Next week is the big retail earnings week. Home Depot prints Q1 fiscal 2026 before the open Tuesday, May 19. Walmart prints Q1 fiscal 2027 before the open Thursday, May 21. Together, the two reports cover roughly $620 billion of trailing-twelve-month U.S. retail revenue and will reset the market's read on consumer-discretionary demand into Memorial Day weekend.

Here is what to watch in each.

Home Depot: Tuesday, May 19

Analysts are looking for $3.41 in EPS, a 4.2% decline from the $3.56 in the year-ago quarter. The bigger question is comp-store sales and full-year guidance. When Home Depot issued its FY26 outlook in February, the company guided to total sales growth of 2.5%–4.5% and comparable sales of flat to +2.0%, with adjusted diluted EPS growth of flat to 4.0% off an FY25 base of $14.69. That's a wide range that suggests management's own confidence is muted.

Three signals to track Tuesday:

  • Lumber pricing color. Home Depot's COO told analysts last quarter that framing-lumber prices ranged from roughly $585 to over $1,200 per thousand board feet during Q4 — extraordinary volatility. Fox Business' coverage of the prior call flagged the company's stance that "volatile" was the new baseline. Any narrowing of that band would be a real signal about Pro-customer demand recovery.
  • Pro vs. DIY mix. Pro-customer revenue has been the relative bright spot through the housing-market slowdown of 2024–2025. If DIY softens further without Pro accelerating, the comp picture turns ugly fast.
  • Iran-war pass-through. Energy and transportation costs feed directly into Home Depot's COGS. Any commentary on the gasoline-and-diesel impact on supply chain — see our coverage of the Iran/oil retail squeeze — will be load-bearing for FY26 margins.

The stock has tumbled from a 52-week high above $426 to roughly $304, with the consensus analyst price target at $404.10 and 21 Strong Buy ratings. That's a setup where a clean print with reaffirmed guidance could move the name 5%+; a guide-down adds to the housing-market malaise narrative and risks dragging the whole home-improvement category down.

Walmart: Thursday, May 21

Analyst consensus is $0.65 in EPS on roughly $174 billion in revenue, per stocktitan's compilation. FY27 EPS guidance is $2.75–$2.85.

Morgan Stanley's preview note tells the most interesting pre-print story: the bank doesn't expect Walmart to lift full-year guidance after Q1, and the named culprit is gas prices. With diesel and freight costs spiking on the back of the Iran conflict, Morgan Stanley's read is that management will hold the line and let Q2 do the talking. But the analyst sees roughly two points of upside to consensus operating income and EPS growth of 8% in Q1 — which suggests the beat-and-not-raise outcome is the base case.

Four signals worth tracking Thursday:

  • Grocery comps. Walmart's grocery share gains have been the dominant retail story of 2024–2026 — we covered the "mass channel tipping point" earlier. Any softening in grocery traffic, particularly against the Amazon Now 30-minute push we covered this morning, would be a significant signal.
  • Sam's Club membership. Walmart's membership-and-other revenue line has become the cleanest profitability lever in the model. The narrative-disrupting outcome would be membership growth slowing.
  • Tariff pass-through commentary. Walmart has been explicit about passing tariff costs through where it can. The Q1 call will reveal how much of that has been absorbed by suppliers versus surfaced to shelves.
  • AI capex framing. Walmart's Sparky and the broader agentic-commerce push are real spend lines now. Investors want to see operating leverage on those investments, not just product-feature checkboxes.

The cross-read

Investing.com's preview framed the week as a referendum on whether Walmart's defensive positioning continues to compound in a tariff-pressured environment, and whether Home Depot's cyclical exposure is finally finding a floor. Those are the two correct questions.

For retail-industry watchers without a stock position, the more useful frame is the language. Listen for how each CEO talks about consumer health. McDonald's CEO Chris Kempczinski said this week that consumer spending could be "getting a little bit worse." If Doug McMillon and Ted Decker echo that language in any form, the market will reprice the entire discretionary-retail complex by Memorial Day. If they both push back on it — emphasizing trade-down winners, omnichannel mix shift, and category-share gains — the consumer-resilience narrative survives another month.

Either way, the next 96 hours will tell us more about American household spending than the last four weeks of macro data have.