Wickes’ first-half results leave the home-improvement retailer needing a significantly higher year-on-year rate of profit growth in the second half if it is to finish 2026 around current analyst expectations.
Adjusted profit before tax increased just 1.1% to £27.6 million in H1, compared with £27.3 million a year earlier, yet Wickes says it remains on track for current consensus adjusted PBT of approximately £54.6 million for the full year.
Finance Gazette’s calculations show what that means for the remaining six months. Wickes produced £49.9 million of adjusted PBT during FY2025, of which £27.3 million came in the first half, leaving an implied £22.6 million for H2 2025. Reaching the current £54.6 million consensus after £27.6 million in H1 2026 would therefore require approximately £27.0 million in H2, equivalent to 19.5% year-on-year growth.
That does not mean Wickes needs a dramatic sequential increase from the first half. In fact, £27.0 million would be around 2.2% below the £27.6 million generated in H1 2026, with the high year-on-year growth rate partly reflecting the comparatively low £22.6 million contribution from H2 last year.
The more useful question is therefore whether improving sales momentum and management’s planned productivity benefits can produce substantially stronger year-on-year profit growth than was visible during the first six months.
The relationship becomes clearer when revenue expectations are considered alongside profit.
Analyst estimates published by Wickes put average FY2026 revenue at approximately £1.68 billion, alongside adjusted PBT of £54.6 million. With £865.3 million of revenue already reported in H1, that implies approximately £814.7 million of revenue in H2 2026.
Wickes generated about £788.3 million of revenue in H2 2025, based on FY2025 revenue of £1.6362 billion less the £847.9 million reported in the first half. On that basis, current consensus implies approximately 3.4% year-on-year H2 revenue growth but 19.5% adjusted PBT growth.
That combination would increase the derived adjusted PBT margin for the second half from roughly 2.9% last year to around 3.3% this year, an improvement of approximately 0.45 percentage points.
| Finance Gazette calculation | H2 2025 | Implied H2 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue | £788.3m | £814.7m |
| Adjusted PBT | £22.6m | £27.0m |
| Revenue growth | — | 3.4% |
| Adjusted PBT growth | — | 19.5% |
| Adjusted PBT margin | 2.87% | 3.31% |
Current market expectations therefore contain an implicit profitability challenge: profit growth would need to materially outpace revenue growth during the second half, whereas that degree of operating improvement was not evident in H1.
Revenue increased 2.1% to £865.3 million during the first six months, while adjusted operating profit rose 1.7% to £40.8 million and adjusted PBT increased 1.1% to £27.6 million. Adjusted operating margin remained at 4.7%, while the adjusted PBT margin stayed at approximately 3.2%.
Wickes therefore demonstrated sales resilience during the first half, but not yet the level of year-on-year profit acceleration embedded in the current full-year consensus.
There is, however, an important qualification to that calculation: the £54.6 million consensus Wickes is now targeting is lower than analysts expected earlier in 2026.
At the time of the company’s FY2025 results, analyst consensus for 2026 adjusted PBT stood at £57.6 million. It subsequently fell to £57.1 million and then to £55.4 million before reaching the current £54.6 million midpoint.
The present figure is therefore £3.0 million below the earlier £57.6 million expectation, a reduction of approximately 5.2%.
This changes the interpretation of the H2 requirement. A 19.5% increase appears particularly demanding when compared only with H1’s 1.1% growth, but the figure also reflects a weaker H2 2025 comparison and a full-year consensus that has already been revised down during 2026.
The second-half hurdle remains materially above last year’s outcome, but it is lower than the one analysts were setting for Wickes earlier in the year.
There are also signs that the operating picture has improved since June.
Retail like-for-like revenue fell 1.7% in Q1, recovered to growth of 0.7% in Q2 and was down 0.3% across the first half as a whole. Since then, Wickes says Q3 trading has shown a “significantly improved trend”, with Retail like-for-like revenue increasing at a mid-single-digit rate. Management also expects its productivity programme to support H2 profitability and says the group will benefit from lower business rates.
Those developments provide a plausible route from H1’s modest profit growth towards the stronger H2 performance embedded in consensus, although the eventual impact cannot yet be quantified from the information provided.
Retail continued to generate volume growth despite deflation during H1. Revenue increased 0.8% to £639.8 million even though Wickes reported a 2.4% deflationary pricing environment, while TradePro sales rose 5% and active membership increased from 615,000 to 671,000.
The membership growth did not translate directly into the same rate of sales growth because Wickes says it was partially offset by a slight decline in average basket size as prices fell across a number of categories.
For the second half, the important issue is therefore not simply whether Wickes continues attracting customers and increasing volumes, but whether stronger Retail trading and productivity measures translate into the improvement in profitability implied by analyst forecasts.
Design & Installation provided the stronger headline revenue growth during the first half, with delivered revenue increasing 5.7% to £225.5 million and extending the division’s run of positive delivered-sales growth to five consecutive quarters.
The forward order picture, however, is less straightforward. Wickes reported strong ordered sales for Lifestyle Kitchens and Bespoke Bathrooms, but said customers had become more considered about larger purchases and that Bespoke Kitchen orders were softer. Although the total number of Design & Installation projects increased, ordered sales by value were slightly below the previous year.
That distinction matters because delivered sales record revenue once Wickes has satisfied the relevant performance obligation, whereas ordered sales measure the value when an order is agreed.
The division therefore adds useful growth to the current numbers but provides a more qualified signal about the future order pipeline, reinforcing the point that not every operating indicator is accelerating at the same rate.
Wickes describes its first-half performance as strongly volume-led and remains confident that it can meet current market expectations.
The arithmetic underneath that outlook makes the remaining challenge more specific. At the current consensus midpoint, Wickes does not need H2 adjusted PBT to exceed the first-half result, but it does need approximately £27 million compared with £22.6 million in H2 2025.
If the current revenue consensus is also achieved, that would mean converting roughly 3.4% H2 revenue growth into approximately 19.5% adjusted PBT growth, with the derived H2 PBT margin improving from around 2.9% to 3.3%.
Stronger Retail trading in early Q3, productivity measures and lower business rates provide evidence of how that improvement might be achieved, while softer Design & Installation order values and the reduction in analyst expectations during 2026 provide important qualifications.
The second half is therefore less about whether Wickes can keep sales moving forward than whether that improving sales trend can now generate the stronger profit conversion already embedded in current consensus forecasts.
