Is Waymo profitable in 2026?
Updated August 2026. This page started as a March 2025 revenue forecast. The question people are actually typing is whether Waymo is profitable. That is the question this version answers.
Waymo is not a profitable standalone company in 2026.
Alphabet does not publish a Waymo income statement. The closest public line is Other Bets, the segment that houses Waymo and several smaller bets. In the quarter ended 30 June 2026, Other Bets recorded $382 million of revenue and a $1.799 billion operating loss (Alphabet Q2 2026 results). Alphabet says Other Bets revenue comes primarily from autonomous transportation services and internet services. That is not the same thing as “Waymo lost $1.8 billion.” It is enough to say the robotaxi business is still being funded at a loss.
The useful math is simpler than a slogan about autonomy. Take weekly paid rides, multiply by an assumed average fare, multiply by 52. That is a revenue run-rate. It is not profit. Profit also needs cost per mile, utilization, vehicles, and the overhead sitting in Other Bets.
This page is the 2026 snapshot: the last disclosed ride count, a run-rate at the same $18 fare I used in 2025, and a check against the forecast this page originally made. The 2026-2028 fleet scenarios live on a separate post, Modeling Waymo’s Revenue Trajectory.
The original forecast, so you can see the miss
In March 2025 this page used a moderate case of 400,000 average weekly rides in 2025 and 800,000 in 2026, at $18 a ride, for 52 weeks.
That implied about $374 million of 2025 revenue and about $749 million of 2026 revenue.
A conservative 2025 case at 300,000 weekly rides implied about $281 million. An aggressive 2025 case at 1 million weekly rides implied $936 million. I am leaving those figures here because they are the forecast, not because they were the outcome.
What the ride count actually did
2024
Waymo’s Co-CEO said weekly rides had gone from about 10,000 a year earlier to 100,000 by August 2024 (The Munich Eye).
By December 2024 the company reported more than 150,000 trips a week across Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, and more than 4 million fully autonomous rides for the year (Waymo 2024 year in review).
A late-2024 print around 175,000 weekly rides annualized to more than 9 million rides.
Early 2025
In late February 2025, Sundar Pichai said Waymo One was serving more than 200,000 paid trips a week across Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco (Road to Autonomy).
That was the baseline this page used.
What happened after the forecast
In February 2026, Waymo said it had more than tripled annual volume in 2025 to 15 million rides, with more than 400,000 rides a week across six U.S. metro areas at the time of a $16 billion funding round (Waymo, 24 February 2026).
Fifteen million rides in 2025 is about 288,000 rides a week if you smear the year flat. The year was not flat. It started near 200,000 and ended much higher. At the $18 fare this page has always used, 15 million paid rides would be about $270 million of 2025 trip revenue. That is below the $374 million moderate case. It is close to the conservative case.
On the Q1 2026 earnings call, Pichai said Waymo had surpassed 500,000 fully autonomous rides per week, doubling in less than a year, with operations in 11 major U.S. cities (Pichai’s Q1 2026 remarks). Waymo repeated the “half a million trips a week” language in March 2026 (Waymo, 31 March 2026).
Five hundred thousand weekly rides at $18 and 52 weeks is about $468 million of annualized trip revenue. That is the 2026 run-rate on the same fare assumption as the old model. It is not $749 million. The old moderate case needed 800,000 weekly rides. The disclosed print is 500,000.
A later post on this site, Waymo is quietly winning the robotaxi race, walked through the operating scale. Use that one for the race narrative. Use this one for the P&L question.
Is that profit? No.
A $468 million run-rate is real money for a robotaxi network. It is not a profitable Alphabet segment.
Other Bets revenue in Q2 2026 was $382 million, up from $373 million a year earlier. The operating loss widened from $1.246 billion to $1.799 billion (Alphabet Q2 2026 exhibit 99.1).
If you annualize that quarter, you get about $1.5 billion of Other Bets revenue against about $7.2 billion of Other Bets operating losses. Waymo is the main autonomous-transportation story in that bucket. It is not the only line. Fiber, Wing, and the rest still sit in there. Anyone who tells you they can back out a clean Waymo margin from those two numbers is guessing.
What you can say without guessing: ride volume scaled, segment losses did not close. Scale is not the same as a business that covers its own costs.
Cities and fares (the $18 assumption)
Estimating average revenue per ride still depends on city, distance, time of day, and whether you compare Waymo to Uber before or after a tip.
I am keeping $18 as a working average across the network. It is an assumption, not a disclosed ARPU.
San Francisco
User reports put a typical 3-4 mile Waymo trip around $20. Shorter rides that might be $8-9 on Uber or Lyft before a tip can run $18-20 on Waymo (Hacker News thread).
A sample of fifty matched trips found a Waymo robotaxi about $9.50 more expensive than the identical human-driven ride-hail, or about $3.87 more after a 20% tip (Futurism).
A personal log of 70 San Francisco rides from September 2023 to May 2024 averaged $11.84 per mile before surcharges (The Last Driver License Holder).
An analytical fit circulating on r/SelfDrivingCars was $9.52 plus $1.66 per mile plus $0.30 per minute (Reddit price tracker).
San Francisco is the premium city in this set.
Phoenix
A 20-minute airport-to-Uptown trip was about $16 on Waymo versus about $19 on UberX (Matador). Shorter Uptown and downtown rides often land between $10 and $20.
The same Reddit fit for Phoenix was $9.70 plus $0.52 per mile plus $0.20 per minute, which is a much cheaper per-mile rate than San Francisco.
Phoenix is where Waymo prices closer to Uber and Lyft.
Los Angeles
PCMag’s examples (Venice to Santa Monica, $10.49; a 4.4-mile Mid-Wilshire hop, $17.85) sat within about a dollar of pre-tip Uber and Lyft quotes (PCMag).
The Reddit fit for Los Angeles was $5.37 plus $2.50 per mile plus $0.32 per minute: lowest base fare, highest per-mile rate of the three.
Those three formulas are why $18 as a blended average is defensible and also why it will be wrong in any single city.
Footprint (what changed since March 2025)
In March 2025 the live commercial map was Phoenix, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and Los Angeles, with Austin, Atlanta, and Miami still ahead, and Tokyo talked about for 2026.
By the Q1 2026 call, Pichai said six new cities had already launched in 2026, taking the network to 11 major U.S. cities, with international expansion next (Pichai, Q1 2026). Waymo’s February 2026 funding post said it was laying groundwork for ride-hailing in more than 20 additional cities in 2026, including Tokyo and London (Waymo).
More cities is not automatically more weekly rides per car. The ride print that matters for this page is still the 500,000 weekly figure, not the city count.
The vehicle story is also a procurement story, not a P&L. Jaguar I-Pace, Hyundai IONIQ 5, and the later custom Ojai fleet change capacity. They do not tell you whether a mile covers its cost. Alphabet’s Q2 call said Waymo had introduced the Ojai to public riders as the first vehicle on the sixth-generation Waymo Driver (Q2 2026 transcript).
What would have to change for profits
I am not going to invent a Waymo break-even year. Alphabet has not given one.
The variables that actually move the result are the same ones this page used in 2025, plus the one it underweighted: cost.
Weekly rides. The 2026 moderate forecast wanted 800,000. The last primary disclosure is 500,000. Closing that gap is volume.
Fare. $18 is a blend. Mix shift toward Phoenix and new cities can pull it down. San Francisco can pull it up. Competition from Tesla, Zoox, and whoever is still funding a Cruise-like attempt can pull it down.
Cost per mile. This page did not model it in 2025. Other Bets’ widening loss is the reminder. Rides can double while the loss gets worse if you are buying fleet, paying operators, and mapping new cities faster than fares come in.
If you want the version of this analysis that varies fleet size through 2028, that is the trajectory post. If you want Tesla in the frame, that is Tesla vs Waymo.
Anyway. The 2025 moderate case overshot 2025 trip revenue at an $18 fare. The 2026 moderate case still needs 800,000 weekly rides that have not shown up in the last primary print. Ride growth is real. Profitability is not in the segment numbers.
This is educational, not investment advice. I am not a registered investment adviser. Alphabet does not disclose Waymo as a standalone segment. Always check the latest 10-Q.
This post was originally published in March 2025 as a 2025-2026 revenue projection and was rewritten in August 2026 to answer the profitability question and to replace the forecast with later disclosures. Earlier drafts of the 2025 version used AI assistance and were edited before publication.
