Intuit reports fiscal fourth-quarter and full-year results Tuesday, August 25, after the close.
Wall Street expects earnings of about $3.58 per share, up roughly 30% year over year, on revenue of $4.27 billion, up 11.5%.
Read those two numbers next to each other. Profit is forecast to grow nearly three times as fast as revenue. That gap is not a product cycle. It is a payroll decision made in May.
Monday gave the setup. The S&P 500 fell 21.51 points to 7,652.86, down 0.28% and further from the record it set earlier this month. The Nasdaq composite dropped 200.26 to 25,980.19, off 0.76%, as semiconductors sold off ahead of Nvidia's Wednesday report — Micron fell more than 5%, AMD 3%, Broadcom 2%, Nvidia 2.9%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average went the other way, adding 140.15 points to 53,417.16, up 0.26%, carried by financials. The VIX closed at 15.85. The 10-year Treasury yield eased to 4.69% and the 30-year to 5.216% after CNBC reported the Treasury could tap its roughly $1 trillion General Account to fund expanded bond buybacks — a week after the long bond touched levels last seen in 2007. Brent slipped 2.5% to about $92.03 and WTI to roughly $85. Intuit closed at $369.92, up 0.80%, on 3.1 million shares.
The Decision
On May 20, alongside its third-quarter results, Intuit told employees it was reducing its full-time workforce by approximately 17%. Against a last-reported headcount of 18,200, that is more than 3,000 people. The company disclosed $300 million to $340 million in charges, primarily in the fiscal fourth quarter that just ended — the quarter being reported Tuesday — with the actions substantially complete by the quarter ending October 31.
CEO Sasan Goodarzi framed it as speed: "architecting an organization that operates with greater velocity to deliver durable long-term growth." The 8-K language was plainer — simplify the structure, close certain sites, grow technology teams in strategic locations.
The market did not read it as velocity. Shares fell 13% in extended trading that evening.
What Was Actually Working
This is the part that gets lost. The business Intuit cut into was not shrinking.
Fiscal Q3 revenue: $8.6 billion, up 10%.
Global Business Solutions: $3.3 billion, up 15% — and up 17% excluding Mailchimp.
Online Ecosystem: $2.5 billion, up 19% — 22% excluding Mailchimp.
QuickBooks Online Accounting revenue: up 22%, on higher effective prices, customer growth and mix shift.
Credit Karma: $631 million, up 15%.
Mid-market business, per Goodarzi, growing "north of 30 percent."
Full-year FY2026 guidance was raised to $21.341–$21.374 billion, growth of 13–14%, with non-GAAP EPS of $23.80–$23.85, up about 18%.
A company does not usually raise annual guidance and cut 17% of its staff in the same press release. Intuit did.
The Line That Explains It
Consumer revenue grew 8% to $5.3 billion — the slowest line in the business. TurboTax revenue rose 7%, and management trimmed its full-year TurboTax growth expectation from 8% to 7%.
The reason is specific and it is not about software. Roughly two million expected do-it-yourself filers did not file at all. Low-end filers — households earning under $50,000 — have been drifting toward cheaper options. Mailchimp revenue actually declined year over year, hurt by small-business churn and weak customer acquisition.
That is a demand signal, not a technology one. The same softness has been showing up at the register all month: retail earnings season delivered a headline surprise, and the fine print told a different story. Intuit's customer base is small businesses and moderate-income households — precisely the two groups that feel a high-rate, high-price economy first.
The Stock Has Already Had Its Argument
Intuit closed at $705.08 on September 22, 2025. It touched $252.84 on June 22, 2026 — a 64% drawdown, one of the largest ever recorded in a mega-cap software name that never missed a year of revenue growth.
The bear case arrived in pieces: softer TurboTax, the headcount cut, and a wave of downgrades from Truist, Morgan Stanley, TD Cowen and Stifel. Morgan Stanley's Adam Wood moved to Hold and cut his target from $580 to $335, citing an AI-disruption debate he expects to run until Intuit reports its fiscal third quarter in May 2027 — nine months of unresolved argument.
Then the stock rebounded roughly 30% in a month. It has been trading in the mid-$300s to around $370 into the print, with a consensus rating of Buy, an average target near $444, and a forward multiple in the low-to-mid teens against a company still guiding to double-digit growth. Mizuho calls that a trough valuation.
Both sides of that trade are looking at the same company. One is pricing the growth. The other is pricing the possibility that AI assistants make consumer tax preparation a commodity.
Why Tuesday Is Not About Tuesday
The fourth quarter is nearly pre-announced. The company guided revenue growth of 11–12% and non-GAAP EPS of $3.56 to $3.62. Consensus sits at $3.58 — dead center. There is almost no room for the quarter itself to surprise.
The variable is fiscal 2027 guidance, and there is a case that a low number would help.
Mizuho describes it as a "credibility-rebuilding clearing event": conservative targets that get exceeded do more for a re-rating than aggressive targets that get merely met. William Blair's Arjun Bhatia expects high-single-digit revenue growth with mid-teens EPS growth as cost cuts, slower hiring and restructuring savings land — explicitly acknowledging softening demand from lower-end customers.
Which brings the whole thing back to the arithmetic at the top. Roughly 30% earnings growth against 11.5% revenue growth is what a restructuring looks like in its first reported quarter. Restructurings produce that gap exactly once. The question the fiscal 2027 outlook has to answer is what the second year looks like, when the severance charges are gone and the revenue line has to carry the weight by itself.
An investor day on September 17 follows three weeks later, which gives management an unusual option: guide cautiously Tuesday, then lay out the longer story with the stock already reset.
The Backdrop Is Not Helping
None of this is happening in a quiet week.
July PCE — the Fed's preferred inflation gauge, running 3.7% year over year in June against a 2% target — lands Wednesday, August 26 at 8:30 a.m. ET, alongside durable goods and the second estimate of second-quarter GDP. Nvidia reports the same day after the close. The Jackson Hole symposium opens Thursday, August 27, with Chair Kevin Warsh delivering his first keynote as chair on Friday.
The long end of the curve is the live wire. Thirty-year yields hit a 19-year high last week before the Treasury Department stepped in and put a floor under the bond market by doubling its long-end buyback operations — relief that has proven to last about a session at a time. Those yields are a warning shot aimed at every richly-valued growth multiple, and Intuit's has already been cut in half once this year.
What Lands Next
Four things to watch when the release hits Tuesday afternoon:
Fiscal 2027 revenue guidance — high single digits, as William Blair expects, or double digits.
TurboTax commentary on low-income filers and on the roughly two million returns that never showed up.
Whether the $300–340 million restructuring charge came in at, above, or below the range, and what run-rate savings management attaches to it.
Mailchimp, the only line already shrinking, and whether management still treats it as a growth asset.
Intuit will almost certainly hit its own quarter. It guided to it three months ago. The number that matters is the one covering the year after the cuts stop flattering the comparison.
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