American Express beats consensus for a fifth straight quarter and raises its profit guidance for the first time in 2026, powered by premium customer spending

Context: an earnings season that had already made clear who wins from what

The US financial sector's third-quarter 2026 earnings season was already ten days old when American Express reported its numbers on Friday, October 23. The script up to that point had been fairly consistent: Goldman Sachs crushed consensus on October 13 on the back of trading and investment banking, JPMorgan disappointed slightly because of a one-off accounting charge, and Morgan Stanley beat expectations but cooled sequentially against its own second-quarter record. In every one of those cases, the common denominator was exposure to capital markets and interest rates, not the end consumer.

American Express sits in a different bucket within the financial sector altogether: it is neither a deposit-taking bank nor an investment house, but simultaneously a payments network and a card issuer focused almost exclusively on the affluent-consumer and corporate-spending segment. That customer base — high-income households with substantial discretionary spending — is precisely the one that, according to analyst consensus, was supposed to keep underpinning growth even in a quarter where other readings on the US consumer, such as September's jobs report or the mid-October CPI print, pointed to an average consumer under pressure. The underlying question the market wanted answered on October 23 was whether that resilience in premium spending was still intact after three straight quarters of frozen full-year guidance.

The concrete, verified data: $3.7 billion in profit, adjusted EPS of $4.68, and the first guidance raise of the year

American Express published its third-quarter 2026 results before the market open on October 23, as disclosed in its SEC filing (Form 8-K). The headline number is eye-catching but misleading without context: net income came in at $3.7 billion, up from $2.9 billion a year earlier, with GAAP EPS of $5.42, up 31% from $4.14 in the third quarter of 2025. That jump, however, includes a $982 million pre-tax gain from the sale of the company's stake in Global Business Travel Group, partly offset by a $336 million restructuring charge. Stripping out both effects, adjusted net income was $3.2 billion and adjusted EPS was $4.68 — the figure that actually needs to be measured against analyst consensus, which depending on the data provider sat between $4.47 and $4.60 (Zacks and Benzinga, respectively). The adjusted result beats both estimates and represents 13% year-over-year growth from the $4.14 reported in the third quarter of 2025.

Total revenues net of interest expense reached $20.1 billion, up 9% year over year, driven by higher Card Member spending, higher net interest income tied to growth in card balances, and strong growth in card fees (many of Amex's premium cards carry a steep annual fee, a recurring and predictable revenue source that has kept growing as the company refreshes its Platinum and Gold products). Billed business reached $454.0 billion, up 8% year over year, with growth of 7% in Goods & Services, 10% in Travel & Entertainment, 9% in US Consumer Services and 11% in International Card Services — the latter once again the fastest-growing segment.

This is not an isolated data point: it is the continuation of a streak. Here is how American Express's adjusted EPS has evolved quarter by quarter across 2025 and 2026:

Year-over-year growth was 17.6% in the first quarter, 11% in the second, and 13% in this third one — three consecutive quarters of double-digit earnings-per-share growth, in a macro backdrop where consensus had spent months anticipating some deterioration in US consumer spending. The company also raised its full-year 2026 adjusted EPS guidance to a range of $17.60-$17.90 (equivalent to $18.30-$18.60 on a GAAP basis), up from the $17.30-$17.90 range it had kept unchanged since its initial January guidance. It is a modest revision in absolute terms — the low end of the range moves up by 30 cents — but a meaningful one symbolically: it is the first time this year American Express has moved that number, after choosing to reinvest its earnings upside into marketing and technology in each of the two prior quarters instead of raising guidance.

Sector/asset analysis: why the premium consumer remains Amex's best friend

Credit quality is improving, not deteriorating, right when consensus expected the opposite. Provisions for credit losses fell to $1.0 billion in the quarter, down from $1.3 billion a year earlier — a 23% decline — and the 90-plus-day delinquency rate stood at 0.3% of the portfolio as of September 30, 2026, down from 0.4% a year earlier. For a card issuer, these two figures matter more than the EPS headline: they indicate that, at least within Amex's customer base, there is no sign that the labor-market softening visible in September's jobs report — a print that disappointed the Federal Reserve — is feeding through into card defaults. It is quarter-after-quarter confirmation of the company's central thesis: a high-income, diversified-wealth customer absorbs a labor-market cooldown far better than the average consumer.

The contrast with Wall Street's investment banks (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley) is revealing about what is actually driving financial-sector profits this quarter. Those banks depend on trading activity and M&A dealmaking, a volatile revenue source that spiked as Treasury yields hit their highest level since 2007 and which, as Morgan Stanley itself showed, can cool from one quarter to the next without that meaning anything is wrong. American Express, by contrast, depends on recurring customer spending and annual card fees — a far more predictable revenue source that grows more linearly but is also slower to accelerate during a strong market moment. For an investor, this translates into distinct risk profiles within the same sector: Amex looks more like a defensive premium-consumer growth stock than a traditional investment bank.

The broader payments sector stays in focus over the coming days. Visa — which does not issue its own credit cards, but whose network processes much of the same consumer spending that feeds Amex — reports its fiscal fourth-quarter 2026 results on October 27. If Visa confirms payment-volume growth similar to the 8% billed-business growth shown by Amex, it would reinforce the reading that US card spending remains solid in the middle-to-upper income segment, even if it is weaker at the lower end of the income distribution — the "K-shaped economy" narrative that has already surfaced in coverage of other macro data this month.

Corporate credit and Amex's own debt: improving delinquency and lower loss provisions are, almost without exception, good news for holders of the company's corporate debt, since they reduce the risk that credit-portfolio deterioration will pressure future margins; it is no coincidence that the company was able to reinvest its earnings upside into marketing rather than into shoring up reserves.

What to watch next

• Visa, October 27: fiscal fourth-quarter and full fiscal-year 2026 results, the most immediate gauge of whether US card spending is holding up outside Amex's specifically premium customer base.
• The Fed's October 27-28 meeting: any signal on the pace of rate cuts into 2027 directly affects the funding cost of card portfolios and, indirectly, the discretionary-spending appetite of the high-income households at the core of Amex's business.
• Intel and Comcast, October 29: not directly tied to payments, but their results — alongside the other large-cap tech names reporting that same week — will set the market's tone in the final days of October, a factor that can influence investor appetite for premium-consumer names like Amex, which tends to move with some correlation to broader market sentiment despite its defensive fundamentals.
• The fourth-quarter receivables report: if delinquency and provisions keep improving despite the weaker employment data of recent months, it would be the clearest confirmation that income segmentation among US consumers is shielding premium card issuers from a tougher credit cycle than the one facing more mass-market card issuers.

Historical parallel: the affluent customer's resilience has already been tested before

This is not the first time the market has feared that deterioration in a broad macro indicator — employment, inflation, consumer confidence — would automatically feed through to credit-card issuers. During the Fed's 2022-2023 rate-hiking cycle, analyst consensus broadly anticipated a significant deterioration in card credit quality as funding costs spiked; Amex, resting on the same affluent customer base it has today, reported delinquency rates that stayed substantially below the sector average throughout, and its stock, while volatile, recovered forcefully once it became clear that the feared broad-based deterioration in consumer credit was not materializing in its portfolio. The pattern seen in this third quarter of 2026 — provisions falling and delinquency improving while other US consumer data soften — suggests that same income-segmentation dynamic is still at work, though the lesson for investors remains the same one from back then: the resilience of Amex's premium customer base does not guarantee that the rest of the credit-card sector, far more exposed to middle- and lower-income consumers, is seeing the same picture.