Visa Q1 2026 Earnings: Revenue Climbs 15% on Strong Holiday and Cross-Border Spending
Visa's fiscal Q1 2026 revenue rose 15% year-over-year to $10.9 billion, powered by strong consumer spending and cross-border activity.
| Q1 2026 | Reported |
|---|---|
| EPS | — |
| Revenue | $10.90B |
Figures as reported by the company to the SEC for the quarter ended December 31, 2025. Analyst estimates are not part of a filing, so no comparison to expectations is shown.
Key takeaways
- Revenue for the quarter, which ended December 31, 2025, came in at $10.9 billion, up 15% from the same quarter a year earlier. Visa attributed the growth to resilient consumer spending, including a strong holiday shopping season.
- Total payments volume rose 8% year-over-year (in constant currency), and cross-border volume — spending by cardholders outside their home country, historically one of Visa’s most profitable business lines — jumped 12%, with both e-commerce and travel-related spending contributing.
- Processed transactions, a measure of how many payments moved through Visa’s network, grew 9% to 69.4 billion for the quarter, reflecting continued growth in global card and digital payment usage.
- Trailing-twelve-month profitability stayed high, with a net profit margin near 51% and an operating margin near 61%. EPS growth of about 14.7% over the same period roughly tracked revenue growth of about 14.4%, suggesting the business scaled without profitability eroding.
- Return on equity was about 61% over the trailing twelve months, underscoring how much profit Visa generates relative to shareholder capital — a reflection of its asset-light model, since it processes payments rather than lending money directly.
- CEO Ryan McInerney called it a “very strong” quarter, pointing to growth in value-added services (tools like fraud prevention and data analytics that Visa sells to banks) and in commercial and money-movement solutions (business payments and transfers) as complements to core consumer card spending.
- Management highlighted continued investment in newer areas including agentic commerce (AI systems making purchases on a person’s behalf) and stablecoin-related capabilities, describing Visa’s ambition to serve as broad infrastructure — a “hyperscaler” — for global payments.
- Looking ahead, Visa guided for full fiscal-year 2026 net revenue growth toward the high end of a low-double-digit percentage range, while also expecting operating expense growth to pick up toward the high end of a mid-teens percentage range.
Q1 2026 in context
| Metric | Dec 2025 | Dec 2024 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue | $10.9B | $9.5B | +14.6% |
| Net income | $5.9B | $5.1B | +14.3% |
| Free cash flow | $6.4B | $5.1B | +26.7% |
| Operating margin | 61.8% | 65.6% | -3.8 pts |
| Net margin | 53.7% | 53.8% | -0.1 pts |
Figures for the quarter ended Dec 2025 and the quarter ended Dec 2024, as reported to the SEC.
Each company's quarter ending in calendar Q4 '25, as reported to the SEC. A peer that reported no revenue figure for that quarter is left out.
How the stock took it
Visa Inc. closed at $331.80 on Jan 29, 2026, the last session before the report, and at $333.84 on Feb 2, 2026, the first session after it — +0.6% across the report.
| Earlier report | Close before | Close after | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jul 30, 2025 | $351.29 | $345.47 | -1.7% |
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.
Sources: company report · earnings call