleared consensus rather than matching it, and Lowe's cut was to figures a market that watched July retail sales fall 0.6% had already discounted. TJX is the one where the close confirmed the open, and the reason is the only forward number of the four that came in light: a Q3 guide of $1.30-1.32 against $1.35. Raising the full year did not buy it back. Walmart and Deere report Thursday before the open.

The Dates and Times

All five report before the market opens. Dates for the rest of the slate live in the earnings calendar.

Date	Company	The bar
Tue, Aug 18	Home Depot	$4.71 EPS consensus, ~$47.5bn revenue, roughly flat
Wed, Aug 19	Target	~$2.21-2.23 EPS, up ~8% from $2.05 a year ago
Wed, Aug 19	Lowe's	~$4.25 EPS, down ~2% from $4.33 a year ago, on ~$26.2bn revenue
Thu, Aug 20	Walmart	$0.74 EPS, the top of the $0.72-0.74 guide
Thu, Aug 20	Deere	Fiscal Q3, against a $4.5-5.0bn FY26 net income guide

The Board

Three mornings, five reads on the same consumer.

Why This Week Is the Consumer Verdict

The macro data has turned ambiguous at exactly the wrong moment. Payrolls went negative in July, participation fell to a multi-year low, and Friday, August 14 brings July retail sales, the first spending print of the new regime. Whatever that number says, the following week says it with names attached: we flagged in the week-ahead hub that these reports are the confirmation or the refutation.

Each one answers a different question:

Home Depot answered the housing question, and answered it well. The full preview is here: comps accelerated to 1.7% from Q1's 0.6%, EPS beat by $0.19, and the full-year guide held rather than got cut, even with mortgage rates still near a one-year high. That is one data point in the consumer's favor heading into Wednesday and Thursday.

Target is the turnaround question. After years as the sector's problem child, Q1 comps of +5.6%, with stores up 4.7% and digital up 8.9%, read like an actual inflection, and the Street wants $2.21-2.23 against $2.05 last year. The full Target preview works through the guide math and the options setup. The stock has outrun the broader market as that belief spread, which raises the bar: a turnaround trade needs a second consecutive datapoint, and this is it. One good quarter is a bounce. Two is a trend.

Lowe's is the same question asked a different way. The full preview is here. Q1 comparable sales rose just 0.6%, well behind Target's spring, while total sales grew from $20.9 billion to $23.1 billion, a gap between the 0.6% comp and the roughly 10% headline growth that is mostly acquisitions rather than organic demand. Consensus wants $4.25 of adjusted EPS, down about 2% from $4.33 a year ago, inside a full-year guide of $12.25-12.75 that management affirmed at Q1. A quarter that merely holds the guide is a quieter outcome than Target's turnaround story, and that suits Lowe's: it has not been asked to prove a comeback the way Target has, so the bar to clear is lower and a miss would say more about the category than about the company.

Walmart is the trade-down question. The preview is here: consensus of $0.74 sits at the very top of management's own range, which leaves no room for a tariff wobble on pricing. Walmart historically gains share when consumers get squeezed, so a strong print here is not automatically good macro news; it can simply mean the squeeze is on.

Deere is the industrial cross-check. The full preview is here. Farm equipment has been in a slump all year and construction has been covering for it. Whether that swap is still working, inside a $4.5-5.0 billion full-year net income guide, says something about the part of the economy that does not show up in mall traffic. Use the sector heatmap that week to watch whether the market files the results under "consumer fine" or "consumer cracking".

How I Would Read the Week

Wednesday's CPI and Friday's retail sales set the frame, and this week fills in the texture. If retail sales hold up, a soft patch in any single retailer reads as company-specific. If retail sales crack, Walmart's Thursday print becomes the most important macro release of the month, because it is the closest thing the market has to a real-time census of the US consumer.

The setup I find most interesting is Target. It carries the widest gap between narrative fragility and expectation: the turnaround is newly believed, the comp bar is the highest in the group, and unlike Home Depot and Walmart it has no fortress reputation to fall back on if the quarter wobbles. Whichever way it prints, it moves.

The One-Line Read

Home Depot on the 18th, Target and Lowe's on the 19th, Walmart and Deere on the 20th, all before the open: one week, three mornings, five names, and the first named-company verdict on a consumer that just watched payrolls go negative, with Walmart's top-of-guide consensus leaving the least room for error and Target's freshly believed turnaround carrying the most story risk per dollar.