JetBlue Sales Rose, but Its Loss Grew Bigger
JetBlue lost $257 million in the three months ended September 30, 2026, according to CNBC. A year earlier, the loss was $143 million.
The company published its Third Quarter 2026 Results on October 26, 2026. The loss grew by $114 million, or about 80 percent.
Companies also report results per share. A share is one slice of ownership in the company, so this figure divides the total loss by the number of shares. On that basis, JetBlue lost $0.60 per share. Analysts had expected a loss of $0.54, according to Yahoo Finance. That is a gap of six cents. The same report put third-quarter revenue at $2.81 billion.
Revenue is the total money a company takes in from customers, before it pays any costs.
Revenue has been climbing. In the second quarter, JetBlue reported operating revenue of $2.7 billion, up 14.5 percent from a year earlier, in a release dated July 28. In the first quarter, its revenue per available seat mile, or RASM, grew 6.5 percent. RASM is the airline industry's main measure of how much money each seat it flies brings in. Third-quarter revenue of $2.81 billion was higher than the second-quarter figure, though the company rounds both numbers in its reporting. Even so, the extra revenue has not yet led to a smaller loss.
In my view, the gap between sales and losses is the number to watch on the call. Think of a coffee shop that sells more cups but pays more for beans and rent. The extra cups only help if they bring in more than the extra costs. A loss that grows while revenue rises points to costs climbing faster, or to fares that are not yet covering the cost of flying. Analysts will want a breakdown of those costs and a sense of where they are headed into 2027.
JetBlue's cost-cutting effort is called JetForward. The company delivered $90 million of incremental EBIT in the first half of 2025 under the program, according to its third-quarter 2025 release. EBIT stands for earnings before interest and taxes, a rough measure of profit from running the business. Incremental means an improvement over a starting point, so the figure is a gain, not a total profit. In its fourth-quarter 2025 results, published in January 2026, the company set a target of $310 million of additional incremental EBIT for 2026.
Whether the third-quarter loss leaves that target on track is a question the call should answer directly.
The company's longer goal is more ambitious. In its second-quarter release, JetBlue set a target of at least $1.00 in earnings per share for 2028, as part of its path back to steady profitability. That would be a full-year profit of at least a dollar per share, three years from now.
In my view, a target like this is a plan the company is working toward, not a forecast of what will happen. Investors should weigh it that way. The company has not, in these materials, laid out in detail how it gets from the 2026 loss to the 2028 figure. That makes comments on capacity, fleet, and costs on the call more useful than the headline number alone.
For scale, JetBlue was incorporated in Delaware in August 1998 and began flying on February 11, 2000. It serves more than 100 destinations across the United States, the Caribbean and Latin America, Canada, and Europe, and it has 23,000 crewmembers. At that size, small changes in cost per seat or in fares add up to large sums. That is one reason a single quarter matters for the full-year math.
The earnings call is set for Tuesday, October 27, 2026, at 10:00 a.m. ET.
For savers and investors who do not follow airlines closely, here is the short version. Sales are rising, the loss is bigger, and the company has tied its credibility to a 2028 profit target. The next clues will come from the call, and from the cost and capacity details that follow it.
