Verizon Earnings: Phone Lines Rise but Revenue per Account Falls

By Stock Titan Editorial Team Published October 26, 2026, 07:58 AM EDT

Is Verizon cutting prices to win customers?

Verizon launched the Simplicity plan on June 16, 2026, at $45. People switching from another carrier got an initial offer of $30 a line, according to its announcement. The same day it opened a loyalty program to every monthly-plan customer who opts in, with 3% back each month in Verizon Dollars and no activation or upgrade fees.

The schedule Verizon filed with its results shows what happened to the money. Its average monthly service revenue per account, which Verizon calls ARPA, was $168.08 in the third quarter against $171.27 a year earlier. That 1.9% drop is in the results filing Verizon made with the market regulator.

That figure covers every monthly-plan account, consumer and business, with all its lines together. It is Verizon’s revenue, and it is no one’s bill. Phone sales sit outside it, and a single customer’s bill may well have gone up. Held across the 34.47 million accounts, the drop is worth about $330 million a quarter, by our count, which is a size check and not a measured saving for anyone.

The drop did not come with fewer phone lines per account. That average rose to 2.74 at the end of September from 2.71 a year earlier, by our count.

Show the data

Item	2025	2026	Change
Q1	$169.81	$166.66	-$3.15
Q2	$170.79	$168.35	-$2.44
Q3	$171.27	$168.08	-$3.19

The decline also started before the new plan. In the first quarter of 2026 the figure was already 1.9% below a year earlier, and in the second quarter it was 1.4% lower, both as Verizon printed them. Verizon’s release does not say what drives it. Our reading is that Simplicity and the loyalty perks cannot be the whole explanation, since the drop began before either existed.

AT&T, which reported on October 21, took the opposite path. It collected $58.90 a month per monthly-plan phone line in the third quarter, against $56.64 a year earlier, according to its quarterly data file. Its release said wireless service revenue grew on more subscribers and on “pricing actions that were partially offset by promotional discounts on wireless subscriber additions,” meaning price changes trimmed by discounts for new customers. The two measures differ, since Verizon counts per account and AT&T per phone line, so only their direction compares. We looked at AT&T’s side in our AT&T earnings article, and T-Mobile, the third big carrier, reports on October 28.

The government’s price index for cellphone service, part of the consumer price index, tells a bumpier story. It sat below its year-earlier level in every month from January to July 2026, then jumped in August. By September it was 3.2% above a year before (more in our September inflation article). Our reading is that the two measures can split because the index follows prices, while Verizon’s figure also falls when customers move to cheaper plans.

What is Verizon’s $2 billion AI deal with Amazon?

The deal “establishes a commercial framework to scale distributed compute and meet the real-time demands of agentic and generative AI workloads,” Verizon said in the results release. As we read it, that means a set of terms under which Verizon’s network helps Amazon run AI programs across many sites and answer requests quickly.

Chief executive Dan Schulman said that “technology leaders are choosing our fiber network to power the next generation of AI infrastructure.” He was pointing to Verizon’s fiber lines as the part of the company AI customers are buying. The release gives no yearly revenue for the deal, so its weight next to Verizon’s $34.3 billion of quarterly revenue cannot be judged yet.

Verizon raises its 2026 phone line forecast

A year earlier the third quarter brought Verizon only 44,000 net additions, meaning new monthly-plan phone lines minus the lines that left. It lost lines on that measure in the first half of 2025, then turned it around late in the year.

Show the data

Category	Value
Q1 2025	-289K
Q2 2025	-9K
Q3 2025	44K
Q4 2025	616K
Q1 2026	55K
Q2 2026	184K
Q3 2026	406K

Verizon raised its full-year forecasts for the third quarter in a row, and for phone lines it now expects a net 1.1 million to 1.2 million this year. In April and again in July it had said it expected the upper half of 750,000 to 1.0 million, according to its first quarter and second quarter releases.

Verizon has added 645,000 so far this year, so the new range leaves 455,000 to 555,000 for the fourth quarter, by our count. That is fewer than the 616,000 of the fourth quarter of 2025.

Fewer customers are leaving, too. Churn, the share of phone customers who leave each month, fell to 0.94% from 0.98%. Verizon’s count of monthly-plan accounts at the end of September was almost exactly where it stood a year earlier, because the count shrank in the quarters before this one.

Verizon also lifted its forecast for adjusted earnings per share, its profit divided by its shares and leaving out items Verizon lists as special, to $5.04 to $5.06.

Verizon dividend, buybacks and debt

The quarterly dividend, the cash Verizon pays shareholders for each share, was declared at $0.7075, a little above the last quarter of 2025. Verizon expects to repurchase up to $4.5 billion of stock this year, and fewer shares were outstanding at September 30 than at the end of 2025. Our dividend yield calculator turns a dividend like this into a yield, the dividend as a share of the stock price.

Dividends and buybacks together took about $12.8 billion in the first nine months, by our count. Free cash flow, the cash left after paying for the network, was $18.0 billion. Total debt rose during the quarter, while unsecured debt, borrowing not backed by specific assets, fell; the panel below has both. More of Verizon’s history is on its financials page.

Why Verizon’s operating income rose as revenue per account fell

Verizon said its promotional cost of acquisition, the offers it uses to win new customers, fell 41% from a year earlier. Its promotional cost of retention, the offers that keep current customers, improved 30%. The release gives no dollar amounts for either.

Fewer customers are swapping phones as well. Verizon’s upgrade rate, its measure of how many monthly-plan lines took a new device, was 2.6% against 3.3% a year earlier, and Verizon said people keep their phones longer.

Carriers often sell phones for less than they paid for them and earn it back on the monthly plan. In the third quarter Verizon’s cost of wireless equipment ran $707 million above its equipment revenue, against $864 million a year earlier, by our count. That gap also moves with how many devices are sold and which ones, so it is only a rough gauge of subsidies.

Service and other revenue rose $995 million. Frontier, the fiber internet company Verizon bought on January 20, 2026, is in this year’s numbers and not last year’s. The release does not say how much of the rise it supplied.

Show the data

Step	Value
Q3 2025	$12,723M
More revenue	+$995M
Smaller phone gap	+$157M
Overhead	+$272M
Service costs	-$402M
Q3 2026	$13,745M

Higher network and service costs took back $402 million. Verizon’s adjusted EBITDA, which also leaves out interest, taxes and items it lists as special, came to 40.2% of revenue, a share Verizon called the highest it has ever reported.

Put together, Verizon is taking in less per account and spending less on promotions to win and keep customers. The extra phone lines came with lower service revenue per account, and applied to a fixed 34.47 million accounts, that decline equals about $330 million a quarter. Our reading is that the rise in operating income before depreciation came from elsewhere: service revenue that now includes Frontier, which the release does not size, a smaller gap on phone sales and lower overhead.

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