Walmart vs Costco: Floor Space and Revenue Per Sq Ft

Warehouse. Pexels Images.

This article compares the retail floor space and revenue per square feet between Walmart and Costco. We will look at several floor space and revenue metrics, consisting of worldwide result, U.S. market, and international.

Let’s look at the details!

For the detailed statistics of Walmart and Costco’s revenue and number of stores, you may find more resources on these pages:

Walmart

• Walmart sales by segment: U.S., international, and Sam’s Club,
• Walmart revenue by region: U.S. and international,
• Walmart global store count and locations breakdown by region,
• Walmart retail stores, property ownership, and distribution facilities,

Costco

• Costco revenue by country: U.S., Canada, and international,
• Costco revenue by category: merchandise sales and membership,
• Costco store numbers breakdown, ownership, and floor space,
• Costco total stores and warehouse locations by country,

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Definitions

To help readers understand the content better, the following terms and glossaries have been provided.

Walmart vs Costco in Fiscal Schedules: Walmart’s FY2026 financial results are compared against Costco’s FY2025 results due to differences in their fiscal year reporting.

Walmart operates on a fiscal calendar that ends on January 31, meaning its FY2026 includes February 2025 to January 2026. In contrast, Costco follows a fiscal year ending in August, making its FY2025 cover September 2024 to August 2025.

Since Costco’s FY2026 results are not yet available at the time of Walmart’s latest fiscal report, analysts and industry comparisons often use Costco’s FY2025 as the closest match when evaluating the two retailers’ financial performance.

This approach ensures that the most recent annual results for both companies are used while accounting for their differing fiscal schedules.

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Insight & Summary of Walmart vs Costco in Floor Space and Revenue Per Square Feet

The following analysis consolidates the trends observed across Walmart vs Costco’s floor space and revenue per square feet for the 2016–2026 period.

• The revenue per square foot comparison between Costco and Walmart is perhaps the single most powerful illustration of the warehouse club model’s structural productivity advantage over conventional big-box retail. At the consolidated level, Costco generated $2,004 per square foot in 2025 versus Walmart’s $668 in 2026 — a 3.0x differential that has widened consistently over the period from approximately 2.7x in 2016.

• Both companies have grown their revenue per square foot steadily — Walmart from $414 to $668, a 61% increase, and Costco from $1,125 to $2,004, a 78% increase — but Costco’s faster compounding rate means the absolute gap has expanded from $711 per square foot in 2016 to $1,336 by 2025. The divergence is structural rather than cyclical: Costco’s standardized, high-throughput warehouse format drives substantially higher sales density through a combination of curated SKU selection, bulk purchasing behavior, and member-driven visit frequency — advantages that are deeply embedded in the business model and unlikely to erode materially over time.

• The U.S. market comparison reinforces this dynamic with equal clarity. Costco U.S. revenue per square foot grew from $1,181 in 2016 to $2,137 in 2025, while Walmart U.S. expanded from $464 to $739 over the same period — a persistent differential of approximately 2.5–2.9x. Notably, Costco U.S. crossed the $2,000 per square foot threshold by 2025, a milestone that underscores the exceptional sales density of its domestic warehouse network.

• Sam’s Club, Walmart’s warehouse club format and the most relevant domestic comparator to Costco, has shown the strongest per-square-foot trajectory within the Walmart portfolio — growing from $646 in 2016 to $1,155 in 2026, a 79% increase that nearly mirrors Costco’s growth rate. At $1,155 per square foot in 2026, Sam’s Club operates at approximately 54% of Costco’s U.S. productivity level — a gap that, while still substantial, has been narrowing at a more meaningful pace than any other Walmart format, reflecting Sam’s Club’s accelerating membership momentum and e-commerce integration.

• The international comparison reveals an even wider productivity differential, driven by the structural divergence in format composition between the two companies. Costco International generated $1,829 per square foot in 2025, while Walmart International produced just $470 — a nearly 4x gap that is the largest of any regional comparison in this dataset.

• Costco International’s revenue per square foot has grown consistently from $1,075 in 2016 to $1,829 in 2025, benefiting from the maturation of high-performing markets in Canada, Japan, Korea, and Australia. Walmart International’s productivity, while improving from $308 to $470 over the same period, is constrained by its portfolio of smaller-format stores — particularly in Mexico and Central America — which generate far lower revenue per square foot than the full-size warehouse format regardless of their individual market performance.

• The floor space data provides the essential context for interpreting the productivity differentials. Walmart’s total floor space has declined from 1,164 million square feet in 2016 to approximately 1,057 million square feet in 2026 — a contraction driven by the international portfolio divestitures — while Costco’s has grown steadily from 103 million to 135 million square feet. The scale difference is dramatic: Walmart operates approximately 7.8x more floor space than Costco globally, yet generates only 2.6x more revenue — confirming that Costco extracts dramatically more value from each square foot of physical retail space.

• Costco’s domestic floor space of 93.6 million square feet in 2025 generates $200B in U.S. revenue, compared to Walmart U.S.’s 778 million square feet generating $483B — meaning Costco achieves 42% of Walmart U.S.’s domestic revenue from just 12% of its floor space. This concentration of revenue productivity is the defining operational characteristic of the warehouse club format and represents a compounding competitive advantage that grows more pronounced as Costco continues to add high-productivity locations to an already-dense and mature warehouse network.

The table below combines Walmart and Costco floor space and revenue per sq ft metrics into a single view for the latest three fiscal years.

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Walmart Retail Stores Floor Space:- U.S., International, and Sam’s Club U.S.

For the definition of the fiscal schedules of Walmart and Costco, you may refer to this section: Walmart vs Costco in fiscal schedules.

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Walmart Revenue Per Square Feet:- U.S., International, and Sam’s Club U.S.

For the definition of the fiscal schedules of Walmart and Costco, you may refer to this section: Walmart vs Costco in fiscal schedules.

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Costco Warehouses Floor Space:- U.S., Canada, and International

For the definition of the fiscal schedules of Walmart and Costco, you may refer to this section: Walmart vs Costco in fiscal schedules.

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Costco Revenue Per Square Feet:- U.S., Canada, and International

For the definition of the fiscal schedules of Walmart and Costco, you may refer to this section: Walmart vs Costco in fiscal schedules.

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Walmart vs Costco Floor Space:- U.S., International, and Total

For the definition of the fiscal schedules of Walmart and Costco, you may refer to this section: Walmart vs Costco in fiscal schedules.

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Walmart vs Costco Revenue Per Square Feet:- U.S., International, and Consolidated

For the definition of the fiscal schedules of Walmart and Costco, you may refer to this section: Walmart vs Costco in fiscal schedules.

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References and Credits

1. All financial figures presented were obtained and referenced from Walmart and Costco’s quarterly and annual reports published on the respective investor relations pages: Walmart Investor Relations and Costco Investor Relations.

2. Pexels Images.

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Disclosure

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