Tractor Supply Opened 47 Stores in Five Months. Next Year It's Slowing Down.

When we last looked at Tractor Supply in April, they had opened 8 stores in a single month and were sitting at 2,434 locations.

They’ve added 47 more. That’s 2,481 locations, and 29 of the 47 went into towns where neither Home Depot nor Lowe’s has a store.

Tractor Supply is expanding into a market the big box chains have largely ignored: small towns and rural communities where the nearest Lowe’s might be a 45-minute drive. That part hasn’t changed. What changed this year is the shape of the stores, and it explains why the company cut its 2027 opening target while its footprint keeps growing.

Where the 47 Went

34 of the 47 are in the South. The new-store list reads like a list of places the big boxes skipped: Mountain View and Prairie Grove in Arkansas, Denmark and Pelzer in South Carolina, White Bluff and Munford in Tennessee, Masaryktown in Florida, Brandenburg in Kentucky.

Two of the largest metros on the list run the other way. Memphis (Bartlett) and Spring, Texas are both suburban infill inside markets Tractor Supply already serves.

Two of the five biggest state gains came from outside the established base. South Carolina ranks 14th by Tractor Supply store count and Arkansas ranks 20th, and they added 4 stores each, close behind Florida and Georgia at 5 apiece from 6th and 7th place. Adding stores in a state that already ranks near the top is infill. Adding four in a state ranked 20th is a region the chain is still building out.

The 100-Store Plan, and the 2027 Retreat

Tractor Supply committed to opening 100 new stores in 2026, and they’re hitting it. They opened a record 40 stores in Q1 and another 28 in Q2, after starting the year with their 2,400th store in Aiken, South Carolina.

2027 is where it changes. The company has dialed back next year’s target to 85-90 stores, down from the 100 it originally planned.

The change is in what they’re counting.

Bigger Boxes, Not Just More of Them

Tractor Supply’s standard new-build prototype runs about 22,000 square feet. The stores they’ve been opening lately are much larger, because they’re moving into buildings somebody else already built. The sizes reported so far:

• A former Big Lots in Lakeland, Florida: about 40,000 sq ft, nearly twice the prototype
• A former supermarket in West Babylon, New York: over 50,000 sq ft
• A former Toys R Us in Ventura, California: about 47,000 sq ft

The Big Lots conversions are essentially finished. Tractor Supply picked up 19 leases out of the bankruptcy in May 2025, opened about half that fall, and opened the rest in Q1 2026. The Port Orange, Florida store we flagged in April (#3189, 3818A S Nova Rd) was one of them.

The West Babylon store is #2919 at 64 Route 109, one of the 47 new locations.

The extra square footage isn’t for more shelf space. These larger stores give Tractor Supply room to work as fulfillment points, including the enhanced final-mile delivery the company has put at the center of its growth plan. Opening fewer, bigger stores that also ship is a different plan from opening more, smaller ones.

Where Tractor Supply Doesn’t Compete with Big Box

Out of 2,392 cities with a Tractor Supply store, 1,390 of them, or 58%, have no Home Depot and no Lowe’s. That ratio hasn’t moved since April, when it was 1,364 of 2,352. They’re growing without diluting the strategy.

The new stores skew even further that way. 29 of the 47, or 62%, are in cities with no big box competitor at all.

Tractor Supply’s model works in places that can’t support a 100,000-square-foot big box store. They sell feed, fencing, pet supplies, and work gear alongside power tools and hardware. In a lot of these markets the customer is different: ranchers, hobby farmers, rural homeowners. The big box stores aren’t set up to serve them.

One caveat on all of this. Store locations show where a chain has decided to compete, not how well it is doing there. The count says nothing about revenue per store or foot traffic, so a 58% uncontested share describes Tractor Supply’s strategy rather than its margins.

Here’s what the top states look like now, with the change since April:

Texas still leads with 259 locations, more Tractor Supply stores than most brands have nationwide. But it added only 2. The gains are concentrated in Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee, ranked 6th, 7th, and 10th, while the five largest states added 7 between them.

2,481 Stores and Counting

Tractor Supply now operates 2,481 stores across 48 states. The only two it hasn’t entered are Alaska and Hawaii. That keeps it in second place among hardware and home improvement retailers by store count, behind only Ace Hardware’s 4,947 locations.

Across three data points the climb is steady: 2,426 open locations in March, 2,434 in April, 2,481 in September.

Here’s where all six brands stand:

Tractor Supply’s 47 new stores this period are more than Home Depot and Lowe’s opened combined, by a factor of almost five. Home Depot added 7 and Lowe’s added 3.

With 2,481 stores in September and a 100-store year still running, Tractor Supply should clear 2,500 before the end of 2026. The 2027 target drops to 85-90 while the average store gets bigger and takes over buildings vacated by retailers that didn’t make it. Counting store openings will understate what Tractor Supply adds next year.

The full Tractor Supply dataset with all 2,481 open locations is on our data page.