On August 12, The Home Depot told the market that chair, president and chief executive Ted Decker was taking a temporary medical leave of absence. The company said it expects him back within the next few months and disclosed nothing about the condition. Six days later — Tuesday, before the open — the retailer reports the quarter that carries its spring and early-summer selling season.
What the board did with the interim structure is more interesting than the fact of the leave. It did not name an interim CEO. It split the job.
Ann-Marie Campbell, senior executive vice president, takes oversight of day-to-day operations. Richard McPhail, executive vice president and chief financial officer, takes oversight of financial management and the Pro subsidiaries. Greg Brenneman, the independent lead director, chairs the board while Decker is out. The board said the arrangement followed Decker’s own recommendation, and the filing was explicit on one more point: no changes were made to Campbell’s or McPhail’s compensation.
Read the structure, not the statement
Every piece of that design says short gap, not succession. A company bracing for a long absence hands someone the title, because the title is what lets a person make decisions that outlive the quarter. Home Depot instead widened two existing remits and left the org chart otherwise intact.
The compensation detail is the sharpest tell. Interim pay arrangements are standard when a board expects the arrangement to run — they are how companies compensate for genuine added risk and workload. Declining to touch pay is a statement about expected duration. It is also the thing to watch: if an amended filing shows up later attaching interim comp, the timeline moved.
Our take: The structure is designed to make Tuesday look like a normal earnings day. It probably will be. But splitting a CEO’s job between operations and finance is fine for running the business and awkward for defending a forecast — because a full-year guide is exactly the thing that sits across both halves. Whoever answers “are you still confident?” on Tuesday is answering for a number they did not set, without the authority that normally comes with defending it.
The number underneath
Home Depot went into this quarter carrying fiscal 2026 guidance of comparable sales roughly flat to up 2%, and total sales growth of 2.5% to 4.5%. The gap between those two ranges is acquisition and expansion: the GMS deal, new stores, roughly 40 to 50 new SRS locations, tuck-ins. SRS itself was guided to mid-single-digit organic growth.
Q1 gave the flat-to-2% band very little cushion. Sales were $41.8 billion, up 4.8%. Comparable sales rose 0.6%, and US comps rose 0.4%. The top-line growth was real; almost none of it came from the existing store base.
Consensus for Tuesday sits around $47.5 billion in revenue and $4.71 in EPS against $4.68 a year ago — roughly a point of earnings growth. Which frames the actual question: a full-year guide anchored on flat-to-2% comps, with a first quarter at 0.6%, implies the back half does better than the front. Tuesday is the first checkpoint on whether that acceleration is showing up, and it lands in a stretch where the consumer data has been running soft.
What to watch
- The guide, and who defends it. Reaffirming is the low-friction path. Trimming it while the CEO is on leave is the harder call and the one that tells you the interim structure has real authority.
- Comps versus acquired growth. If total sales land in range but comps sit near zero again, the growth story is M&A integration, not demand recovery.
- Pro versus DIY. Pro outperformed DIY in Q1. McPhail now oversees the Pro subsidiaries directly, so the disclosure around them is worth reading closely.
- Any later filing on interim compensation. The cleanest public signal that the leave is running longer than the board planned.
- Lowe’s on Wednesday. Same category, same housing backdrop, no leadership variable. It is the control group for whatever Home Depot reports.
None of this is a governance crisis. A medical leave with a stated return window and two long-tenured executives covering the desk is close to the best version of an unwanted event. The point is narrower: Home Depot has to publish a judgement call about the rest of its year at the precise moment its judgement is being made by committee. Watch what they do with the guide. That is where the interim structure gets priced.