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 $4-4.75 billion.

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.

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 $4-4.75bn 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 is the housing question. The preview is here: consensus wants flat earnings while mortgage rates sit at a one-year high near 6.7%, and the full-year guide needs the comp to accelerate in the back half. Flat is fine; the quarter turns on whether management can show where that back-half acceleration actually comes from.

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 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. 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. Farm equipment has been in a slump all year and construction has been covering for it. Whether that swap is still working, inside a $4-4.75 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.