Home Depot Is Opening 12 Stores in 2026. Its Supply Arm Has 1,200 Branches.

Home Depot has 2,028 US locations in our September data, up from 2,021 in April. Seven stores in five months, a gain of 0.35%.

Those seven are not a slowdown anyone is hiding. Home Depot announced 12 new US stores for 2026, and the 7 in our data are 7 of those 12. The company is executing a plan that tops out at 12 stores against a base of 2,028, an expansion worth 0.6% of the footprint in a full year.

Meanwhile its distribution subsidiary runs about 1,200 locations. Counting Home Depot stores has stopped describing how Home Depot grows.

The 7 New Stores

Three of the 7 are in Texas, which went from 190 Home Depots to 193, and none of the 7 entered a state where the company had no presence. Every one appears on Home Depot’s own announcement list, and the five that haven’t reached our data yet are the ones the company scheduled for later in the fall: Cookeville, Tennessee; Penitas, Texas; Broken Arrow, Oklahoma; Inverness, Florida; and Clinton, Utah. We checked each of those five against the dataset and none is present.

A location dataset that agrees with a company’s published plans, including on what hasn’t happened yet, is one you can build on.

Third Place by Store Count

Home Depot is the default answer to “biggest home improvement retailer.” By revenue that holds. By store count it is third.

Ace Hardware is ahead on the strength of a co-op model that adds stores without building them, and Tractor Supply passed Home Depot while opening 47 locations in the same five months Home Depot opened 7. Store count and market position are different measurements.

Home Depot and Lowe’s Have Split the Country

The two chains are treated as direct rivals, and nationally the counts are close: 2,028 to 1,765. State by state, they barely overlap.

Home Depot leads in 29 states, Lowe’s leads in 20, and Maine is tied at 11 each. A national gap of 263 stores is the sum of a lot of lopsided state-level results rather than a narrow lead everywhere. California is Home Depot’s strongest market at better than two to one. North Carolina runs the other way at 40 to 118. Lowe’s has been a North Carolina company since 1921, when it opened in North Wilkesboro, and still has its headquarters in the state.

The split is regional. By census region:

Those rows cover the 50 states. They come to 2,014 for Home Depot and 1,764 for Lowe’s, short of the national totals because DC and the territories sit outside the regions: Home Depot has 10 stores in Puerto Rico, 2 in the US Virgin Islands, and 1 each in DC and Guam, and Lowe’s has 1 in DC.

Home Depot leads three of the four regions and leads the West by better than 1.7 to 1. The South is the only region where Lowe’s is ahead, and 12 of the 20 states Lowe’s leads sit inside it: Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia. Home Depot’s 29-state lead is built on the West and the big Sun Belt states; Lowe’s is built on the Southeast.

Of the 1,608 cities with a Home Depot, 780 also have a Lowe’s. A little under half of Home Depot’s footprint faces its nearest competitor in the same town.

The Expansion Moved to Distribution

Home Depot bought SRS Distribution in 2024. In September 2025 SRS completed a $5.5 billion acquisition of GMS, a distributor of drywall, ceilings and steel framing. The combined operation runs about 1,200 locations, more than 3,500 sales staff and a fleet of nearly 8,000 trucks, against the 12 new stores planned for the year.

Lowe’s did the same thing on the same timeline, closing on Foundation Building Materials for $8.8 billion. Both companies spent billions on contractor supply networks in the same eighteen months, and both are opening stores in the single digits to low teens per year.

The two largest players in the category now compete on who supplies the contractor. Neither acquisition shows up in a store count, which is why a store count alone will mislead you about both companies.

Where the 2,028 Stores Are

Home Depot operates in all 50 states, plus DC, Puerto Rico, Guam and the US Virgin Islands. Hawaii has 8 stores. The dataset also holds 28 Canadian Home Depot locations, 15 in British Columbia and 13 in Ontario, which are excluded from the US figures throughout.

The stores concentrate in metros. 630 of the 2,028, nearly a third, sit in the 210 cities that have two or more. Houston alone has 21, then San Antonio with 13, Chicago 11, Miami 10, and San Diego, Phoenix and Las Vegas with 9 each.

At the other end, 266 cities have a Home Depot and none of the other five chains, against 2,271 such cities for Ace Hardware. A 100,000-square-foot box needs a population base, so it goes where the people already are.

Across three snapshots the map has barely moved. The dataset held 2,022 locations in March, 2,021 in April after a single closure, and 2,028 in September, a net gain of six over six months.

Store counts show where a company has built, not what it earns or how a given store performs. Home Depot could hold flat at 2,028 US stores and grow substantially through SRS and GMS, and the location data would show none of it.

The full Home Depot dataset with all 2,028 locations is on our data page.