T-Mobile US Reports Q2 2026 Results: Full Earnings Call Transcript

T-Mobile US (NASDAQ: TMUS ) held its second-quarter earnings conference call on Thursday. Below is the complete transcript from the call. This transcript is brought to you APIs. For real-time access to our entire catalog, please visit for a consultation.

View the webcast at Summary T-Mobile US reported strong Q2 2026 financial results, with a notable postpaid net account addition of 277,000 and a 13% increase in postpaid service revenue. The company emphasized its strategic focus on network superiority and customer value, highlighting a record-high Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 46 and industry-leading growth in 5G broadband. 8 billion. S.

Cellular, and the launch of a co-branded T-Mobile Visa credit card. Management remains committed to network investments, including 5G Advanced and future spectrum opportunities, while maintaining a disciplined capital allocation framework. Full Transcript OPERATOR Good morning. All participants will be in a listen-only mode.

Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, please press star then 1. To withdraw your question, please press star then 2.

You may also submit a question via X by sending a post to MobileIR or erinygopalan using TMUS. I would now like to turn the conference over to Kathy Yau, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations for T-Mobile US. Please go ahead. Kathy Yau, SVP Investor Relations Good morning.

Welcome to T-Mobile's second quarter 2026 earnings call. Joining me on our call today are Srini Gopalan, our President and CEO, Peter Osvaldik, our CFO, as well as other members of the leadership team. During this call we will make forward-looking statements which involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially. We encourage you to review the risk factors set forth in our SEC filings, our earnings release, investor fact book and other documents related to our results, as well as reconciliations between GAAP and non-GAAP.

Results discussed on this call can be found on our investor relations website. With that, let me now turn it over to Srini. Srini Gopalan, President and CEO Thanks, Kathy, and good morning, everyone. We're here in New York City today, excited to discuss our results.

Q2 was another extraordinary quarter of executing on our strategy and delivering against the ambitious goals we set out at our February Capital Markets Day update. Our strategy is simple but truly powerful: Give customers the best network, the best value and the best experience all in one place. That's how we eliminate trade-offs for our customers, and that's what truly sets us apart. Nothing demonstrates this better than our NPS, a record high 46 this quarter.

Let me pause on that for a second because that 46 represents the highest NPS in wireless ever across the big three carriers, and it is of course well ahead of the competition. This differentiation is why we outgrew the industry time and time again, and we did it again in Q2. In the wireless space, we continue to see a substantial opportunity of more than 20 million families and businesses who are network seekers and not yet with T-Mobile. With the best network in America, we have an unparalleled right to win with these customers.

This quarter, the highest percentage ever of network-seeking prospects ranked T-Mobile number one on having an extremely reliable network and as a completely trusted brand. This is why we grew our postpaid share of households yet again across every single cohort within the top hundred markets, and also in smaller markets and rural areas. Let me double-click on smaller markets and rural areas. These markets represent approximately 40% of the population, and we have lots of room to run at this opportunity.

S. Cellular last year, and the integration is going great. Our share in T-Mobile for Business gives us that same kind of runway. This quarter we continue to take share with a network-superiority-led value proposition.

Our nationwide 5G Advanced network continues to drive new TAM creation through advanced network solutions, subsequently leading to traditional voice and broadband sales. And I'm also really excited to welcome Chris Sambar to T-Mobile as our Chief Enterprise Officer, who will help further supercharge growth here. Chris will be joining us in August. Turning now to broadband: it wasn't that long ago some competitors were calling 5G broadband cell phone internet.

Today it's the most exciting evolution in broadband technology in a long, long time. It has consistently produced industry-leading growth, and we have so much more runway left here. 5G broadband has rapidly become a premium broadband offering in the marketplace. In fact, with our latest-generation router coupled with our network, we're delivering download speeds roughly equivalent to fiber to the home when both are used over Wi—Fi, which is how the vast majority of customers experience broadband.

That is truly impressive. And both the network and CPE technology continue to rapidly evolve. D. Power's number one in customer satisfaction.

That's also why we've consistently been the fastest-growing ISP in the country, including in Q2, and this industry-leading growth has come with very healthy ARPUs. As we approach 2027 and 2028, there will be even more spectrum availability reflecting the stewardship of Chairman Carr and his commitment to American 6G leadership. This will unlock even greater capacity that will be deployed under our fallow capacity model. Putting it all together, our unmatched value proposition drove postpaid net account additions of 277,000 in Q2 alongside 2% ARPA growth year over year, a really strong result.

We continued to bring new families and businesses to T-Mobile in a durable and profitable way with CLVs in Q2 up healthy double digits over last year. In addition, port-in ARPAs continued to exceed port-out ARPAs by approximately 20%. This is another highlight of our unrivaled value proposition. With over 60% of customers on new accounts selecting our premium plans, our adjacencies—TADs and financial services—continue to add incremental growth, leveraging our brand and ecosystem.

I'm really excited to share that our T-Mobile Visa credit card launch was one of the most successful co-branded launches for Capital One, and we're on track to rank amongst Capital One's leading co-brand programs in terms of new accounts. Most importantly, we will not stop. We're not standing still. Our network keeps winning accolades from third-party providers even as we continue to invest in it.

Let me double-click into both. For the third straight time we won the Best Mobile Network by Ookla. We also swept every single subcategory across Opensignal's Quality of Experience and network performance awards, making us their most awarded mobile network over the last five years. S.

test champion, sweeping the national benchmark for all 13 categories tested, including AI Services Champion. Turning now to our ongoing investments into our network, we continue to push the envelope of what's possible. In Q2 we rolled out live translation on beta. This is our first network-native AI application, and we're embedding AI models directly into our core.

Longer term, we believe our network will become the connective tissue for physical AI with inferencing at the edge. I am so excited by the opportunity here, highlighting what a low-latency, high-capacity network can deliver. We continue to partner with key industry leaders here, including bigger AI. Our value—something we guard zealously—we continue to lead the industry while ensuring that customers are able to take advantage of America's best network.

Our back book pricing remains a clear advantage to our differentiated growth strategy. We continue to abide by the more-for-more philosophy. One example of this is our recent initiative where we modernized legacy rate plans to ensure all of our customers can benefit from our great nationwide 5G Advanced network. On customer experience, we're continuing to meet the customer where they want while driving digital transformation to further enhance the experience.

Ten years ago we launched T-Mobile Tuesdays because we deeply believe that here at T-Mobile we don't think customers should have to prove loyalty but rather receive thankings from us just by being a customer. In June we celebrated that milestone with Member Month, which was a tremendous success that truly underscored the spirit of the Un-carrier. 99 per gallon at select Shell gas stations. This drove record momentum in T Life usage, and we ended the quarter with over 30 million monthly active users.

Pulling it all together, this differentiation is what drives industry-leading financial growth, and we delivered again across every key metric in Q2: postpaid service revenue up 13%, total service revenue up 9%, both at multiples to our competition, core adjusted EBITDA up 12% with industry-leading free cash flow margin of 25%. This is what this team does—deliver day in and day out. Our results speak for themselves, as you can see with our industry-leading NPS. What fuels that differentiation is the incredible future-proofed asset base we've built and our willingness to continue to invest to build it.

And this is only just the beginning. Peter, over to you. Peter Osvaldik, EVP & CFO All right, thank you, Srini. As you can see, we had a fabulous Q2, which reinforces our strong guidance for the remainder of the year.

So let me add some additional color, starting with accounts, where we continue to expect postpaid account net additions to be between 950,000 and 1,050,000 on the strength of the underlying momentum in the business. As part of our full-year plan and guidance, we anticipated our Q3 rate-plan modernization would result in a temporarily elevated account churn profile and expect Q3 net postpaid account additions to be approximately 250,000. It should be noted that the impact on postpaid phone churn is lower, as the modernization impact is concentrated more in accounts with fewer lines.

Now, in the first half of the year, we have delivered almost 500,000 net postpaid account additions, so we are well on our way to delivering within our guidance range. This modernization also creates strong value both for customers and T-Mobile and sets us up to deliver against our 2027 guidance ambitions. 3 billion, or up 6% year over year. 5% and 3% this year.

5 billion for the full year, representing 10% growth year over year at the midpoint. 4 billion, or up 8% year over year. Our expectation for full-year 2026 cash CapEx remains unchanged at approximately $10 billion. 8 billion, an increase of $200 million at the midpoint, primarily driven by lower cash income taxes.

Our philosophical approach to guidance, as you are seeing play out, is to begin the year with an ambitious and industry-leading guidance range based on our best view at the time, targeting to land at the midpoint of that strong guidance range and providing updates throughout the year as warranted. 5 billion in Q2 and through July 17. 07 billion. 7 GHz, which represent an opportunity to further cement our network leadership position and provide increased value creation through, for example, additional 5G broadband capacity unlock.

To sum it all up, we continue to see strong momentum in the business and cannot be more excited for the future. And so with that, I'll now turn the call back to Kathy to begin the Q&A. Kathy Yau, SVP Investor Relations Thanks, Peter. Okay, let's get to your questions.

You can ask questions via phone by pressing star, then 1, and via X by sending a post to T-Mobile IR or Gopalan using TMUS. We will start with a question on the phone. Operator, first question, please. OPERATOR The first question comes from Sean Disley with Morgan Stanley.

Please go ahead. Sean Disley, Analyst at Morgan Stanley Great. Thanks very much. I was hoping you could discuss how you're thinking about volume versus price growth this year and any comments on the backdrop.

Obviously a bit less volume growth for you guys this year, obviously pushing price a little bit harder. But how should we think about the balance through the rest of the year? Thank you for the 3Q update there. Great.

Srini Gopalan, President and CEO Cool. Thanks so much, Sean. It's not just a question of this year. I mean, the way we've historically thought about price versus volume really centers around CLV and the opportunity to maximize the total amount of value creation that we bring through differentiated propositions.

And that balance, you know, we titrate that balance very carefully to make sure that we're generating both the right volume as well as the right CLV. The exciting piece for us is the double-digit growth we've seen in CLVs. And I think it's fair to reflect on the fact that that's not kind of some independent variable. That's very closely linked to the fact that the perception of our network is at an all-time high, and so we're attracting more network seekers than we ever have before.

Again, our port-in versus port-out ARPA ratios, you can see that our port-in ARPAs are 20% higher than our port-out. So it's a careful titration of where we want to maximize volume versus where we want to maximize value. All brought together with CLV. Navita, do you want to add?

Navita Yeah, I think you're seeing, if you double click a little bit in there, obviously we have aspirations for both the P and the Q with what you've seen with our now raised guidance since the beginning of the year aspirations. But also what's interesting is, yes, we delivered 2% year-over-year postpaid ARPA growth. However, if you look underneath, remember last year we also had the acquisitions of UScellular and entered into our fiber JV, with the customers coming on board having lower ARPA. 7% on a year-over-year basis.

So that shows you the underlying strength of the business. 5% to 3% on that ARPA growth for this year. Sean Disley, Analyst at Morgan Stanley Thank you. Kathy Yau, SVP Investor Relations Thanks so much, Sean.

Operator, let's go with the next question, please. OPERATOR The next question comes from Michael Flunk with Bank of America. Please go ahead. Michael Flunk, Analyst at Bank of America Yes, great.

Thank you all for the questions this morning. So I want to touch on device subsidies, Sri. Earlier in the year you talked about less appetite for device subsidies expectation. We see increase in device prices back half of the year, in addition to it, a new iconic device potentially released.

So what is your view on device subsidies heading into the holiday season, end of the year, and how do you balance that versus the net add guidance that you have? Srini Gopalan, President and CEO Thanks for that question, Michael. So when we talked earlier in the year, just to be clear, what I talked about at that point was not moving away completely from device subsidies, but more rounding off the value proposition, which is now that we're in a place where we have so many elements to our value proposition, how do we make sure that we have a balanced articulation of the 250 reasons why someone should be choosing T-Mobile.

Now, we started off with a big network campaign articulating the network reasons why. Over the year we had Member Month, which brings together all of the benefit reasons why. We're now running the 250 Reasons to Choose T-Mobile campaign. So our effort really is to broaden out the reasons why people should choose T-Mobile rather than purely a free phone.

Of course we'll be competitive on things like subsidy, but that's not kind of what we're leaning in on. And that was really the articulation of what I did in February.