PayPal Q3 2026 earnings: profit beats, revenue just misses, guidance raised

October 27, 2026

PayPal's Q3 2026 adjusted profit beat estimates even as revenue fell slightly short, and the company raised its full-year earnings and buyback outlook.

Key takeaways

• Adjusted profit came in well above Wall Street’s forecast, while revenue fell a bit short of expectations — a split outcome where the company made more money per dollar of sales than analysts expected, even though total sales grew less than hoped.
• Net revenue rose about 2% year over year to $8.6 billion (roughly 1% after stripping out currency swings), a modest pace that explains the revenue miss despite the profit beat.
• The dollar value of payments flowing through PayPal’s platforms (total payment volume) climbed 6% to about $487 billion, and the number of transactions processed rose 7% to 6.8 billion — signs that usage of PayPal, Venmo and its merchant-processing business (Braintree) kept growing even as overall revenue growth was slower.
• Active accounts grew only slightly (up about 0.6% to roughly 440 million), but each existing customer is transacting more often than a year ago — a sign PayPal is getting more value out of its existing user base rather than primarily adding new customers.
• Profitability metrics over the past year show PayPal keeping more of each revenue dollar as profit: operating margin and net profit margin both sit in the high-teens-to-mid-teens range, and EPS has grown more than twice as fast as revenue over the trailing year — a pattern typically driven by cost discipline, a shift toward higher-margin services, and share buybacks that shrink the share count.
• Return on equity near 24% over the trailing year indicates the company is generating strong profit relative to shareholders’ equity, a figure that can be boosted both by genuine profitability and by stock buybacks that reduce the equity base.
• Management raised full-year guidance, now expecting adjusted (non-GAAP) earnings per share of about $5.60, up from a prior forecast near $5.38, and increased its outlook for transaction margin dollars — a core profitability metric that strips out volume-sensitive costs — to about $15.7 billion from about $15.6 billion.
• PayPal kept its roughly $6 billion stock buyback target for the year and said it now expects adjusted free cash flow of at least $6.5 billion, signaling continued capital returned to shareholders.
• President and CEO Enrique Lores said he was pleased with the quarter’s performance and that the company’s strategy is beginning to show up in its financial results, as the board raised guidance for the second straight quarter.
• For the fourth quarter, PayPal guided to low-double-digit currency-neutral revenue growth and adjusted EPS of about $1.43, suggesting management expects the growth and profitability trends from this quarter to continue into year-end.

Q3 2026 in context

Figures for the quarter ended Sep 2026 and the quarter ended Sep 2025, as reported to the SEC.

How the stock took it

PayPal Holdings, Inc. closed at $54.99 on Oct 26, 2026, the last session before the report, and at $56.55 on Oct 28, 2026, the first session after it — +2.8% across the report.

Closes from the market's daily record. Each figure spans the report date — from the last session that closed before it to the first that closed after — because a company may report before the open or after the close.

Fundamentals

Financial history →

Sources: company report