Verizon stock fell 3.78% as of 9:30 a.m. ET on October 26, 2026, after third-quarter revenue missed analysts’ estimates despite better-than-expected adjusted earnings. The telecom company raised its full-year outlook for the third consecutive quarter as customer additions and cash generation strengthened.

Verizon stock declines after mixed quarterly results

Third-quarter adjusted earnings per share reached $1.31, above the $1.27 analyst consensus. Revenue totaled $34.31 billion, below the $34.77 billion estimate, although it increased 1.5% from a year earlier. Reported earnings per share were $1.25, distinct from the adjusted measure that excludes special items.

Verizon’s third-quarter earnings release explains that equipment revenue fell 9% year over year, primarily because customers kept their devices longer and the company reduced spending on device subsidies. That decline partly offset growth in mobility and broadband service revenue, which rose 2.9% to approximately $23.5 billion.

Customer trends were stronger than the equipment sales figures. Verizon added 406,000 postpaid phone subscribers on a net basis, its strongest third-quarter performance in five years. Postpaid phone churn, a measure of customer departures, improved to 0.94% from 0.98% a year earlier. Quarterly free cash flow rose 12.1% to $7.8 billion.

Higher 2026 targets and an AWS infrastructure agreement

Verizon now expects full-year postpaid phone net additions of 1.1 million to 1.2 million, versus its previous target in the upper half of a 750,000-to-1-million range. Management also raised adjusted earnings guidance to $5.04–$5.06 per share, representing expected annual growth of 7%–7.5%, compared with its previous 6%–7% growth forecast.

For the fourth quarter of 2026, Verizon expects mobility and broadband service revenue to grow approximately 4% year over year. These targets are management forecasts rather than completed results.

Separately, Verizon signed an agreement valued at more than $2 billion with Amazon Web Services. The agreement establishes a commercial framework to scale distributed computing for agentic and generative artificial intelligence workloads; its stated value is not reported quarterly revenue.

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