AT&T reported strong fourth-quarter and full-year results, meeting or exceeding its 2025 guidance as it doubled down on fiber and 5G expansion with deals for Lumen and EchoStar assets, plus sharpened its focus on higher-margin enterprise services, and restructured reporting around its converged connectivity strategy.
In sum – what to know:
Growth delivered – AT&T revenues rose 3.6% in Q4 and 2.7% for the year, supported by sustained post-paid mobile and fiber subscriber growth.
Strategy in motion – AT&T reinforced its ambition to be the leading US provider of “advanced connectivity”, backed by new spectrum and fibers.
Fast convergence – fiber-mobile bundling climbed sharply; more expected in the long term as fiber reach expands beyond 40 million locations.
AT&T has claimed “strong” fourth-quarter and full-year results, hitting its 2025 targets, even beating them on some counts – as it pursues its stated strategy to “become the best advanced connectivity provider in America”. John Stankey, chairman and chief executive at the firm, stated: “[We] executed well against this strategy in 2025.” Revenues climbed 3.6 percent in the quarter to $33.5 billion, versus $32.3 billion in the year-ago period; they were up 2.7 percent in the year to $125.6 billion. Stankey cited “another solid year of 5G and fiber subscriber growth”.
Its post-paid mobile base was up by 1.5 million subscribers at the end of 2025 (for the “fifth consecutive year”, said Stankey); it also added over one million net-new fiber subscribers in the year (for the “eighth consecutive year”). Stankey called it AT&T’s “best year for consumer broadband subscriber growth in a decade”. He said the firm’s better “financial flexibility” had seen it make “opportunistic strategic investments” in 2025, including deals to acquire spectrum licenses from EchoStar ($23 billion) and fiber assets from Lumen Technologies ($5.75 billion).
The latter, for Lumen’s consumer fiber business (‘mass markets’, comprising one million subs and four million sites), will close shortly. “These transactions represent key building blocks [to] expand the total addressable market for ‘advanced connectivity’ services in the years ahead,” said Stankey. For ‘advanced connectivity’, read fiber and 5G/6G for the new AI era, including higher-margin private services (MPLS, SD-WAN, VPNs) for large national, multi-national, and public sector firms. AT&T will report differently next quarter.
The firm is grouping its consumer/enterprise 5G and fiber businesses in the US, responsible for 90 percent of its revenues, together going forward, and separately of its ‘legacy’ concerns, housing the company’s domestic voice and data services provided over its copper-based network to consumer and business customers, and its ‘Latin America’ unit, which is basically all of its Mexican stuff. Its EchoStar and Lumen deals, together with Gigapower, its 50/50 fibre-to-the-premise joint-venture with Blackrock, announced in 2023, are about amping up its main propositions.
Stankey said on an earnings call: “Including (50/50 fibre-to-the-premise joint-venture with Blackrock) Gigapower and the fiber assets we’re acquiring from Lumen, we expect to reach over 40 million customer locations with our fiber services by the end of this year, up from 32 million at the end of 2025. Beyond 2026, we plan to expand our fiber reach by approximately five million locations annually through the end of this decade. We expect this to drive rapid expansion of our opportunity to sell fiber and 5G together to both households and businesses at unmatched scale.”
AT&T claimed the “fastest annual increase” in its “convergence rate”, up 200 basis points year-over-year, with 42 percent of households taking fiber broadband also now taking mobile broadband, it said. Stankey responded to analysts on its call: “We’re going to drive that to 50 percent… I don’t expect it to stop there…. We’re in a structural realignment… and this is going to be an industry of converged providers… If you look back… when there were compelling bundles in the market, we approached periods where 80 percent of consumers were bundling. And I would expect that at some point in time, over the long haul, you might see something similar to that occur.
All told, AT&T’s revenues climbed 3.6 percent in the quarter to $33.5 billion, versus $32.3 billion at the end of 2024; it put the uplift down to higher sales in its general mobile/wireless (‘mobility’, covering consumer and enterprise 4G/5G sales, plus IoT on the side) and ‘consumer wireline’ (fixed-line telephony, home broadband, fixed-wireless access; FWA) businesses, plus from its Mexican unit. These offset a decline in its ‘business wireline’ unit. Revenues for the full year were $125.6 billion, up 2.7 percent from $122.3 billion a year ago; the explanation was the same.
Mobile revenue was up 5.3 percent in the quarter of 2025, thanks to a 2.4 percent jump in service revenue and 12.7 percent higher equipment sales. Consumer wireline revenues were up 2.9 percent, driven by broadband revenue growth of 6.7 percent (thanks to fiber revenue growth of 13.6 percent), partially offset by declines in legacy voice and data services. Fixed-line sales to enterprises were down 7.5 percent in the quarter, versus 2024, mostly attributed to lower fixed telephone (“legacy”) and “other transitional services” (down 17.5 percent) – even as the firm saw 6.8 percent growth in fiber and new ‘advanced connectivity’ services.
Operating expenses in the fourth quarter were $27.7 billion, up marginally primarily (from $27 billion at the end of 2024) because of higher mobile sales – driving higher equipment, advertising, selling, bad debt expenses, plus some restructuring/transformation costs, it said. They were $101.5 billion for the year, versus $103.3 billion in 2024. Operating income was $5.8 billion in the quarter (versus $5.3 billion a year ago); net income was $4.2 billion for the whole of 2025 (versus $4.4 billion).
Profit, as adjusted EBITDA, was $11.2 billion on the quarter and $46.4 billion in the year, up over both periods ($10.8 billion and $44.8 billion in 2024). The company’s total debt at the end of 2025 was $136.1 billion. Pascal Desroches, chief financial officer at AT&T, said the firm achieved over four percent growth in consolidated adjusted EBITDA during the fourth quarter, while expanding adjusted EBITDA margins by 20 basis points. As well, he stated: “Adjusted EPS grew by over 20 percent in the fourth quarter to $0.52 and nearly nine percent for the year to $2.12.”
AT&T reported over $1 billion in cost savings for 2025, with a plan to achieve an additional $4 billion in annual cost savings by the end of 2028. Full-year free cash flow was $16.6 billion.
