Q2 2026 Earnings: The Strongest Season in Five Years

Corporate America just delivered one of its best earnings seasons in recent memory. With the vast majority of S&P 500 companies now reporting, the numbers are hard to ignore.

As of mid July most S&P 500 companies had reported Q2 2026 results, with over 80% beating EPS estimates — a beat rate that would be the best since Q2 2021. What stands out even more is the size of the surprises: companies are topping estimates by close to 29%, which would be the highest earnings surprise FactSet has recorded since it started tracking the metric back in 2008. The prior record, set in Q2 2020, was 23.2%.

Ten of the eleven S&P 500 sectors posted year-over-year earnings growth, with seven of those in double digits, led by Energy, Communication Services, Information Technology, and Materials. The one holdout: Health Care was the only sector to post a year-over-year earnings decline.

Revenue told a similarly strong story. Going into the season, the S&P 500 was tracking toward its highest revenue growth since Q2 2022, with all eleven sectors expected to grow revenue year-over-year, led by Information Technology, Energy, and Communication Services.

Perhaps the more telling detail is what happened before the season even started. Analysts typically trim earnings estimates as a quarter progresses — by an average of 2% to 2.7% over the past five and ten years — but this time they raised Q2 estimates by 3.4%, breaking a decade-long pattern. That's a sign Wall Street walked into this earnings season more confident than usual, and companies still managed to clear the higher bar.

Looking ahead, analysts aren't expecting the momentum to fade. They're projecting earnings growth of 26.8% for Q3 and 24.4% for Q4 2026, which would extend the current streak of double-digit earnings growth to nine straight quarters if it holds.

The takeaway: this isn't just a story about a couple of AI-driven mega-caps posting outsized gains. Corporate earnings growth is running well above historical averages across most of the economy — the strongest broad-based performance since 2021.