Host's comparable hotel RevPAR rose 7.0% on higher room rates and World Cup demand, lifting margins and Adjusted FFO per share 8.6% to $0.63, while hotel sales held total revenue growth to 3.4%; full-year guidance was raised.
Revenue
$1.6B
+3.4% YoY
Net income
$237M
+7.2% YoY
Diluted EPS
$0.35
+9.4% YoY
Operating margin
17.9%
Overview
Host Hotels & Resorts, the largest US hotel real estate investment trust (REIT — a company that owns property and must pay out most of its taxable income as dividends), grew total revenue 3.4% to $1,640 million in the second quarter of 2026. That headline understates how well the hotels actually did: at the 74 hotels Host owned in both periods (its "comparable" set), revenue rose 5.9%, and comparable hotel RevPAR rose 7.0%.
RevPAR ("revenue per available room") is the hotel industry's core yardstick: room revenue divided by every room the hotel could have sold, whether it was booked or not. It rises when a hotel fills more rooms, charges more per room, or both. Total RevPAR does the same calculation with all hotel revenue — restaurants, banquets, spa, golf — not just rooms.
The two numbers pull in different directions for a simple reason: Host has sold six hotels since 2025 (including the two Four Seasons resorts in Orlando and Jackson Hole, sold in the first quarter of 2026), and those sales took $95 million out of this quarter's revenue. A one-off $53 million from selling seven villas next to the former Four Seasons Orlando partly filled the gap. Strip out the villa sales and total revenue ($1,587 million) was flat against last year's $1,586 million — the growth at the hotels Host kept was roughly equal to the revenue it gave up by selling hotels.
Key figures
Metric
Q2 2026
Q2 2025
YoY Change
Total revenues
$1,640M
$1,586M
+3.4%
Operating profit
$293M
$277M
+5.8%
Operating profit margin (GAAP)
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Comparable hotel figures, Adjusted FFO and Adjusted EBITDAre are non-GAAP measures the company reconciles in the filing. A basis point (bp) is one-hundredth of a percentage point.
For a hotel REIT, FFO (funds from operations) is the earnings figure investors watch most: it adds back depreciation — a large accounting charge for buildings that doesn't reflect cash leaving the business — and removes gains or losses on property sales. Host's "Adjusted" FFO also strips a few other one-off items. EBITDAre is a similar real-estate-industry measure of operating earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and property-sale gains.
What drove the quarter: price, not volume
Almost all of the 7.0% RevPAR gain came from charging more. Comparable average room rates rose 5.8%, to $335.83, while occupancy (the share of rooms actually sold) edged up only 0.8 percentage points, to 74.9%. The 10-Q attributes the rate gains to "strong transient leisure business, particularly at resorts and in connection with the FIFA World Cup matches, and robust group business."
The business-mix data in the earnings release makes the price-driven nature explicit (these figures cover Host's current portfolio):
Customer type
Q2 room nights
Change in room nights
Q2 rooms revenue
Change in rooms revenue
Transient (individual travellers)
1.487M
−0.7%
$559M
+6.9%
Group (conferences, events)
1.093M
+3.5%
$332M
+7.4%
Contract (e.g. airline crews)
0.215M
+3.4%
$48M
+6.6%
Individual travellers booked slightly fewer nights than a year ago but paid about 7% more in total. Group business grew on both volume and price.
Outside the rooms, comparable food-and-beverage revenue rose $26 million, or 5.8%, "driven by growth in banquet and audio-visual revenues from strong group contribution." Other comparable revenue was roughly flat: more spa and golf spending was offset by lower attrition and cancellation fees (charges when a group books fewer rooms than it contracted for, or cancels), which had been unusually high in 2025.
The biggest market swings were renovation comparisons
The fastest-growing markets by comparable Total RevPAR were Austin (+53.4%), Washington, D.C. (+20.4%) and Northern Virginia (+13.5%). The filing says these were "primarily due to the impact of large-scale renovation projects recently completed... and associated renovation disruption in 2025" — in other words, rooms that were closed or disrupted last year are now back and freshly renovated, so part of the gain is an easy comparison rather than new demand. Austin occupancy, for example, jumped from 48.7% to 69.8%. The Grand Hyatt Washington finished its major renovation during the quarter.
Maui (+10.6% Total RevPAR, occupancy up from 70.6% to 78.7%) is still recovering from the 2023 wildfires. On the weak side, New Orleans (−5.6%) and Denver (−5.2%) had fewer city-wide conventions, and the New Orleans Marriott is mid-renovation. Seattle (−3.6%) and Orlando (−0.2%) also slipped.
Margins: higher rates beat higher wages
Comparable hotel EBITDA — the profit the hotels themselves generate before interest, tax and depreciation — rose 7.8% to $497 million, and its margin widened 60 bps to 31.9%. Comparable revenue grew $87 million and comparable hotel EBITDA grew $36 million, so about 41 cents of each extra revenue dollar reached hotel-level profit.
Room-rate increases carry high margins because charging more for the same room costs little extra. That offset real cost pressure: comparable rooms expenses rose 4.6% and comparable "other departmental and support" expenses rose 6.1%, both "primarily due to higher wage expense." Incentive management fees paid to the hotel operators (Marriott, Hyatt and others earn these once a hotel clears profit thresholds) rose 15.4% as more properties crossed those thresholds; management expects that growth to moderate. Lower property insurance premiums cut comparable other property-level expenses by $5 million, or 4.8%.
Why earnings grew faster than revenue
Net income attributable to Host rose 7.2% to $237 million, and diluted EPS rose 9.4% to $0.35. Several items explain the gap between that and the 3.4% revenue growth:
Interest income rose to $18 million from $7 million. The filing doesn't explain the increase, but it coincides with Host holding proceeds from its first-quarter hotel sales until the July dividend.
Income taxes fell to $18 million from $27 million.
The villa sales added $53 million of revenue against $44 million of cost of goods sold; the release says they contributed $8 million to net income and Adjusted EBITDAre.
Working the other way, Q2 2025 included $22 million of "other gains" and a $9 million insurance gain, against a $1 million other loss and no insurance gain this quarter.
Fewer shares: Host repurchased 4.0 million shares for $75 million in the first quarter (none in Q2), which lifts per-share results. This is part of why Adjusted FFO per share (+8.6%) grew faster than Adjusted EBITDAre (+5.8%).
The year-to-date jump in total net income (+55.9% to $742 million) is mostly property-sale gains: $241 million of "other gains" from selling the St. Regis Houston, both Four Seasons resorts and the Sheraton Parsippany. Those gains are excluded from FFO, which is why year-to-date Adjusted FFO per share rose a more modest 7.4%, to $1.30.
Takeaway: Host's hotels had a strong quarter — comparable RevPAR +7.0% and a 60 bp margin gain — but the growth was almost entirely room-rate driven, helped by World Cup events and by hotels coming back from renovation, while transient room nights actually fell 0.7%. Headline revenue barely moved once the one-off villa sales are removed, because the hotels Host has sold are taking out about as much revenue as its remaining hotels are adding.
Balance sheet and dividend
At June 30, 2026, Host had $5.1 billion of debt with a weighted-average interest rate of 4.8%, a weighted-average maturity of 4.7 years and no maturities in 2026, plus about $3.6 billion of available liquidity (including $1.5 billion of undrawn revolving credit). It paid a $0.92 per share dividend on July 15: a $0.20 regular dividend plus a $0.72 special dividend that distributes the roughly $500 million taxable gain from the Four Seasons sales. REITs must pay out most of their taxable income, so large asset-sale gains tend to come back to shareholders this way. That payment reduced cash by $630 million after the quarter ended. $405 million remains under the share repurchase authorization.
Capital spending was $243 million in the first half, against a full-year forecast of $550–630 million, including $73 million on the Marriott and Hyatt "transformational" renovation programs. A March 2026 rainstorm in Hawaii (the "Kona Low") caused an estimated $27–32 million of property costs, which Host expects insurance to substantially cover above its deductible.
Guidance and outlook
Management raised its full-year 2026 targets in the August 5 earnings release:
2026 guidance
Current
Previous
Comparable hotel RevPAR growth
4.75% to 5.25%
3.0% to 4.5%
Comparable hotel Total RevPAR growth
4.75% to 5.25%
3.5% to 5.0%
Comparable hotel EBITDA margin change vs. 2025
+40 to +50 bps (29.6% to 29.7%)
+20 to +50 bps
Net income
$944M to $962M
$908M to $955M
Adjusted EBITDAre
$1,820M to $1,840M
$1,785M to $1,835M
Diluted EPS
$1.35 to $1.38
$1.30 to $1.37
Adjusted FFO per diluted share
$2.15 to $2.18
$2.10 to $2.16
The release says comparable RevPAR grew about 10% in July, again boosted by the World Cup. But the full-year range of 4.75%–5.25% is below the first half's 5.7%, even after a ~10% July — which means the guidance assumes clearly slower growth from August through December. Management says as much: year-over-year margin gains should "moderate as the year progresses, primarily driven by lower room rate growth expectations in the second half of the year." The guidance also includes $16–20 million of net contribution from condominium sales this year (with remaining sales shifting to 2027), and assumes nothing more from the pending Hurricane Helene and Milton insurance claims.
Our read: the second half will be a tougher test. The World Cup was a one-time rate boost, and the renovation comparisons in Austin and Washington will fade once last year's disrupted quarters roll off. With transient room nights already slightly negative, Host's growth depends on keeping rates rising — watch whether average room rate growth holds up in the third-quarter results, and whether wage increases start to outpace it and squeeze the margin gains. The $0.63 Q2 Adjusted FFO per share, plus $1.30 for the first half, puts Host on track for its $2.15–$2.18 target only if the second half contributes roughly $0.85–$0.88.