Verizon Adds 406,000 Postpaid Phone Customers in Its Best Third Quarter in Five Years, Raises Outlook a Third Straight Time

Verizon Communications said on Monday that it added 406,000 postpaid phone customers in the third quarter of 2026, its strongest third-quarter showing in five years, and raised its full-year guidance for the third consecutive quarter.

The number the quarter will be remembered for is 406,000. That was Verizon's postpaid phone net additions for the third quarter — a more than 820% increase from a year earlier, the strongest third-quarter performance in five years, and nearly double the 209,439 additions analysts expected on the Visible Alpha consensus. Verizon also added 137,000 postpaid accounts, its best account growth in more than a decade, and it did so while spending less to win and keep customers: overall postpaid phone churn improved to 0.94%, promotional acquisition costs fell 41% from a year earlier, and retention promotion costs improved 30%. Shares rose 2.4% in premarket trading on Monday. One year into Chief Executive Dan Schulman's tenure, the claim that simpler offers could restart growth in the company's core business now has a full quarter of evidence behind it.

Broadband kept pace with the phone business

The gains were not confined to phones. Verizon added 314,000 broadband customers in the quarter — 159,000 through fixed wireless access and 155,000 through fiber — taking total broadband connections to 17.4 million, with more than half of new fiber customers choosing speeds of one gigabit or faster. The company still expects fiber passings to exceed 32 million by the end of the year, on the way to a medium-term target of 40 million to 50 million. Across the first nine months of 2026, Verizon added nearly 1.7 million mobility and broadband subscribers, against 879,000 in the same period of 2025. The mix matters: broadband and fiber growth is the part of the story that does not depend on winning a promotional fight for phone switchers every quarter.

Record profit, and a revenue line that still missed

Profit set records even as the top line undershot. Total operating revenue rose 1.5% to $34.3 billion, below the $34.77 billion analysts expected, because a 9.0% decline in equipment revenue — customers keeping their phones longer, and Verizon deliberately spending less on device subsidies — offset service growth. Mobility and broadband service revenue rose 2.9% to $23.5 billion, improving sequentially from 1.6% growth in the first quarter and 2.8% in the second. Net income rose 5.2% to $5.3 billion. Earnings per share were $1.25, up from $1.17 a year earlier. Adjusted earnings per share were $1.31, up 8.3% from $1.21 a year earlier and ahead of the $1.27 analyst estimate. Adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization rose 8.0% to $13.8 billion, the highest quarterly figure the company has reported, and the adjusted margin on that measure widened to 40.2% from 37.8%. The consumer segment remained the profit engine, with segment earnings up 6.5% and a 45.3% margin; the smaller business segment grew its earnings 13.0%.

A third consecutive raise, with the fourth quarter asked to accelerate

Verizon raised full-year 2026 guidance for the third consecutive quarter. It now expects 1.1 million to 1.2 million postpaid phone net additions for the year, up from the upper half of a 750,000-to-1.0-million range, and more than three times the 2025 total. Adjusted earnings per share guidance rose to $5.04 to $5.06, implying 7.0% to 7.5% growth, from 6.0% to 7.0% previously. Operating cash flow growth guidance rose to 3.5% to 5.0%, and free cash flow is now expected to approach 12% growth, up from 9% to 10%. Mobility and broadband service revenue is expected in the upper half of the 2.5% to 3.0% full-year range, with growth of approximately 4.0% in the fourth quarter — an acceleration the company has now promised explicitly, and the clearest test the raised outlook sets for itself. Capital spending guidance was held at $16.0 billion to $16.5 billion. Cash generation already supports the story: third-quarter operating cash flow was $11.5 billion and free cash flow was $7.8 billion, up 12.1%; Verizon returned $12.8 billion to shareholders in the first nine months, and net unsecured debt eased to $123.7 billion from $128.7 billion at the end of the second quarter.

The Amazon Web Services agreement points past the phone business

Alongside the results, Verizon said it had signed an agreement valued at more than $2 billion with Amazon Web Services, establishing a commercial framework to scale distributed compute for the real-time demands of agentic and generative artificial-intelligence workloads; the agreement centers on high-capacity fiber connectivity for the cloud provider's data centers. It follows a dark-fiber agreement with Google valued at more than $1 billion, announced in July. Schulman framed the two deals as one business: “Technology leaders are choosing our fiber network to power the next generation of AI infrastructure,” he said, adding that Verizon is “only one year into a multi-year growth story.” That is the strategic wager inside the earnings beat — that the same fiber footprint built for broadband customers can be sold a second time to hyperscalers whose computing demand is compounding faster than consumer wireless ever will.

What remains unknown

The release does not disclose the Amazon Web Services agreement's term, its revenue timing, or how much of the more-than-$2 billion value depends on build milestones, so the deal's contribution to 2027 service revenue cannot yet be sized from public documents. Equipment revenue also remains a drag with no stated floor: as long as customers hold phones longer and subsidies stay restrained, total revenue growth will trail service revenue growth. What to watch is specific: whether fourth-quarter service revenue growth reaches the approximately 4.0% the company forecast, whether the postpaid pace survives the holiday promotional season without the churn and cost discipline slipping, and whether further hyperscaler fiber agreements follow the Google and Amazon Web Services deals. The verified record on Monday is a subscriber quarter strong enough to force a third straight guidance raise — and a revenue miss that shows exactly where the transformation is still unfinished.