Toast added 9,500 restaurant locations in a quarter and raised its profit outlook

Toast Inc., which sells point-of-sale and payments technology to restaurants, reported second-quarter 2026 total revenue of $1.908 billion, split between $1.57 billion from financial technology solutions (primarily payment processing on transactions run through its platform), $290 million from software subscriptions, and $48 million from hardware and professional services. The company added approximately 9,500 net new restaurant locations during the quarter, pushing its total base to roughly 180,000 locations — a 22% increase from a year earlier.

The revenue mix is the defining feature of Toast’s business model: the overwhelming majority of revenue comes from payments volume flowing through restaurants that use its point-of-sale system, not from software subscription fees. That means Toast’s growth is tied directly to signing up more restaurant locations and to those restaurants’ own sales volume, rather than a pure per-seat software-licensing model — a structure that ties Toast’s fortunes closely to the health of the restaurant industry itself.

Following the results, Toast raised its full-year 2026 Adjusted EBITDA guidance to a range of $805 million to $825 million, up from a prior forecast of $790 million to $810 million. Notably, the company said it is reinvesting a $10 million tariff refund received during the quarter into growth initiatives rather than dropping the full amount straight to profit — a signal that management is choosing to fund expansion over banking every incremental dollar, even while still raising its overall profitability outlook.

Toast operates in a competitive restaurant-technology field alongside players like Square (Block) and smaller vertical POS providers, where switching costs and integrated payments create stickiness once a restaurant adopts a system. Adding 9,500 locations in a single quarter, while simultaneously raising profit guidance, suggests the company is scaling its footprint without sacrificing the margin improvement investors have been watching for since Toast’s public listing — though restaurant-industry-wide traffic and same-store sales trends remain the external variable that could affect its payments-driven revenue regardless of location growth.