American Water Works (AWK) Q2 2026 earnings call transcript

I would now like to introduce your host for today's call, Aaron Musgrave, Vice President of Investor Relations. Mr. Musgrave, you may begin. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for today's call. At the end of our prepared remarks, we will open the call for your questions. Let me first go over some safe harbor language. Today, we'll be making forward-looking statements that represent our expectations regarding our future performance or other future events. These statements are predictions based on our current expectations, estimates, and assumptions. However, since these statements deal with future events, they are subject to numerous known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause actual results to be materially different from the results indicated or implied by such statements.

Additional information regarding these risks, uncertainties, and factors, as well as a more detailed analysis of our financials and other important information, is provided in the second quarter earnings release and Form 10-Q, each filed yesterday with the SEC. This call will include a discussion of non-GAAP financial information. A reconciliation of our historical adjusted earnings per share to GAAP earnings per share and other disclosures related to our non-GAAP financial information can be found in the appendix of the slides for this call. And finally, all statements during this presentation related to earnings and earnings per share refer to diluted adjusted earnings and earnings per share.

With that, I will turn the call over to American Waters President and CEO, John Griffith.

John Griffith Thanks, Aaron, and good morning, everyone. Let's turn to slide five, and I will start by covering some highlights of the second quarter and first half of the year. As we announced yesterday, we delivered solid financial results in the second quarter and through the first half of 2026. Adjusted earnings were $1.61 per share for the second quarter, compared to $1.49 per share for the same period last year. In the first six months of 2026, adjusted earnings were $2.62 per share, compared to $2.51 per share in the same period of 2025. With this strength across the business, combined with our expectations for the rest of the year, we continue to be on track to achieve our full-year earnings guidance, which we've again affirmed along with our long-term targets.

David will share more about our results and guidance a bit later. I also want to acknowledge the great work of our state and corporate regulatory teams as they continue to successfully execute our regulatory strategy with rate cases and merger proceedings, which I'll talk more about shortly. We have completed three rate cases already in 2026 in West Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, all of which authorized recovery of nearly 100% of the capital investments we have made in each state. As we've discussed with investors many times over the years, we strategically choose to operate in a diverse set of regulatory environments that we believe have been and will remain supportive of water and wastewater utility investments and consolidation.

American Water continues to receive healthy support at the state level for the work that we do. We, along with utility commissions, all share a strong desire to promote customer affordability, resilient and reliable services, and financially strong utilities. We look forward to continuing to provide common-sense solutions for the benefit of customers and communities across our 14-state footprint.

Moving on to some of our other key accomplishments so far in 2026, we have invested $1.8 billion in capital projects and acquisitions year to date. This reflects our focus on making investments to better serve our customers and to grow the business. As we've said, growing to scale in our states greatly benefits our operating efficiency and long-term customer affordability. Speaking of customer growth, we were very pleased to close on the acquisition of systems from Nexus Water Group ahead of schedule on June 1st. Our teams did a great job of achieving all eight requisite state approvals in a timely and constructive manner. We're also excited to continue our progress on the municipal acquisition front with approximately 57,000 customer connections under agreement as of June 30.

Overall, we're well on our way to executing our capital plan for 2026 and achieving our target of 2% customer growth. These efforts align squarely with our mission to provide safe, clean, reliable, and affordable service to our customers.

Turning to slide 6 I pleased to share that we continued to achieve new milestones in the second quarter related to our proposed merger with essential utilities You may recall as part of the update we provided with Q1 earnings we achieved our first state approval Kentucky in April In May and June we added Ohio and Virginia to the list of approvals received It also worth noting that so far we hearing good support for the merger during public input hearings including in Pennsylvania in April and May In other states, the merger cases are proceeding as planned, including very good progress in Texas, where we've reached a settlement in principle. We remain very pleased with our integration planning to date and the constructive relationships that continue to develop between the American Water and Essential Utilities teams.

Consistent with our messaging from the merger announcement last October, we expect the merger to close by the end of the first quarter of 2027. With that, I'll hand it over to David to cover our financial and regulatory update in further detail. David?

Thanks, John, and good morning, everyone. Starting on slide 8, I'll provide further insights into our financial results for the quarter. Consolidated earnings were $1.61 per share compared to $1.49 per share in Q2 of 2025, representing just over an 8% growth rate. Revenues were higher due to authorized rate increases to recover investments across our states, while depreciation, financing costs, and general taxes increased as expected. Importantly, O&M costs were flat period over period, highlighting our continued focus on cost control while supporting operational and customer needs. Slide 9 shows our financial results for the year so far. Consolidated earnings were $2.62 per share, compared to $2.51 per share in 2025, which is well on track with our plans for the year.

The variance drivers here are similar to the quarterly drivers, and our outlook for these categories for the year remains unchanged, as you can see from the full-year waterfall in the appendix. As a reminder, the majority of our EPS growth will occur in the second half of the year, with revenue increases in key states expected to go into effect later in Q3.

Slide 10 provides a look at our balance sheet and liquidity profile. Our total debt-to-capital ratio as of June 30th was 58%. On May 20th, we successfully completed a long-term debt issuance of $500 million at 4.625% that attracted strong demand. In June, we settled 3.4 million shares of our approximately 8 million share equity forwards for a net proceed of $476 million.

Our financing plan for 2026 assumes we'll settle the remaining equity forwards in Q4. Slide 11 covers the latest regulatory activity in our states. In Pennsylvania, we received a final order in the case that approved a $75 million annualized increase in water and wastewater revenues, compared to the filing that had requested a $160 million increase. The order also approved a return on equity of 9.55% and an equity component of 54.2%. As John mentioned, we believe this was a constructive outcome, and we will implement new rates on August 13th. On active cases, you can see we have general rate cases in progress in six jurisdictions. To highlight a few of those, in June, we entered into a black box settlement with staff and several interveners in Virginia, as well as a partial settlement with the Public Advocates Office in California.

In New Jersey, as outlined in the procedural schedule, the company is in confidential settlement discussions with the parties to the proceedings, and we hope to be able to announce a resolution soon.

In Illinois, our case is progressing as expected, and the next milestones in the case will be evidentiary hearings in August, followed by briefings from all parties in September and in a proposed order due in October. On May 15th, we filed a general rate case in Kentucky reflecting $108 million in system investments covering January 2027 through December 2027. We are seeking $18 million of additional annual revenue and will expect proposed rates to go into effect on an interim basis in December 2026.

Intervenor testimony is set for August, a rebuttal testimony in September. And lastly, on July 1st, we filed a general rate case in Missouri reflecting $1.6 billion in system investments covering the period from June 2025 through May 2028. We are seeking $179 million of additional annual revenue, and we expect proposed rates to go into effect in June 2027. Importantly, with this case, this is the first case using the fully-forecasted future test-share legislation that was passed last year.

Turning to slide 12, as John mentioned yesterday, we affirmed our 2026 adjusted EPS guidance range of $6.02 to $6.12 per share. This represents our expectation of, again, delivering 8% EPS growth in 2026 while continuing to provide high-quality, affordable service to our customers. We also continue to expect to achieve consistent EPS and dividend growth well within the 7% to 9% range through 2030 and beyond.

With that I turn it over to Cheryl to talk more about our capital program and our recent acquisition activity Thanks David Good morning everyone Starting on slide 14 we successfully invested in many needed capital projects across our footprint in the first half of 2026 We deployed billion this year to renew our infrastructure improve resiliency and address water quality challenges as well as add new systems including those acquired from Nexus These investments are crucial for us to deliver on our core mission of consistently providing clean and reliable water and wastewater services, and we remain vigilant about utilizing our scale and expertise to control costs and keep bills affordable for our customers.

We are hyper-focused on staying balanced between affordability and making necessary investments in our systems. We remain confident that American Water's average monthly residential water bills will stay at or below 1% of median household income for many years to come.

Concluding on slide 15, we continue to be well positioned for growth through acquisitions across many states as our track record of signing and closing deals continues in 2026. We were excited to begin serving the customers of the acquired Nexus water systems in the beginning of June, which was a few months ahead of our initial estimated timeline. We look forward to leveraging our scale and size to deliver safe, clean, reliable, and affordable water and wastewater services to the 47,000 new customer connections and to welcoming the 70 local employees who already call these communities home. So, zooming out, as of June 30th, we had approximately 57,000 customer connections under agreement across six states, totaling $236 million.

There are many systems across our fragmented industry that have underinvested in the necessary capital to operate their systems, and we believe we can be a solutions provider for these communities.

With that, I'll turn it back over to our operator to begin Q&A and take any questions you may have.

Morning, Paul.

David A. Hey, Paul, this is David. We have not quantified it. I mean, in practical purposes, I think one way you could do it is you could go back and look at our prior cases and what that filed increase would be. I mean, that's not a complete apples to apples, but that could give you an idea.

Yeah, Paul, I'd say we still feel good about Indiana. And from everything we're seeing in the state, it's focused on the electric affordability story there. Our rates are very affordable in Indiana and continue to be in our forecast to be there. So we feel good. As far as the legislation, yeah, it's beneficial to us. I mean, it's not overload material from an American water standpoint, but it's certainly little winds like that help.

Thanks for the question, Andrew. Andrew, with regards to our strategy in Pennsylvania, our real focus and what underpins our rate cases in the state is the capital investment that we make. They're really investment-driven rate cases. As we look to recover, we can continue to do that under general rate cases. Another area that we exploring is a broadening of our DESIC mechanism which could be useful in a couple of ways giving us interim recovery in between rate cases which also has the benefit of smoothing in increases over time which is helpful from an affordability perspective I say water in the state as relates to mechanisms is a little bit behind electric In other states, we've had the opportunity to update the mechanism, and certainly from our perspective in PA, if we can get some traction in being able to do that, that could be helpful from a cadence perspective.

But at the end of the day, for us, we need to continue to – our obligation in PA, as in all of our states, is to provide good service that requires capital. That's what drives the rate cases, and so we'll look for the most constructive form of recovery.

How should we think about that? Well, approval for the merger is really just under a standard in the state. Each state has their own standard. In the case of Pennsylvania, it is substantial affirmative public benefit. That can come in a variety of ways. Certainly, affordability is a theme across the state and other states, but our job with respect to the merger is to be able to demonstrate substantial affirmative public benefit, which we think that we've done in our testimony.

So we're in settlement discussions there, and so we'll continue to push there.

Hey, Andrew, good morning. Thanks for that question. Currently, it's about 40 percent, give or take, depending on the year, but you can roughly think 40 percent of our capital in PA falls under the D-CIC mechanism.

Yeah, under the current legislation that allows DSEC, we would need to amend that to include additional capital to fall into that mechanism.

Angie, John, here, just to follow on David's response.

I think, you know, there's a cap element to the DSEC, and then there's an eligibility in terms of assets that's available. David correctly said legislation is required for a wholesale change. There may be work that can be done in a regulatory pathway around the edges that could be helpful. David's 40% answer, I think the answer to that question from an electric perspective is somewhere in the neighborhood of 90%. And that's really, you know, when we look at what's eligible for us, you know, think in terms of underground piping.

And that's where water, you know, when you think about treatment, think about PFAS, storage tanks, things like that. The more we can broaden the eligibility, then that would be helpful.

There certainly will be economies associated with the merger over time. I will say in the near term, as we begin to go through our integration planning, both companies and together as one company will have a need really for the people by and large that we have today. But both companies, individually and together, still have the need to invest all of the capital that we're investing. And it's that capital investment that really drives timing of rate cases for capital recovery.