In one breath
The Q2 2026 10-Q filed July 24 shows American Express growing revenue at the fastest pace in three years, while simultaneously setting aside less money for bad loans than it did a year ago. The stock sits about 11% below its 52-week high, priced at a premium to its own decade-average on sales but only modestly above its median earnings multiple. The open question is whether a deliberate choice to spend this quarter’s upside on future growth, rather than pocket it as profit, is discipline or a warning that the easy gains are behind it.
A company that nearly went quiet, now louder than ever
In 2020, American Express looked like a business built for a world that had just ended. Its card members were the kind of people who flew business class and expensed client dinners, and both of those things had stopped. Revenue collapsed and the net margin, the share of each revenue dollar that survived as profit after every bill was paid, fell to a fraction of its former self. The company was not broken, but it was exposed.
What followed was one of the sharper recoveries in financial services. Travel reopened, pent-up spending unleashed, and by 2024 the annual filing showed net margins back above 26%, meaning more than a quarter of every revenue dollar was becoming profit. The business had not just recovered. It had found a higher gear.
The question today is whether that gear holds, or whether the company is now burning fuel to stay in place.
What the filing actually changed
The Q2 2026 earnings release reported revenue of $19.6 billion for the quarter, up 10% from the same three months a year earlier, the fastest year-over-year revenue growth in three years. It was driven by something concrete: card members spent more. Billed business, the total dollar value of purchases run through Amex cards, reached $455.8 billion in the quarter. Think of that as the engine size. The bigger it is, the more fee and interest revenue the company collects on top.
Three million new card members joined in Q2 alone, and the company says nearly two-thirds of them are Millennials or Gen Z. That matters because a new card member in their late twenties has decades of potential spending ahead, while a new member in their late fifties has far fewer. Amex is, in effect, replanting its forest.
But here is the tension the filing introduces. Total expenses rose faster than revenue in the quarter. The company is deliberately spending more on marketing and customer acquisition, and CEO Stephen Squeri said on the earnings call, as reported by Investing.com, that this reflects a choice to reinvest operating upside rather than let it flow to the bottom line. That is a coherent strategy. It is also one that cannot be verified until future quarters show whether those new card members actually spend.
The number that surprised everyone
Buried in the credit section of the earnings presentation is a figure that runs against the grain of most financial-sector news right now. Provisions for credit losses, the money a lender sets aside anticipating that some borrowers won’t pay, fell by roughly a quarter compared to the same quarter a year ago. The company is keeping a smaller emergency fund because the borrowers who are paying are paying more reliably.
The charge-off rate, the share of outstanding loans actually written off as uncollectable, held steady at 2.2%. A household analogy: if a neighborhood lender had a hundred borrowers and two of them stopped paying last year, two of them stopped paying this year too, no worse. Meanwhile, the share of accounts running more than a month behind on payments nudged down slightly, a small move that points the same direction.
For a saver trying to understand the business, this is the most important single data point in the filing. It says the premium customer base is holding up under whatever economic pressure exists right now.
What the math says, what the mood is paying
“The math” is what filed fundamentals justify on their own terms. “The mood” is what the market is currently willing to pay on top of that. Our data shows Amex trading at a price-to-sales multiple at the 84th percentile of its own decade, historically expensive relative to revenue. On earnings, the multiple is closer to the 60th percentile, more moderate but still above the median.
The stock is down modestly over the past six months and sits roughly 11% below its 52-week high, even as the underlying business just posted its strongest revenue growth in three years. Seeking Alpha noted that net interest income disappointed relative to expectations, which may explain some of the gap. Benzinga reported that Morgan Stanley trimmed its valuation estimate, citing the maintained full-year guidance as a signal of caution, while Piper Sandler moved its estimate higher with a more constructive read of the reinvestment story. The same filing, two different conclusions.
What neither side disputes is that the company reaffirmed full-year revenue growth guidance of 10%, a pace that would extend the company’s recent run of double-digit quarterly revenue growth.
Reading the numbers
Revenue: $19.6 billion in Q2 2026, up 10% year-over-year. Revenue here means consolidated total revenues net of interest expense, the standard Amex measure. A 10% rise means the business added roughly $1.7 billion in a single quarter compared to the same quarter last year. To feel that scale: it is more than Amex earned in profit during all of 2020.
EPS: $4.53 in Q2 2026, up 11% from $4.08 a year ago. EPS, or earnings per share, is the profit divided by the number of shares outstanding. A household analogy: if a small business earned $4.08 for every share of ownership last year and $4.53 this year, each ownership unit is generating more. The analyst consensus heading into the quarter was $4.40, so the company beat by about 3%.
Provisions for credit losses: $1.08 billion, down from $1.41 billion. This is the money set aside for loans that may go bad. A drop of this size, roughly $330 million in a single quarter, flows directly into pre-tax income. It is one reason operating income rose 15% even though expenses rose 12%.
Billed business: $455.8 billion, up 10%. This is the total spending run through Amex cards in the quarter. It is the raw material of the business. A 10% rise means card members collectively spent about $41 billion more than in Q2 2025, roughly the equivalent of the company’s entire annual revenue last year added in a single quarter of incremental card activity.
P/S multiple: 5.5, at the 84th percentile of the past decade (our data). Price-to-sales is the total market value of the company divided by annual revenue. At the 84th percentile of its own history, the market is paying more for each dollar of Amex revenue than it has in roughly 84% of all months over the past ten years. That is a high bar for the business to clear.
Sources
- SEC EDGAR: AXP 10-Q, quarter ended June 30, 2026
- American Express Q2 2026 Earnings Press Release
- American Express Q2 2026 Earnings Presentation
- SEC EDGAR: AXP 10-K, fiscal year ended December 31, 2024
- Investing.com: American Express Q2 2026 earnings call transcript
- Motley Fool: Billed business analysis, July 24, 2026
- Seeking Alpha: AXP Q2 net interest income commentary
- Benzinga: Analyst valuation estimate changes following Q2 2026
- TipRanks: AXP Q2 2026 earnings report and consensus
