Meta Reports Third Quarter 2025 Results

MENLO PARK, Calif., Oct. 29, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) today reported financial results for the quarter ended September 30, 2025.

"We had a strong quarter for our business and our community," said Mark Zuckerberg, Meta founder and CEO. "Meta Superintelligence Labs is off to a great start and we continue to lead the industry in AI glasses. If we deliver even a fraction of the opportunity ahead, then the next few years will be the most exciting period in our history."

 

Third Quarter 2025 Financial Highlights

 

Provision for Income Taxes - One-Time, Non-Cash Charge Impact 

We expect a significant reduction in our U.S. federal cash tax payments for the remainder of 2025 and future years due to the implementation of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. However, the implementation also led to the recognition of a valuation allowance against our U.S. federal deferred tax assets, reflecting the impact of the U.S. Corporate Alternative Minimum Tax. As a result, the third quarter 2025 provision for income taxes includes a one-time, non-cash income tax charge of $15.93 billion. Excluding this one-time tax charge, our third quarter 2025:

• Effective tax rate would have decreased by 73 percentage points to 14%, compared to the reported effective tax rate of 87%.
  
  
  
  
• Net income would have increased by $15.93 billion to $18.64 billion, compared to the reported net income of $2.71 billion.
  
  
  
  
• Diluted EPS would have increased by $6.20 to $7.25, compared to the reported diluted EPS of $1.05.

 

Third Quarter 2025 Operational and Other Financial Highlights

• Family daily active people (DAP) – DAP was 3.54 billion on average for September 2025, an increase of 8% year-over-year.
  
  
  
  
• Ad impressions – Ad impressions delivered across our Family of Apps increased by 14% year-over-year.
  
  
  
  
• Average price per ad – Average price per ad increased by 10% year-over-year.
  
  
  
  
• Revenue – Revenue was $51.24 billion, an increase of 26% year-over-year. Revenue on a constant currency basis would have increased 25% year-over-year.
  
  
  
  
• Costs and expenses – Total costs and expenses were $30.71 billion, an increase of 32% year-over-year.
  
  
  
  
• Capital expenditures – Capital expenditures, including principal payments on finance leases, were $19.37 billion.
  
  
  
  
• Capital return program – Share repurchases of our Class A common stock were $3.16 billion and total dividend and dividend equivalent payments were $1.33 billion.
  
  
  
  
• Cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities – Cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities were $44.45 billion as of September 30, 2025. Cash flow from operating activities was $30.0 billion and free cash flow was $10.62 billion.⁽¹⁾
  
  
  
  
• Headcount – Headcount was 78,450 as of September 30, 2025, an increase of 8% year-over-year.

 

 

CFO Outlook Commentary

We expect fourth quarter 2025 total revenue to be in the range of $56-59 billion. Our guidance assumes foreign currency is an approximately 1% tailwind to year-over-year total revenue growth, based on current exchange rates. Our outlook reflects an expectation for continued strong ad revenue growth, partially offset by lower year-over-year Reality Labs revenue in the fourth quarter. The anticipated reduction in Reality Labs revenue is due to us lapping the introduction of Quest 3S in the fourth quarter of last year as well as retail partners procuring Quest headsets during the third quarter of this year to prepare for the holiday season, which were recorded as revenue in the third quarter.

We expect full year 2025 total expenses to be in the range of $116-118 billion, updated from our prior outlook of $114-118 billion and reflecting a growth rate of 22-24% year-over-year. 

We currently expect 2025 capital expenditures, including principal payments on finance leases, to be in the range of $70-72 billion, increased from our prior outlook of $66-72 billion. 

Absent any changes to our tax landscape, we expect our fourth quarter 2025 tax rate to be 12-15%.

We are at an exciting point for our company, where we have continued runway to improve our core services today as well as the opportunity to build new AI-powered experiences and services that will transform how people engage with our products in the future. We expect the set of investments we are making within our ads and organic engagement initiatives next year will enable us to continue to deliver strong revenue growth in 2026, while our progress on AI models and products will position us to capitalize on new revenue opportunities in the years to come.

A central requirement to realizing these opportunities is infrastructure capacity. As we have begun to plan for next year, it has become clear that our compute needs have continued to expand meaningfully, including versus our expectations last quarter. We are still working through our capacity plans for next year, but we expect to invest aggressively to meet these needs both by building our own infrastructure and contracting with third party cloud providers. We anticipate this will provide further upward pressure on our capital expenditures and expense plans next year. 

As a result, our current expectation is that capital expenditures dollar growth will be notably larger in 2026 than 2025. We also anticipate total expenses will grow at a significantly faster percentage rate in 2026 than 2025, with growth driven primarily by infrastructure costs, including incremental cloud expenses and depreciation. Employee compensation costs will be the second largest contributor to growth, as we recognize a full year of compensation for employees hired throughout 2025, particularly AI talent, and add technical talent in priority areas.

Finally, we continue to monitor active legal and regulatory matters, including the increasing headwinds in the EU and the U.S. that could significantly impact our business and financial results. For example, in the EU, we continue to engage constructively with the European Commission on our Less Personalized Ads offering. However, we cannot rule out the Commission imposing further changes to that offering that could have a significant negative impact on our European revenue, as early as this quarter. In the U.S., a number of youth-related trials are scheduled for 2026, and may ultimately result in a material loss.

 

Webcast and Conference Call Information

Meta will host a conference call to discuss its results at 1:30 p.m. PT / 4:30 p.m. ET today. The live webcast of the call can be accessed at the Meta Investor Relations website at investor.atmeta.com, along with the company's earnings press release, financial tables, and slide presentation.

Following the call, a replay will be available at the same website. Transcripts of conference calls with publishing equity research analysts held today will also be posted to the investor.atmeta.com website.

 

Disclosure Information

Meta uses the investor.atmeta.com and meta.com/news websites as well as Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook Page (facebook.com/zuck), Instagram account (instagram.com/zuck) and Threads profile (threads.net/zuck) as means of disclosing material non-public information and for complying with its disclosure obligations under Regulation FD. 

 

About Meta

Meta is building the future of human connection, powered by artificial intelligence and immersive technologies. When Facebook launched in 2004, it changed the way people connect. Apps like Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp further empowered billions around the world. Now, Meta is moving beyond 2D screens toward experiences that foster deeper connections and unlock new possibilities.

 

Contacts

Investors:

Kenneth Dorell

[email protected] / investor.atmeta.com 

Press:

Ashley Zandy

[email protected] / meta.com/news 

 

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements regarding our future business plans and expectations. These forward-looking statements are only predictions and may differ materially from actual results due to a variety of factors including: the impact of macroeconomic conditions on our business and financial results, including as a result of geopolitical events; our ability to retain or increase users and engagement levels; our reliance on advertising revenue; our dependency on data signals and mobile operating systems, networks, and standards that we do not control; changes to the content or application of third-party policies that impact our advertising practices; risks associated with new products and changes to existing products as well as other new business initiatives, including our artificial intelligence initiatives and Reality Labs efforts; our emphasis on community growth and engagement and the user experience over short-term financial results; maintaining and enhancing our brand and reputation; our ongoing privacy, safety, security, and content and advertising review and enforcement efforts; competition; risks associated with government actions that could restrict access to our products or impair our ability to sell advertising in certain countries; litigation and government inquiries; privacy, legislative, and regulatory concerns or developments; risks associated with acquisitions; security breaches; our ability to manage our scale and geographically-dispersed operations; and market conditions or other factors affecting the payment of dividends. These and other potential risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ from the results predicted are more fully detailed under the caption "Risk Factors" in our Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q filed with the SEC on July 31, 2025, which is available on our Investor Relations website at investor.atmeta.com and on the SEC website at www.sec.gov. Additional information will also be set forth in our Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2025. In addition, please note that the date of this press release is October 29, 2025, and any forward-looking statements contained herein are based on assumptions that we believe to be reasonable as of this date. We undertake no obligation to update these statements as a result of new information or future events.

For a discussion of limitations in the measurement of certain of our community metrics, see the section entitled "Limitations of Key Metrics and Other Data" in our most recent quarterly or annual report filed with the SEC.

Non-GAAP Financial Measures

To supplement our condensed consolidated financial statements, which are prepared and presented in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles in the United States (GAAP), we use the following non-GAAP financial measures: revenue excluding foreign exchange effect, advertising revenue excluding foreign exchange effect, and free cash flow. The presentation of these financial measures is not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for, or superior to, financial information prepared and presented in accordance with GAAP. Investors are cautioned that there are material limitations associated with the use of non-GAAP financial measures as an analytical tool. In addition, these measures may be different from non-GAAP financial measures used by other companies, limiting their usefulness for comparison purposes. We compensate for these limitations by providing specific information regarding the GAAP amounts excluded from these non-GAAP financial measures.

We believe these non-GAAP financial measures provide investors with useful supplemental information about the financial performance of our business, enable comparison of financial results between periods where certain items may vary independent of business performance, and allow for greater transparency with respect to key metrics used by management in operating our business.

Our non-GAAP financial measures are adjusted for the following items:

Foreign exchange effect on revenue. We translated revenue for the three and nine months ended September 30, 2025 using the prior year's monthly exchange rates for our settlement or billing currencies other than the U.S. dollar, which we believe is a useful metric that facilitates comparison to our historical performance.

Purchases of property and equipment; Principal payments on finance leases. We subtract both purchases of property and equipment, and principal payments on finance leases in our calculation of free cash flow because we believe that these two items collectively represent the amount of property and equipment we need to procure to support our business, regardless of whether we procure such property or equipment with a finance lease. We believe that this methodology can provide useful supplemental information to help investors better understand underlying trends in our business. Free cash flow is not intended to represent our residual cash flow available for discretionary expenditures.

For more information on our non-GAAP financial measures and a reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures, see the "Reconciliation of GAAP to Non-GAAP Results" table in this press release.

 

 

 

 

Segment Results

We report our financial results for our two reportable segments: Family of Apps (FoA) and Reality Labs (RL). FoA includes Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, and other services. RL includes our virtual, augmented, and mixed reality related consumer hardware, software, and content.

The following table sets forth our segment information of revenue and income (loss) from operations:

 

 

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