Moderna returned to profit in the third quarter of 2026, reporting net income of $162 million as revenue rose 29 percent from a year earlier to $1.313 billion. The vaccine maker, which had posted a net loss of $200 million in the same quarter of 2025, also raised its full-year revenue outlook, a sign that its push beyond covid shots is starting to show up in the numbers. The results were released on Thursday, November 6, 2026, in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

What Moderna reported

Diluted earnings were $0.38 a share, against a loss of $0.51 a share in the third quarter of 2025. Both the revenue and the profit came in well ahead of what Wall Street had penciled in: analysts had expected revenue of roughly $885 million and a loss of about $1.25 a share, according to data compiled by GuruFocus and CNBC. Operating income was $130 million, compared with an operating loss of $260 million a year earlier.

By region, United States sales were $780 million and international sales were $533 million. The company said the quarter included the first United States sales of mFLUSIVA, its messenger-RNA influenza vaccine for adults 50 and older, which the Food and Drug Administration approved in early August 2026 as the first mRNA flu shot cleared in the country.

Why the profit swing happened

Two things moved the quarter. Revenue grew because Moderna sold more product, helped by the new flu vaccine and the fall respiratory season, when demand for its covid and combination shots is highest. At the same time, the company kept cutting costs. Research and development spending fell 27 percent year over year as Moderna narrowed its pipeline and wound down some programs.

Cost of sales ran the other way, rising 54 percent to $318 million, which the company tied to higher sales volume and manufacturing costs. That is the kind of detail worth reading in the filing rather than the headline: an increase in the cost of making each dose can eat into the benefit of selling more of them, and it is one of the lines analysts watch for signs of how profitable the new products really are. Our guide to how to read a company earnings report walks through where these numbers sit in the statements.

The raised outlook

The clearest forward signal was the guidance. Moderna said it now expects full-year 2026 revenue to grow 15 percent to 25 percent, up from its earlier view of growth of up to 10 percent.

"The Company now expects total revenue growth of 15% to 25% in 2026, exceeding its previous outlook of up to 10% growth," Moderna said in the release.

Chief executive Stephane Bancel said the company "delivered 29% revenue growth in the third quarter, alongside the U.S. approval of mFLUSIVA," pointing to the flu vaccine as part of the reason for the stronger year. Guidance like this is reported here as the company's own statement of what it expects, not as a forecast of where the shares go. What a raised outlook tells a reader is that management has more visibility into the rest of the year than it did a quarter ago, which is why a single line in a release can matter as much as the quarter just reported. The price-to-earnings ratio that investors are willing to pay often turns on exactly that kind of outlook.

The bigger picture

The quarter matters because of where Moderna has been. At the height of the pandemic the company booked tens of billions of dollars in covid-vaccine sales, then watched that revenue fall away as demand normalized, which is what pushed it into losses. The task since has been to build a business that does not depend on a single product. The first United States sales of mFLUSIVA, alongside its covid and combination respiratory shots, are an early read on whether that broader base is taking shape. One quarter does not prove it, but a 29 percent revenue rise and a return to profit are the first numbers that point that way rather than the other.

The caveats in the detail

A profit of $162 million in a single quarter does not by itself make the full year profitable, and the strongest quarter for a respiratory-vaccine maker is usually the fall. The accelerated United States approval of mFLUSIVA for adults 65 and older rests on immune-response data, and the company has said continued approval for that group may depend on a confirmatory trial. Those are the sort of conditions that sit in the filings rather than the headline and that can change the picture later.

One data point also did not line up cleanly across sources. A summary of Moderna's earnings call carried by Yahoo Finance cited $200 million in net income and $1.4 billion in revenue, which does not match the $162 million and $1.313 billion in the company's SEC filing. Where a secondary account and the primary filing disagree, the filing is the number of record, and that is the figure used here.

What to watch next

The next checkpoints are how mFLUSIVA sells through the 2026 to 2027 flu season, whether the cost of sales keeps rising faster than revenue, and whether the raised guidance holds when Moderna reports the fourth quarter early next year. For readers, the useful habit is to read the actual 8-K and 10-Q filings, where the regional sales, the cost lines and the conditions on the approvals are spelled out, rather than relying on a single headline number.

Moderna shares are covered widely, and nothing here is a recommendation to buy, sell or hold them. The point is simpler: a company that was losing money a year ago reported a profit, beat low expectations and raised its outlook, and the detail behind those three facts is where the real story sits.