Intuit's Trailing Multiple Collapsed From 73x to 16x as Wall Street Repriced It for AI Disruption
INTU's trailing P/E ran from 66-73x in 2024 to an all-time high near $806, then fell under 16x by mid-2026 as Wall Street repriced TurboTax for AI disruption
Introduction
In January 2024, you could buy Intuit for nearly 70 times trailing earnings — one of the richest multiples anywhere in software, a price the market was willing to pay for a company that had just introduced Intuit Assist, its generative-AI financial assistant, and was being read as an AI winner rather than an AI target. By July 23, 2025, that optimism had pushed the stock to an all-time closing high of $806.34. Less than a year later, on June 17, 2026, Intuit's trailing P/E bottomed at 15.63x — a multiple more typical of a slow-growing industrial than a software company whose trailing earnings per share had, by that point, grown 80.6% since the start of 2024 (SPXScore's weekly trailing-data history for INTU, 2024–2026).
This isn't a round trip. Home Depot's multiple fell, found a floor, and climbed back to roughly where it started. Intuit's didn't round-trip — it fell off a cliff, paused, then fell off a second one, on its way from priced-for-perfection to, for one memorable session in June 2026, the single worst-performing stock in the entire S&P 500. Untangling what actually drove each leg of that decline — and what's different about today's partial, contested recovery — is the point of this piece.
Key Takeaways
- Intuit's trailing P/E averaged 61.85x from January 2024 through early April 2025, then hit an all-time high of $806.34 on July 23, 2025 (a 65.61x trailing multiple), before collapsing to a trough of 15.63x on June 17, 2026 — even as trailing GAAP EPS grew 80.6%, from $9.14 to $16.51, over the same stretch (SPXScore trailing-data tracking).
- A January 8, 2026 Wells Fargo downgrade (price target cut to $700 from $840, citing "impossible" year-over-year comps) triggered a roughly 15% five-day slide that widened into a broader "AI-disruption" selloff across software stocks, also hitting Palantir, Adobe, Salesforce, and ServiceNow in the same window (Trefis, Jan 16, 2026; The Motley Fool, Feb 18, 2026).
- On June 2, 2026, Goldman Sachs downgraded Intuit to Sell (price target cut to $276 from $519), naming three AI-native tax-prep rivals and estimating they could process a standard return for roughly $0.12 versus TurboTax's approximately $162 — the same day, Intuit shares fell 8.9%, closed down 51% year-to-date as the S&P 500's single worst performer, and the company's market cap had fallen from a $219 billion peak in July 2025 to $88.1 billion (Yahoo Finance; Forbes, Jun 2, 2026).
- Intuit's own AI pivot has cut in both directions: a July 10, 2024 restructuring cut roughly 1,800 jobs while the company simultaneously planned to hire about 1,800 replacements in AI-focused engineering and product roles, and a February 24, 2026 partnership bringing Anthropic's Claude into TurboTax, QuickBooks, Credit Karma, and Mailchimp sparked a 17.6% one-week rally even as the wider "AI eats software" narrative was punishing the stock (Fortune, Jul 10, 2024; CNBC, Feb 24, 2026).
- By mid-August 2026, Intuit trades at a 20.38x trailing P/E and a trailing PEG of 0.87 — statistically cheap against its own trailing growth rate — even as Morgan Stanley (July 21) and TD Cowen (July 28) both cut price targets further, with the company's Q4/full-year fiscal 2026 earnings report, its first real test since the AI-disruption selloff began, scheduled for August 25, 2026, after this piece was written (Investing.com; Intuit Investor Relations).
Six Windows, One Long Slide
Pull Intuit's trailing GAAP price-to-earnings ratio across six stretches since January 2024 and, unlike a stock that overshoots and then reverts, the shape here is closer to a staircase down, with one brief landing on the way:
- January 2024–early April 2025 (The AI Growth Premium): Price ranged from $605.18 to a low of $544.07. Trailing EPS rose steadily, from $9.14 to $10.70. Trailing P/E averaged 61.85x across 66 weekly observations, ranging as high as 73.26x in February 2024.
- April–July 2025 (A Second, Higher Peak): Price jumped from $594.08 to an all-time closing high of $806.34. Trailing EPS rose from $10.70 to $12.29. Trailing P/E averaged 63.30x — the richest window of the six — peaking at 71.48x in June 2025.
- July–December 2025 (Earnings Catch Up, Quietly): Price actually drifted down, from $769.27 to $647.20, while trailing EPS jumped from $12.29 to $14.60 on the back of Intuit's fiscal 2025 full-year results. Trailing P/E averaged 50.37x, falling to 44.34x by year-end — a de-rating driven almost entirely by earnings growth, not a falling stock price.
- January–February 2026 (The Downgrade Cascade): Price collapsed from $605.28 to a window low of $358.71 on February 18 before a partial bounce to $433.35 by month-end. Trailing EPS was flat at $14.60 the entire window — this was a pure sentiment re-rating, not an earnings event. Trailing P/E averaged 31.74x, down from the low-40s at the window's start.
- March–June 2026 (Deep Value, For Real This Time): Price fell further, from $453.95 to a trough of $258.05 on June 17. Trailing EPS kept climbing, to $16.51. Trailing P/E averaged 24.50x, bottoming at 15.63x — the cheapest reading across the entire 2024–2026 stretch, and a trailing PEG of just 0.67 at the low.
- June–August 2026 (A Contested Recovery): Price has climbed from $261.00 to $336.44. Trailing EPS has held at $16.51. Trailing P/E has averaged 18.35x across this window, ending at 20.38x — a partial recovery that most of Wall Street's sell-side has met with further price-target cuts, not upgrades.
| Window | Price range | Trailing EPS | Avg. trailing P/E | Trough P/E |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 2024–Apr 2025 (AI Growth Premium) | $544.07–$699.47 | $9.14 → $10.70 | 61.85x | 50.84x |
| Apr–Jul 2025 (Second Peak) | $583.56–$806.34 | $10.70 → $12.29 | 63.30x | 54.53x |
| Jul–Dec 2025 (Earnings Catch Up) | $635.63–$769.27 | $12.29 → $14.60 | 50.37x | 44.34x |
| Jan–Feb 2026 (Downgrade Cascade) | $358.71–$605.28 | $14.60 (flat) | 31.74x | 24.57x |
| Mar–Jun 2026 (Deep Value) | $258.05–$459.28 | $14.60 → $16.51 | 24.50x | 15.63x |
| Jun–Aug 2026 (Contested Recovery) | $261.00–$336.44 | $16.51 (flat) | 18.35x | 15.81x |
Source: SPXScore's own weekly trailing-data history for INTU, 2024–2026.
Five of the six bars point the same direction. The only window that didn't fall was the second one — and even that window ended with the stock's all-time high, the single most expensive print in this entire story.
2024–Early 2025: A Multiple Built for an AI Winner
Intuit entered 2024 already carrying a rich multiple, and the company spent the year reinforcing the growth story behind it. Intuit Assist, the generative-AI assistant embedded across TurboTax, QuickBooks, Credit Karma, and Mailchimp, had launched in September 2023 and continued rolling out through 2024, including a dedicated QuickBooks version on November 20, 2024 (Intuit Investor Relations, Nov 20, 2024). Fiscal Q2 2024 results, reported February 22, 2024, beat estimates with Online Ecosystem revenue up 20% year over year (Zacks, Feb 22, 2024) — the kind of print that makes a 66–73x trailing multiple feel less like speculation and more like a reasonable bet on durable growth, at least in the moment.
The most consequential event of this window wasn't a stock move at all. On July 10, 2024, Intuit announced it was cutting approximately 1,800 jobs — about 10% of its workforce at the time — while simultaneously planning to hire roughly 1,800 replacements across engineering, product, and customer-facing AI roles. CEO Sasan Goodarzi told employees, "We do not do layoffs to cut costs, and that remains true in this case," framing the move explicitly as an AI-driven reorganization rather than a cost-cutting exercise; affected U.S. employees received a 60-day transition period, with a final day of September 9, 2024, and a minimum of 16 weeks' severance (Fortune, Jul 10, 2024; Fortune, Jul 11, 2024). It's a decision that reads very differently with hindsight: a company reorganizing around AI two years before AI became the reason the market started discounting its stock.
The window's low point, a trough of $544.07 on April 2, 2025, lines up with the broadest market event of the entire stretch — the global selloff that followed the Trump administration's April 2 "Liberation Day" tariff announcement. The Nasdaq's April 3–4 decline was its steepest since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the following week was the worst for world stocks since the March 2020 lockdown collapse (Axios, Apr 3, 2025; Forbes, Apr 3, 2025). There's no evidence of an Intuit-specific negative catalyst in that window; if anything, the one company-specific news item from April 2025 cut the other way. That same month, the IRS moved to wind down Direct File, its free government tax-filing pilot — a program Intuit had lobbied against for years as a direct competitive threat to TurboTax (The American Prospect, Apr 17, 2025). The macro tide pulled Intuit down in April 2025 even as its most obvious government-policy risk was fading.
April–July 2025: A Second, Higher Peak
If the first window was a rich multiple that held roughly steady, this one was a multiple that got richer still, on the back of a genuinely strong quarter. Intuit reported fiscal Q3 2025 results on May 22, 2025: adjusted EPS of $11.65 against $10.91 expected, and revenue of $7.8 billion against $7.56 billion expected — up 15% year over year, which CEO Sasan Goodarzi called "the fastest organic growth we've delivered in over a decade." Full-year guidance was raised across the board, with revenue growth guidance lifted to roughly 15% (from 12–13%) and GAAP diluted EPS growth guidance raised to 26–27% (from 18–20%); Credit Karma revenue grew 31% to $579 million in the quarter (Intuit Investor Relations, May 22, 2025; CNBC, May 22, 2025). Shares jumped roughly 8–9% in the following session (CNBC, May 23, 2025).
The rally didn't stop there. Intuit's stock kept climbing for another ten weeks, reaching an all-time closing high of $806.34 on July 23, 2025, a 65.61x trailing multiple on EPS that hadn't yet caught up to the guidance raise. Notably, that 65.61x multiple was still shy of the window-one record of 73.26x set back in February 2024, a reminder that Intuit's highest-ever stock price and its richest-ever trailing multiple didn't actually coincide — by mid-2025, trailing earnings had grown enough to make the record price look somewhat less extreme, on this measure, than the multiple the market had paid a year and a half earlier.
July–December 2025: Earnings Catch Up, Quietly
The third window looks calm on the surface — the stock price actually drifted down slightly, from $769.27 to $647.20 — but the mechanism underneath is unusual. Intuit reported fiscal Q4 and full-year 2025 results on August 21, 2025: full-year revenue of $18.8 billion, up 16%, and GAAP EPS growth of 31% to $13.67 for the year, with Q4 revenue alone up 20% to $3.8 billion and Credit Karma's Q4 revenue up 34% to $649 million (Intuit Investor Relations, Aug 21, 2025). Because trailing EPS is a rolling four-quarter sum, that full-year result rolled into Intuit's trailing-twelve-month figure all at once, pushing trailing EPS from $12.29 to roughly $13.71 by mid-September and, notably, resetting the trailing three-year EPS growth rate from 11.37% to 23.41% in the same window (per our trend-tracking data for INTU).
The upshot: a trailing P/E that fell from the high-50s to 44.34x by year-end, without the stock price doing almost anything at all. This is a de-rating driven entirely by the denominator catching up to the numerator — the opposite of the dynamic that shows up in almost every other window in this piece, where price moves were doing the work. It's also, in hindsight, the calm before a genuinely turbulent six months.
January–February 2026: The Downgrade Cascade
This is where the story turns. On January 8, 2026, Wells Fargo analyst Michael Turrin downgraded Intuit to Equal Weight from Overweight, cutting his price target to $700 from $840. His stated reasoning wasn't a company-specific problem — it was math: 2025's "robust rebound in tax" had set an "impossible" comparison for 2026, with elevated expectations colliding with a genuinely difficult year-over-year setup (Yahoo Finance, Jan 8, 2026). Intuit shares dropped nearly 6% the day the note went out and kept sliding, for a cumulative five-day loss of roughly 15% (TIKR; Trefis, Jan 16, 2026). By January 31, 2026, Intuit was down 24% year-to-date — despite a solid fiscal Q1 2026 print in November 2025 that showed 18% revenue growth and reiterated full-year guidance (Motley Fool via Yahoo Finance).
What made this more than a single-stock story is that Intuit wasn't alone. A broader "AI-disruption" selloff hit software stocks across the board in the same window — Palantir fell roughly 22%, and Adobe, Salesforce, and ServiceNow each fell 25–30% — as the market openly debated whether AI agents would prove additive to software incumbents or would eat their businesses outright. Opinion split sharply: JPMorgan called the selloff "indiscriminate," arguing AI looked additive rather than substitutive in the near term; Morgan Stanley's Katy Huberty called it "sentiment-driven"; Goldman's Ben Snider warned it could be "the end of the beginning" of something larger (The Motley Fool, Feb 18, 2026). Notably, none of this predates or overlaps with an Intuit earnings event — the company's fiscal Q2 2026 results didn't arrive until February 26, 2026, and when they did, they reiterated rather than cut full-year guidance (Intuit Investor Relations, Feb 26, 2026). This was a re-rating on narrative and comps, not a re-rating on results.
The window found a floor at $358.71 on February 18, 2026 before a sharp bounce. On February 24, 2026, Intuit announced a multi-year partnership bringing Anthropic's Claude into TurboTax, QuickBooks, Credit Karma, and Mailchimp — custom AI agents for invoicing, payment tracking, and tax estimation, with a rollout planned for spring 2026. Shares, down roughly 45% year-to-date at the time of the announcement, gained 17.6% over the following week, with Wedbush characterizing the broader software selloff as "overblown" (Intuit Investor Relations; CNBC, Feb 24, 2026). For a moment, it looked like the worst might be over.
March–June 2026: Goldman Calls It — Deep Value, For Real This Time
It wasn't over. Intuit reported fiscal Q3 2026 results on May 20, 2026, and they were genuinely strong: non-GAAP EPS of $12.80 against a $12.48 consensus, revenue of $8.56 billion (up 10.4%) against an $8.52 billion consensus, and a raised full-year outlook — revenue guidance lifted to $21.341–$21.374 billion and non-GAAP EPS guidance to $23.80–$23.85. QuickBooks Online Accounting revenue grew 22% in the quarter (Intuit Investor Relations, May 20, 2026). The market's response was a "sell the news" reaction: shares fell roughly 5.28% in after-hours trading on a beat-and-raise quarter, reflecting persistent skepticism about TurboTax's long-term durability rather than any complaint about the numbers themselves (Investing.com).
Then, on June 2, 2026, Goldman Sachs analyst Gabriela Borges downgraded Intuit to Sell from Neutral, cutting her price target to $276 from $519 — the sharpest cut of any analyst in this entire story. Her note named three specific AI-native tax-prep competitors — Prime Meridian, Perplexity Tax, and Chime Tax. The unit-economics gap she laid out was stark: AI systems, she estimated, could process a standard individual tax return for roughly $0.12, against TurboTax's approximately $162 cost per return. Her base case: if 20% of U.S. filers shifted to fully AI-based tax preparation, TurboTax revenue could run about 18% below fiscal 2025 levels by 2030 (Yahoo Finance, Jun 2, 2026). Intuit shares fell 8.9% that same day, closing down 51% year-to-date and making Intuit, for that session, the single worst-performing stock in the entire S&P 500. The company's market capitalization had fallen from an all-time high of $219 billion in July 2025 to $88.1 billion. The same week, Intuit announced a 17% global workforce reduction — roughly 3,000 employees — and lowered its TurboTax revenue estimates, with Goodarzi citing anticipated declines in IRS filing volumes while emphasizing a pivot toward what the company called an "AI-driven expert platform strategy" (Forbes, Jun 2, 2026).
Intuit's trailing P/E bottomed at 15.63x on June 17, 2026, with the stock at $258.05 — a trailing PEG of just 0.67 against a trailing three-year EPS growth rate that, mechanically, still read 23.41%. By any conventional trailing-multiple screen, Intuit had become one of the cheapest large-cap software names in the market. Whether that screen was measuring the right thing is the question the rest of this piece has to sit with.
June–August 2026: A Recovery Wall Street Doesn't Fully Believe
From its June trough, Intuit has climbed back — from $261.00 on June 24 to $336.44 by August 11, roughly a 29% rebound over about seven weeks. It hasn't been a straight line. On July 14, 2026, IBM's preliminary Q2 earnings warning — missing revenue estimates and citing customers redirecting capital toward data-center infrastructure instead of software — triggered a sector-wide selloff. IBM itself fell roughly 25% that day, its worst single-session decline on record (CNBC, Jul 14, 2026), and enterprise-software peers including Workday, ServiceNow, Salesforce, and Adobe all came under pressure the same day (Yahoo Finance, Jul 14, 2026). Intuit, with no company-specific news of its own that day, fell as much as 6% intraday (TIKR).
What's most striking about this recovery is that it has happened almost entirely without the sell side's blessing. On July 21, 2026, Morgan Stanley downgraded Intuit from Overweight to Equalweight, cutting its price target to $335 from $580 and arguing that uncertainty around TurboTax's AI-disruption exposure likely wouldn't resolve until fiscal Q3 2027 results, due in May 2027 (Investing.com, Jul 21, 2026). A week later, on July 28, 2026, TD Cowen downgraded Intuit from Buy to Hold, cutting its target to $304 from $504, citing concern that the company would miss its 10%-plus growth guidance (TIKR). Four analysts — Wells Fargo, Goldman, Morgan Stanley, and TD Cowen — cut price targets across this window even as the stock rose. Sell-side price targets falling while the price they're supposedly forecasting climbs is not a normal pattern; it's most consistent with a market that thinks the January–June selloff overshot on sector-wide sentiment, and analyst models simply haven't caught up yet.
Layered on top, the macro backdrop has stayed unsettled rather than supportive. The Federal Reserve held its benchmark rate unchanged at its July 29, 2026 meeting, in a divided vote, after May 2026 inflation hit 4.2% — the highest reading in more than two years — driven largely by an oil-price spike tied to the Iran conflict; Fed Chair Kevin Warsh said the central bank would act if needed but held for now, with markets pricing meaningfully higher odds of a September hike than a cut (Fortune, Jul 29, 2026; NPR, Jul 29, 2026). None of the reporting on that decision draws an explicit line to software valuations specifically — the IBM-led selloff earlier in July is best read as a separate, sector-specific event — but a Fed that's holding rates because inflation is still running hot is not a Fed making risk assets, growth stocks included, obviously cheaper to own.
What a Trailing Multiple Can and Can't Tell You
Line up all six windows and the arithmetic is almost uncomfortably clean: Intuit's trailing P/E fell in nearly a straight line from 73x to 16x while trailing EPS rose 80.6%, from $9.14 to $16.51. That's not a business that got worse on paper — full-year revenue growth has stayed in the mid-teens throughout, and the company has beaten consensus estimates in every quarterly report cited in this piece. What changed is what the market is willing to pay for a dollar of that trailing earnings, and the reason isn't really about 2024, 2025, or even the actual numbers Intuit has reported in 2026. It's about 2030 — specifically, about whether products like Prime Meridian, Perplexity Tax, and Chime Tax can do to TurboTax's $162-per-return economics what Goldman's Gabriela Borges argued they can.
That's a genuinely difficult thing for a trailing multiple to price. A trailing P/E and a trailing PEG are, definitionally, backward-looking — they tell you what the market paid for earnings the company has already reported, set against growth the company has already delivered. Intuit's 0.67 trailing PEG at its June 2026 low looked, on that measure alone, like one of the cheapest stocks in software. But a PEG built on trailing three-year EPS growth has no mechanism for pricing in a competitive threat that, by Goldman's own estimate, might not show up in Intuit's reported numbers until 2030. That's precisely the gap SPXScore's forward-earnings framework is built to address — a multiple built on what analysts expect a company to earn over the next twelve months incorporates at least some of what the market is worried about today, in a way that a purely trailing calculation structurally cannot.
None of that makes Intuit's post-crash multiple "wrong," and it doesn't make the AI-disruption thesis "right" either. It means the trailing numbers and the market's price are telling two different stories at the same time, and the August 25, 2026 earnings report — the first full read on Intuit's business since Goldman's downgrade — is the next real data point in figuring out which one is closer to true. If you want to see how Intuit's re-rating compares with the rest of the technology and software sector, our historical trend view tracks trailing and forward P/E and PEG over time, and the S&P 500 coverage applies the same framework across the full index, including the free S&P 50 subset for a faster read.
Conclusion
Intuit in mid-August 2026 is a company earning meaningfully more than it did at the start of 2024, trading at a fraction of the multiple the market was willing to pay for that same growth story at its 2025 peak. That gap opened for a reason that has almost nothing to do with the last four quarters of reported results and almost everything to do with what the market thinks the next four years look like for a company whose flagship product now has direct, dramatically cheaper AI-native competition. A 20x trailing multiple with an 80%-plus trailing EPS growth rate behind it is not, on its face, an expensive stock. Whether it's a cheap one depends on a question no trailing multiple can answer: whether Intuit's own AI pivot — the 2024 layoffs, the Anthropic partnership, the "AI-driven expert platform" strategy — can outrun the AI-native rivals Wall Street is now pricing it against. The August 25 earnings report won't settle that question either, but it will be the first real evidence since the selloff began.
This article discusses Intuit's historical stock performance and macroeconomic conditions as of August 17, 2026, for informational purposes only. It is not investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Financial data, guidance, and analyst estimates referenced here are subject to revision by the company and by third-party research providers, and Intuit's fiscal Q4 and full-year 2026 results, scheduled for release on August 25, 2026, were not yet available at the time of writing.