Walmart vs Costco: Sales Revenue Per Employee

Workforce. Pexels Images.

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

Let’s look at the numbers!

For the detailed statistics of Walmart and Costco’s revenue, 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,

Costco

• Costco revenue by country: U.S., Canada, and international,
• Costco revenue by category: merchandise sales and membership,
• Costco headcount analysis: total employees and employees by segment,

Please use the table of contents to navigate this page.

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.

Back To Table Of Contents

Insight & Summary of Walmart vs Costco in Sales Per Employee

The following analysis consolidates the trends observed across Walmart vs Costco’s sales per employee for the 2016–2026 period.

• The disparity in sales per employee serves as the ultimate quantifiable reflection of the structurally distinct operating models between Costco and Walmart. Over the latest three periods, Costco generated a staggering consolidated average of $764,468 per employee, operating at an efficiency level more than double that of Walmart, which averaged $321,205 globally.

• Costco’s astronomical labor productivity is the direct result of its warehouse club model: a highly concentrated footprint, a strictly limited number of active SKUs (roughly 4,000), and bulk-packaged, palletized merchandising that requires minimal labor touches per dollar of revenue generated.

• Walmart’s lower sales per employee metric is not indicative of operational inefficiency, but rather a fundamentally different strategic mandate. Walmart operates a decentralized, hyper-complex omnichannel network with over 100,000 SKUs per supercenter. This labor-intensive model is required to support intricate logistics, individual item stocking, diverse grocery operations, and last-mile e-commerce fulfillment.

• Regionally, the divergence remains pronounced. In the U.S. market, Costco pushes $862,362 per employee compared to Walmart’s $345,133. Internationally, Costco maintains its extraordinary productivity (averaging $620,637 per employee), demonstrating that its low-touch, high-throughput warehouse economics scale seamlessly across borders, while Walmart’s localized, multi-format international strategy ($244,633 per employee) continues to rely on heavy human capital deployment.

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

Back To Table Of Contents

Walmart Sales Per Employee: U.S., International, and Total Corporate

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

Back To Table Of Contents

Costco Sales Per Employee: 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.

Back To Table Of Contents

Walmart vs Costco Sales Per Employee: U.S. Market, International, and Total Corporate

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

Back To Table Of Contents

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.

Back To Table Of Contents

Disclosure

We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to assist us in writing some of the text in this article. However, the data is directly obtained from original sources and meticulously cross-checked by our editors multiple times to ensure its accuracy and reliability.

If you find the information in this article helpful, please consider sharing it on social media. Additionally, providing a link back to this article from any website can help us create more content like this in the future.

Thank you for your support and engagement! Your involvement helps us continue to provide high-quality, reliable content.

Back To Table Of Contents