Visa earnings: fourth quarter 2026

The quarter in brief

Visa runs one of the world's biggest card networks. It earns money on the value spent with its cards and on each payment it carries between a shopper's bank and a shop's bank. In the fourth quarter of its 2026 financial year, its sales rose 13% on a year earlier to $12.1 billion.¹ Earnings per share, which is profit divided by the number of shares, rose 17% to $3.48 on the company's own adjusted measure, which leaves out legal charges and some other items. Under standard accounting rules the figure was $3.19, up 22%.¹

For the whole year, sales reached a record $45.9 billion, up 15%, so the quarter ran a little below the year's pace.¹ Two costs, payments to banks and legal settlements, kept the picture from being cleaner still.

The figures, as the company printed them

Against what analysts expected

Analysts, on the average of twelve forecasts, had expected earnings per share of $3.43.² Visa's adjusted figure of $3.48 came in about 1.5% above that, while its figure under standard accounting rules came in below it.¹ So whether the quarter landed above or below what analysts had forecast depends on how you treat the items Visa leaves out. That is not an idle question: legal charges and staff severance costs have appeared in both of the past two years, so they are not entirely out of the ordinary for this company.¹

What the company expects

Our figures show no forecast from Visa for its sales or profit, either for the next quarter or for its 2027 financial year. There is no growth range, no spending figure and no comparison with anything it had said before.¹

The one forward-looking item is a purchase. Visa is buying BioCatch, a company that detects fraud, for $2.4 billion in cash. It expects to complete the deal by the end of March 2027, the close of the second quarter of its new financial year.¹ Getting there depends on approval by regulators and on the usual conditions attached to such deals being met.¹ The expectation is therefore about timing and a one-off cash payment, not about how the business itself will perform.

The strong points

Exchange rates made no difference to the quarter's growth: sales rose at the same rate with and without currency swings.¹ That matters for a company that earns much of its money abroad, where a weaker dollar can make foreign earnings look bigger than they are. Here the growth came from the business itself. Sales also grew faster than the 9% rise in the money spent through Visa's network, a gap of 4 percentage points.¹ Something beyond more spending lifted revenue. Our figures do not show how much came from pricing and how much from other services.

The business also became more profitable as it grew. Operating profit, the profit from running the business before interest and tax, was about 60% of sales, up from about 57% a year earlier, because costs rose only 7%.¹ A legal charge that fell almost by half, to $474 million, helped hold costs down.¹ A smaller share count added to the gain per share. Total adjusted profit rose 13% to $6.6 billion, so part of the per-share rise came from dividing profit among fewer shares after Visa bought many of its own back.¹

Visa handled 74.2 billion transactions in the quarter, up 10%, slightly faster than the money spent on its cards.¹ Visa is paid for carrying payments as well as on their value, and data processing, its biggest source of sales at $6.2 billion in the quarter, grows with the count.¹ More, and often smaller, payments moving onto cards feed this directly. The pace was steady, not a spike: over the full year transactions rose 9% to 281.3 billion.¹

The weak points

Visa pays banks and other clients incentives to issue its cards and route payments over its network, and it deducts these payments from its sales. In the quarter they rose 21% to $5.1 billion, well ahead of the 13% rise in sales.¹ When incentives grow faster than sales, more of each extra dollar is handed back to clients. Over the full year the two grew almost in step, so the quarter's jump stands out as the clearest sign of how hard Visa has to compete to keep the big banks.¹

Cash from running the business grew only about 3% over the year, while reported profit rose 17%.¹ The main reason was legal settlements. Last year, money set aside for legal cases added $1.3 billion to cash because it was booked but not yet paid; this year, paying those cases out took $2.0 billion away.¹ Cash held in a special account for American legal claims fell from $2,990 million to $628 million.¹ Profit that does not turn into cash cannot be handed to shareholders, yet Visa paid out $25.6 billion in buybacks and dividends against $23.5 billion of profit, and its cash on hand fell by about a quarter, to $12.9 billion.¹

Even on Visa's own adjusted measure of costs, which leaves out legal, severance and some other charges, costs grew slightly faster than sales over the full year: 16% against 15%.¹ Marketing spending rose sharply, and staff costs rose too.¹ For a business whose appeal lies in how little it costs to carry one more payment, that is a point to note.

What to watch

The clearest signal is the price of Visa's deals with big banks and other card issuers. These contracts are renewed every few years, and banks sometimes switch networks when they do. If renewals and new contracts come with larger incentives, the jump in incentives is a lasting cost of keeping clients. If banks stay without richer payments, it was a passing bulge tied to a handful of deals. Announcements of major banks moving their cards to or from Visa tell the same story before any results do.

Alongside that, watch decisions by regulators, courts and governments on card fees and on the legal cases still open. They decide two things at once: how much Visa can charge on each payment, and how much cash keeps leaving for settlements rather than reaching shareholders. The regulators' ruling on the BioCatch purchase is a smaller test of the same kind.

Our verdict on the quarter

In all, a strong report. The growth came from Visa's network doing more work, and the company kept more of each dollar of sales as operating profit, which is what a good quarter for this business looks like. Of the two costs to watch, the payments to banks matter more. The legal bill has largely been paid down, though new charges keep arriving, so its drain on cash is shrinking.¹ Richer incentives, by contrast, would be a charge on every future year's sales. If they kept outrunning sales, this quarter would read as the start of a dearer era for Visa; if they fall back into step, it reads as a strong quarter with one lumpy cost.

Notes

1. Visa's results release, 27 October 2026: sec.gov. ↩
2. Nasdaq's earnings calendar, 27 October 2026. ↩