World: retail sales of leading US retailers 2026

Worldwide retail sales of the leading US retailers in 2026

Walmart is the largest US retailer measured by worldwide retail sales, with about 692 billion U.S. dollars in 2025. Amazon is second with roughly 422 billion in retail sales, followed by Costco on about 266 billion and Home Depot on about 162 billion. The ranking has been remarkably stable at the top, with the same handful of names holding the leading places for years.

Worldwide retail sales measure what a company earns selling goods and services to shoppers, at home and abroad. For US retailers the figure is dominated by the giants of general merchandise and grocery, and the gap between first and second is vast: Walmart alone sells almost as much as Amazon and Costco put together, and its total is bigger than the combined retail sales of everyone ranked third through sixth. This scale of concentration mirrors what appears among the world largest economies, where a few players dwarf the rest.

A note on dating. This is the 2026 edition of the ranking, built on the latest full fiscal year of results, 2025, which most large retailers reported in the opening months of 2026. Nothing here is estimated. Where a company earns money outside retail, such as the cloud division of Amazon or the health-insurance arm of CVS Health, that revenue is separated out so the ranking compares retail with retail.

The chart below shows the leading US retailers by their worldwide retail sales in 2025. The shape is a steep staircase down from Walmart, a reminder that the American retail landscape is not a level field of rivals but a pyramid with one company towering over the rest.

Walmart towers over the field: at about 692 billion dollars, Walmart sells more than the next two US retailers combined.

Behind the leaders sit the grocery, pharmacy and home-improvement chains that anchor American main streets, from Kroger and Home Depot to the pharmacy giants CVS Health and Walgreens. Their sales run into the tens of billions, large by any normal measure yet small beside the two companies at the summit.

Leading US retailers by worldwide retail sales

The table lists the leading US retailers by their worldwide retail sales in 2025, alongside the share of those sales made inside the United States where a meaningful international business exists. It can be sorted by any column, and sorting by US share reveals how few of these companies are truly global.

Two features jump out. First, the top two are in a league of their own. Second, the mix of sectors is telling: groceries, pharmacies and home improvement dominate the list, because these are the everyday purchases that scale to enormous volume. Big-ticket and discretionary categories, from electronics to apparel, sit lower down.

Which US retailer has the biggest worldwide sales?

Walmart has the biggest worldwide retail sales of any US retailer, at about 692 billion U.S. dollars in 2025. The lead is not narrow. Walmart sells roughly 64 percent more retail goods than second-placed Amazon, and its retail total is larger than the combined figure for Costco, Home Depot and Kroger. Put in global terms, Walmart alone accounts for about 2.2 percent of the entire 31.3 trillion dollar world retail market.

That dominance is built on a simple, relentless model: everyday low prices on groceries and general merchandise, sold through thousands of large stores and, increasingly, online. In an inflationary period, shoppers from middle and upper-income households traded down to Walmart to stretch their grocery budgets, a pattern that shows how retail leadership tracks the wider pressures on the US cost of living. Grocery is the anchor, and Walmart is now the largest grocer in the country by a wide margin.

To grasp the scale, it helps to compare Walmart with whole national economies. Its worldwide retail sales exceed the annual output of most countries on the planet, a size more often discussed in the context of the GDP of the United States than of a single corporation. The chart below places the ten largest US retailers against the global retail market, showing just how much room remains beyond even these giants.

A small slice of a huge market: even the ten biggest US retailers together hold only about 7 percent of global retail sales.

Is Amazon now bigger than Walmart?

It depends entirely on what is measured. By total company revenue, Amazon has now overtaken Walmart. In 2025 Amazon reported about 717 billion U.S. dollars against roughly 713 billion for Walmart, the first time the online company has finished ahead. By retail sales alone, however, Walmart remains far larger, at about 692 billion against 422 billion, because a great deal of Amazon revenue never touches a retail shelf.

The crossover has been a long time coming. A decade ago Walmart dwarfed Amazon on every measure. Since then Amazon has grown its top line relentlessly, adding cloud computing, advertising and subscription income on top of its store, while Walmart has grown steadily but more slowly. The lines finally crossed in 2025, a milestone that says as much about the rise of cloud computing as about retail. The growth trajectories of Amazon are tracked in more detail in coverage of the wider Amazon business.

For a pure retail ranking the distinction matters, and it is why the headline figure here keeps Walmart in front. Shoppers spend more through Walmart than through the retail arm of Amazon. But the direction of travel is unmistakable, and the gap in retail sales has narrowed year after year as online buying, tracked across the growth of worldwide retail e-commerce, has taken share from stores.

The lines finally cross: Amazon total revenue passed Walmart in 2025, about 717 billion dollars against 713 billion.

The revenue mix of Amazon makes the point visually. Retail selling is still the single largest slice of the business, but cloud computing, advertising and subscriptions together make up well over a third of the total, and they generate the bulk of the profit. That balance is what allows a company ranked second in retail to finish first in total size, and the chart below shows the split.

Not just a store: retail is the biggest single slice of Amazon, but cloud, advertising and other services make up more than a third of revenue.

Why is retail sales different from total revenue?

Retail sales count only the business of selling goods to shoppers. Total revenue adds everything else a company does. For most retailers on this list the two numbers are almost identical, because selling goods is all they do. For a few, the gap is enormous, and that gap changes how the ranking should be read.

Amazon is the clearest case. Of its roughly 717 billion dollars in total revenue, only about 422 billion comes from retail. The rest flows from Amazon Web Services, the advertising business and subscriptions, high-margin operations that have little to do with shipping parcels. The split between these arms is set out in the breakdown of Amazon net revenue by segment, and it explains why the company can rank second in retail yet first in total size.

CVS Health is an even more extreme example. Its retail and pharmacy stores ring up about 139 billion dollars, but the company reports total revenue near 372 billion once its health-insurance and pharmacy-benefit businesses are counted. Including that full figure in a retail ranking would be misleading, which is why the ranking here uses the retail portion. The chart below sets retail sales against total revenue for the companies where the two diverge most.

Where the two diverge: Amazon and CVS Health earn far more in total than their retail arms alone, unlike Walmart and Costco.

How worldwide are these worldwide sales?

The word worldwide flatters most of these companies. Despite the global label, the leading US retailers earn the large majority of their sales at home. About 83 percent of Walmart sales are made in the United States, along with about 87 percent for Home Depot and roughly 88 percent for Walgreens once its international Boots business is set aside. Amazon is the most international of the group, yet still books about 68 percent of its sales domestically.

For many others on the list the international share is close to zero. Kroger, Target, Lowes and Albertsons operate almost entirely inside the United States, so for them worldwide sales and US sales are effectively the same number. This is the quiet truth behind the ranking: American retail is enormous, but it is overwhelmingly a domestic enterprise, unlike the far-flung empires of European grocers or the Mexican operations detailed in coverage of Walmart in Mexico.

The chart below shows the domestic share for the retailers with a genuine international presence. The pattern is clear: even the companies best known for going global still make most of their money within US borders, and international expansion remains more an ambition than a reality for the sector as a whole.

Global names, domestic sales: even Amazon, the most international of the group, makes about 68 percent of its sales in the United States.

Which US retailers grew fastest in 2025?

Size and speed are not the same thing. The largest US retailers grew only modestly in 2025, while the fastest growth came from specialists further down the list. Dicks Sporting Goods led all large US retailers with about 48.5 percent sales growth, boosted by expansion, followed by Five Below on about 22.9 percent and the grocer Sprouts Farmers Market on about 14.1 percent.

Among the giants, growth was steady rather than spectacular. CVS Health rose about 11.9 percent, Amazon lifted its US retail sales about 7.4 percent, and Walmart grew about 4.2 percent. The contrast is instructive: the biggest companies add tens of billions in absolute terms even at low percentage rates, while smaller chains post eye-catching percentages off a far smaller base. Both kinds of growth matter, but they tell different stories about momentum.

The mix of fast growers also hints at where consumer money is moving, toward sporting goods, value chains and fresh-focused grocers. These shifts play out against a backdrop of tariffs and import costs that weigh on margins across the sector, a pressure examined in coverage of US tariffs. The chart below ranks the fastest-growing large US retailers by their 2025 sales growth.

Specialists outpace the giants: Dicks Sporting Goods grew about 48.5 percent in 2025, while Walmart rose about 4.2 percent.

Why is Amazon worth so much more than Walmart?

Here is the sharpest paradox in US retail. Walmart sells far more goods than Amazon, yet the stock market values Amazon at roughly three times as much. In August 2026 Amazon carried a market value of about 2.84 trillion U.S. dollars, against roughly 918 billion for Walmart and about 427 billion for Costco. Selling the most does not make a company the most valuable.

The reason is margin, not volume. Retail is a thin-margin business, where a company keeps only a few cents of profit on each dollar of sales. The cloud and advertising operations of Amazon earn far higher margins, and investors pay a premium for those profits, valuing them well above the low-margin work of moving groceries and parcels. The market is pricing the software company inside Amazon, not the shop. This gulf between sales and value echoes the patterns seen across the biggest companies by market value.

For Walmart the numbers line up more closely: its market value is comparable to a single year of its sales, the mark of a business valued as a steady, mature retailer rather than a growth engine. The chart below sets retail sales against market value for the three largest US retail companies, and the mismatch for Amazon is stark. It is the clearest single illustration that the market rewards what a business earns, not what it sells.

Value follows margin: Amazon is worth about 2.84 trillion dollars despite selling less retail than Walmart, valued near 918 billion.

Which US retailers have the most stores?

Sales are one measure of scale, physical footprint another. Walgreens operates the largest store network of any US retailer, with about 11,605 locations worldwide, narrowly ahead of Walmart on about 10,974. Pharmacies and general-merchandise chains dominate the store count because their formats rely on being close to where people live.

Further down, the grocery and home-improvement chains run large but far smaller networks: Kroger operates about 2,719 stores, Home Depot about 2,362 and Target about 1,995. Costco, despite ranking third in sales, runs only about 915 warehouses, a reminder that its enormous per-store volume does the heavy lifting. Amazon, the second-largest retailer, keeps only around 620 physical locations, since its sales flow through warehouses and delivery networks rather than shops.

The contrast between sales rank and store rank is revealing. Costco proves that fewer, larger outlets can outsell thousands of small ones, while the pharmacy chains show that a dense network of modest stores is its own kind of scale. The chart below ranks the leading US retailers by their worldwide store count.

Networks versus volume: Walgreens and Walmart run the most stores, while Costco outsells both from only about 915 warehouses.

US retail sales worldwide in numbers

A few figures frame the picture. Walmart leads worldwide retail sales at about 692 billion U.S. dollars, Amazon follows on about 422 billion, and the two together account for well over a trillion. Beyond the summit, a broad field of grocery, pharmacy and home-improvement chains fills out the ranking, most of them almost entirely domestic. The chart below returns to the headline measure for the ten largest.

Read together, these numbers separate three questions that are often blurred: who sells the most goods, who is the biggest company, and who is worth the most. In US retail the answers are Walmart, Amazon and Amazon, and holding all three in view is the only way to see the sector clearly.

The headline ranking: Walmart, Amazon and Costco lead the leading US retailers by worldwide retail sales.

Leading US retailers in 2026: the big picture

Taken together, the data tells a story of one dominant retailer, one fast-rising challenger and a long tail of large but domestic chains. Walmart still sells more goods than any other US company by a wide margin, and its lead in retail sales is secure for now. Amazon has closed the gap and surpassed Walmart in total revenue, but only by leaning on businesses that are not really retail at all.

The forces that will shape the next few years are already visible: the steady migration of spending online, the premium that markets place on high-margin cloud and advertising income, and the pressure of prices and tariffs on thin retail margins. What is unlikely to change soon is the identity at the top. For the leading US retailers ranked by worldwide retail sales, the story in 2026 still opens with Walmart, and understanding it means keeping sales, total revenue and market value clearly apart, much as a full reading of the wider Amazon Prime ecosystem requires separating its many moving parts.

Frequently Asked Questions: US Retailers Worldwide