Walmart vs Costco: Total Employees and Employee Per Store

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

Let’s get into the details!

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

Walmart

• Walmart global store count and locations breakdown by region,
• Walmart retail stores, property ownership, and distribution facilities,

Costco

• Costco total employees and employees breakdown by region,
• 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 Employee Per Store

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

• At the consolidated level, Costco has consistently employed more staff per store than Walmart throughout the period — a gap that has widened over time rather than narrowed. Costco’s consolidated employees per store grew from approximately 305 in 2016 to 373 in 2025, while Walmart’s equivalent metric declined from 197 in 2016 to 192 in 2026. The result is a differential that has expanded from roughly 108 employees per store in 2016 to approximately 181 by 2025 — a divergence that reflects fundamentally different labor models, store formats, and operational philosophies.

• Costco’s higher per-store staffing is consistent with its warehouse format, which requires larger teams to manage high-volume merchandise handling, member services, and the breadth of ancillary departments — from pharmacy and optical to tire centers and food courts — within each location. Walmart’s lower consolidated figure is partly a structural artifact of its large international portfolio, which carries significantly lower per-store employee counts and dilutes the consolidated average.

• The U.S. comparison reveals a more compressed but directionally consistent differential. Walmart U.S. employees per store have been range-bound between 279 and 318 across the period, while Costco U.S. has grown steadily from 308 in 2019 to 355 in 2024 before modestly declining to 355 in 2025. The gap in the U.S. has widened from approximately 28 employees per store in 2019 to approximately 48 by 2025 — meaningful but not as dramatic as the consolidated differential, given that both companies operate large-format stores domestically with broadly comparable physical footprints.

• Walmart U.S.’s per-store employee count spiked to 318 in 2021 and 2022 — likely reflecting pandemic-era staffing requirements and elevated customer volumes — before normalizing back to the low 300s, suggesting that the underlying domestic staffing model has been relatively stable. Costco U.S., by contrast, has shown a more consistent upward trajectory, adding employees per store as its revenue per store has grown — implying that staffing investment and productivity gains have moved in tandem rather than in opposition.

• The international comparison presents the starkest divergence of the three pairings and is the most analytically significant. Costco International’s employees per store expanded from 364 in 2019 to 414 in 2025 — a consistently high and rising figure driven by the full-size warehouse format applied uniformly across Canada, Japan, Korea, Australia, and other markets. Walmart International’s employees per store, by contrast, declined persistently from 127 in 2016 to 87 in 2026 — less than one-quarter of Costco International’s equivalent.

• This gap is not indicative of operational inefficiency on Walmart’s part but rather reflects the dramatically different composition of its international portfolio — a large proportion of smaller-format discount and neighborhood stores, particularly in Mexico and Central America, which require far fewer employees per location than a full-size warehouse.

• The directional decline in Walmart International’s per-store employee count also reflects the portfolio rationalization of recent years, as the divestiture of larger-format operations in the U.K. and other markets removed higher-staffed locations from the mix. Taken together, the employee per store comparison reinforces a consistent theme across this analysis: Costco’s standardized, high-productivity warehouse model generates more revenue, more profit, and employs more people per store than any segment of Walmart’s diversified global portfolio — a reflection of deliberate format discipline that compounds its operational advantages over time.

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

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Walmart Total Employee and Employees By Region

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 Employee Per Store:= 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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Costco Total Employees and Employees By Region

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 Employee Per Store:= U.S., Canada, 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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Walmart vs Costco Employee Per Store:= 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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