Lowe's CEO: "Weather Continues to Be the Biggest Driver"
Home Depot barely mentioned it this quarter. Marvin Ellison led with it, unprompted, for the second year running.
Marvin Ellison didn’t wait to be asked.
On Lowe’s Q2 earnings call this morning, the CEO volunteered, unprompted, that weather was the single biggest driver of his company’s regional performance this quarter — not tariffs, not rates, not the competitive environment he spent much of the rest of the call discussing.
“There is no material difference in geographies other than weather impacts,” he said. “Weather continues to be the biggest driver in geographic performance.”
That’s a notable thing for a home improvement CEO to say plainly, unprompted, in 2026. It’s also consistent with what he said a year ago, when weather got referenced 15 times across Lowe’s Q2 2025 call — by a wide margin the most weather-saturated retail call of last season.
Home Depot released results Tuesday, Lowe’s this morning.
Home Depot beat on both top and bottom lines and held its full-year guidance steady. Lowe’s beat on EPS but missed on revenue, and actually cut its full-year outlook — trimming sales, comp, and EPS guidance all down to the low end of its prior ranges.
But the two companies could not have told a more different story about how much weather mattered to get there. Here’s how the weather topic played out for both, compared to what they said last year.
Lowe’s
Ellison’s comment above isn’t a one-off. The pattern holds across both years.
Last year (Q2 2025): comps ran May -1.0%, June +0.3%, then surged +4.7% in July as weather “normalized” and outdoor categories caught up. Weather was referenced 15 times across the call — by my count, the most weather-saturated retail earnings call of last season.
This year (Q2 2026): comps ran May -0.4%, June +1.7%, July -1.2% — though that July number is distorted by the July 4th holiday landing a week earlier this year, which shifted roughly 75 basis points of comp from July into June on the calendar alone. Strip that out and the underlying trend was still soft. Total comp for the quarter: just +0.2%. Revenue came in at $25.96 billion against a Street consensus of $26.16 billion — a real miss — while adjusted EPS of $4.40 beat the $4.22 consensus, helped by an 11-cent tariff-refund benefit.
Weather wasn’t a footnote here either. CEO Marvin Ellison, unprompted, in response to a general question about regional performance, said flatly: “there is no material difference in geographies other than weather impacts... weather continues to be the biggest driver in geographic performance.”
He cited drought conditions in parts of the country and what he called “traumatic conditions in the Midwest.”
CFO Brandon Sink went further, tying the quarter’s -2.1% transaction decline directly to “pressure from weather-sensitive outdoor and seasonal categories.”
And when analyst Chris Horvers pushed on the year-over-year comparison, Sink pointed to a single event as the real driver: a rain-soaked Memorial Day weekend — “one of our biggest DIY events of the year... it kind of dragged on the full quarter results.”
Lowe’s didn’t put a dollar figure on any of this — the disclosures were all directional or in basis points, never in dollars.
But the setup was flagged ahead of time: Piper Sandler’s Peter Keith trimmed his Q2 comp estimate before the print, citing drought conditions and reasoning (correctly) that dry weather discourages exterior projects and softens demand for lawn and garden staples like plants, grass seed, soil, and fertilizer.
Total weather mentions this year: roughly 8, spread across the CEO, CFO, and two separate analyst questions, in both prepared remarks and Q&A. Fewer than last year’s 15, but still substantially more than Home Depot’s 5 — and unlike Home Depot, where weather only surfaced because an analyst asked, Lowe’s CEO brought it up on his own.
Home Depot
The contrast between this year and last year is stark, and it’s less about the weather itself than about how loudly management chose to talk about it.
Last year (Q2 2025), weather was the headline. CEO Ted Decker volunteered it unprompted: “weather did have a big impact.” U.S. comps ran +0.3% in May, +0.5% in June, then snapped to +3.3% in July as a heat wave broke across the North. Two separate analysts — Fadem and Gutman — pressed further on it. Seven total mentions of “weather” across the call, coming from both sides of the table.
This year (Q2 2026), weather barely got airtime. U.S. comps ran +0.5% in May, +1.2% in June, +2.2% in July — still an upward slope, but a far gentler one than last year’s dramatic swing.
Nobody on management brought up weather in prepared remarks. It only came up because analyst Chris Horvers asked directly, and when EVP of Merchandising Billy Bastek answered, he minimized it: “there’s actually just two really small pieces that drove that” — a calendar quirk (the year’s one heat week landing in the July reporting period instead of June’s) and one bad-weather week in May that “normalized” once excluded.
Five total mentions, all clustered in that single exchange, none of them CEO-level.
Worth noting: Ted Decker, Home Depot CEO, wasn’t on this year’s call, and Home Depot’s larger Pro and contractor mix gives it more insulation from DIY-driven weather swings than Lowe’s has — both of which are structural reasons this year’s call may have run quieter on weather, independent of whether the weather itself mattered less.
The analysis and writing here are mine. I use Claude as an editor — for fact-checking and line edits — not as a source of ideas or content.
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