Intuit (INTU) Earnings Aug 25: The Guide Implies 11% Growth

TL;DR

• Intuit reports fiscal Q4 2026 after the close on Tuesday, August 25, with the call at 4:30pm ET. The company set that date in its own advisory. Several third-party calendars still slot it into the August 17-21 week.
• Back the quarter out of the guide and it is a small one. Nine-month revenue was $17,094m and the full-year guide is $21,341m to $21,374m, which leaves $4,247m to $4,280m for Q4, about 11% growth.
• The same quarter grew 20.4% last year. The first half of this year grew 17.8%, Q3 grew 10.4%, and the guide asks Q4 for no recovery.
• $300m to $340m of restructuring charges land in this quarter, from the 17% workforce cut announced on May 20. That is close to 3,000 roles.
• INTU closed $345.66 on Friday, down 3.53% on the day and 52% below its 52-week high of $721.54, on 12.9x forward earnings. Goldman moved it to Sell on June 2 with a $276 target.

When Does Intuit Report Earnings?

Tuesday, August 25, after the close, with the conference call at 1:30pm Pacific, which is 4:30pm ET. Intuit's own advisory release says the results come "following the close of market", and that is the date to plan around. Some earnings calendars still list Intuit a week earlier, in the August 17-21 retail block, which is wrong.

It lands the night before Nvidia. Nvidia reports fiscal Q2 on August 26, as does Salesforce, so Intuit gets roughly eighteen hours of undivided attention and then loses the tape entirely. Palo Alto Networks closes the software run on September 1. The rest of the slate is in the earnings calendar.

The Board

The raised guide and the decelerating quarter are the same document.

Subtracting The Quarter Out Of The Guide

Intuit raised its full-year revenue guidance on May 20, to $21,341m to $21,374m from a prior $21,000m to $21,190m. The headline that travelled was the raise. The arithmetic underneath it is more specific than the headline.

Nine-month revenue through April 30 was $17,094m, against $15,000m a year earlier, per the fiscal Q3 10-Q. Subtract that from each end of the guide and fiscal Q4 is $4,247m to $4,280m.

Now the comparison. Full-year fiscal 2025 revenue was about $18,831m, so the year-ago fourth quarter was roughly $3,831m. That gives implied Q4 growth of 10.9% to 11.7%, call it 11%. The same subtraction on the prior year checks out: a $3,831m Q4 against a $3,182m Q4 in fiscal 2024 is +20.4%, and Intuit reported that quarter as growing 20%.

So the sequence for the year runs like this:

• First half fiscal 2026: +17.8% ($8,536m against $7,246m)
• Fiscal Q3 2026: +10.4% ($8,558m against $7,754m)
• Fiscal Q4 2026, implied: +11.3% at the guide midpoint

Growth roughly halved between the first half and the tax quarter, and management's own full-year number says it stays there. A guide that gets raised in absolute dollars can still describe a business growing at half its prior rate, because most of fiscal 2026 was already banked by May: Q3 alone is 40% of the year's revenue. I would not read the raise as a statement about momentum.

What The Layoff Costs This Particular Quarter

The 17% workforce reduction announced on May 20 is close to 3,000 roles, and Intuit said it expects $300m to $340m of restructuring charges to be recognised in the fourth quarter: this one.

That matters for how the print reads on the wire. GAAP EPS is guided to $15.79 to $15.84 for the year against non-GAAP $23.80 to $23.85, and the gap is wider than usual because the charge sits inside it. A GAAP number that looks alarming at 4:05pm ET is the guided outcome of a decision taken in May, not new information. The line to watch instead is whether the charge comes in at the top of that range, which would suggest the cut went deeper than announced.

Goldman's Twelve Cents

The bear case has a number attached to it now, which is what makes it harder to wave off than the usual disruption talk.

Goldman Sachs cut Intuit to Sell on June 2, taking its 12-month target to $276 from $519. The argument: AI models can process a tax return for about $0.12, against TurboTax's average revenue of roughly $162 per return. Goldman's base case models TurboTax revenue 18% below 2025 levels by 2030 if a fifth of US filers move to AI-native alternatives, naming Prime Meridian, Perplexity Tax and Chime Tax among the entrants. TurboTax is about a quarter of Intuit's revenue and operating income.

Two things sit against a straight read of that. Intuit trimmed its own fiscal 2026 TurboTax revenue forecast, to $5,277m to $5,282m from $5,305m to $5,330m, which is a cut of roughly half a percent rather than a collapse. And Sasan Goodarzi attributed part of the softness to the filing season itself: total IRS filings running about 2 million short of forecast, the steepest industry contraction since the post-COVID years. A shrinking pie is a different problem from losing share, and it recovers differently.

My read is that the $0.12 figure is real and the timeline is the argument. Goldman is modelling to 2030. The stock has already repriced as though a good chunk of it happened this year.

The Number That Actually Moves It

Fiscal Q4 revenue will not decide this print. The guide has bracketed it to a $33m range and the quarter is 20% of the year.

What moves the stock is the fiscal 2027 outlook issued on the same call. That is the first time management has to put a growth rate on a TurboTax business it has just trimmed, in a year where the sell side is modelling structural decline, after cutting 17% of its staff. At 12.9x forward earnings against a five-year history well north of 30x, the stock is priced for a bad answer. A fiscal 2027 revenue guide starting with a double digit would be more than the market is currently paying for. Anything single digit confirms the thesis that took the stock from $721.54 to $345.66.

The Global Business Solutions line is the other thing I would check first. It grew 15% to $3.3bn in Q3 while TurboTax grew 7%, and it is the half of Intuit that nobody is arguing about. If QuickBooks decelerates too, the AI story stops being a tax story.

The One-Line Read

Intuit's raised guide implies an 11% fourth quarter, down from 20% a year ago. At 12.9x forward, the market has priced that already. Everything on August 25 rides on the fiscal 2027 number.