Lowe’s cut the top end of its full-year sales outlook after a second quarter in which shoppers kept skipping do-it-yourself projects even as professional contractors kept spending, the company said in its Q2 fiscal 2026 earnings report. The revision lands exactly one week after Home Depot told investors the opposite: that smaller projects were driving broad demand across its business.
Lowe’s posted net sales of $25.95 billion for the quarter, with comparable sales up just 0.2%. Online sales climbed 15.7%. Gross margin rose to $8.57 billion from $8.10 billion a year earlier, and operating income came in at $3.54 billion versus $3.46 billion. Diluted earnings per share were flat year-over-year at $4.27; on an adjusted basis, EPS rose 1.6% to $4.40.
The guidance cut is narrow but pointed. Lowe’s now expects full-year total sales of about $92.0 billion, down from a prior range of $92 billion to $94 billion, and narrowed its comparable-sales forecast to flat, compared with a previous range of flat to 2%. Full-year diluted EPS guidance came down to roughly $11.75, the bottom of its old $11.75-to-$12.25 range.
Lowe’s attributed the softer outlook directly to continued weakness in discretionary DIY demand, even as it pointed to strength in its Pro, online, and home-services businesses as an offsetting force. CEO Marvin Ellison said in the earnings release that “sustained growth in Pro, Online and Home Services led to our fifth consecutive quarter of positive comp sales, despite pressure in discretionary DIY spending.”
That’s a notably different story than the one Home Depot told a week earlier. Home Depot’s own second-quarter release credited smaller, weekend-scale projects with propping up demand across its business, and the company reaffirmed rather than cut its full-year guidance. Lowe’s, covering much of the same customer base and the same softening housing market, landed on almost the inverse explanation for a comparable quarter: professional and online channels are holding up the numbers while ordinary DIY shoppers pull back.
Part of the gap likely comes down to who each retailer sells to. Lowe’s has leaned more heavily on the casual weekend shopper historically, while Home Depot has spent recent years building out its Pro-customer base more aggressively, according to Retail Insight Network’s analysis of the results. A DIY pullback would logically hit a company more DIY-weighted harder, and that pullback also lines up with a housing market that has left many homeowners deferring the kind of optional project a chain like Lowe’s depends on.
For anyone tracking home-improvement spending as a signal of household financial confidence, having the two biggest players in the category report opposite trends in the same week is the more useful data point than either number alone.