Roblox Q2 2026: bookings up 8%, Q3 guided down 14% to 18%

Roblox’s second-quarter 2026 revenue was $1.47 billion, up 36%, while bookings — the cash users spent on its virtual currency in the quarter — were $1.56 billion, up only 8%. Against its own outlook, revenue came in about $19 million above the top of the $1.39–1.45 billion range it guided to in its April 30 filing (our arithmetic), but bookings landed at the low end of the $1.55–1.61 billion guide, and the company guided third-quarter bookings to fall 14% to 18%.

Roblox (NYSE: RBLX) runs an online platform where users, many of them children and teenagers, play games built by independent creators and buy Robux, its virtual currency, to spend inside them. The tension in this quarter is between two lines that measure the same sales at different times: revenue is still recognizing the boom in 2025 purchases, while bookings show what users are spending now. Terms are defined as they come up.

Roblox Q2 2026 results at a glance

	Q2 2026	Q1 2026	Q2 2025
Revenue	$1,469M	$1,442M	$1,081M
Bookings	$1,557M	$1,731M	$1,438M
Daily active users (DAUs)	123M	132M	112M
Hours engaged	29B	31B	27B
Consolidated net loss	$185M	$248M	$280M
Net loss per share	-$0.26	-$0.35	-$0.41
Adjusted EBITDA	$152M	$99M	$18M
Operating cash flow	$318M	$629M	$199M
Free cash flow	$294M	$596M	$177M

Bookings is a non-GAAP measure of sales in the period, mostly of Robux, before the accounting deferral; the letter reconciles it to revenue. Adjusted EBITDA excludes, among other things, stock-based compensation and the change in deferred revenue; the letter reconciles it to net loss. The DAU and hours figures are read from the letter’s highlights charts; first-quarter figures come from the April 30 letter.

Why did Roblox’s revenue grow 36% while bookings grew 8%?

Because revenue is mostly last year’s bookings. When a user buys Robux, Roblox records a booking, but most of that money goes into deferred revenue and is recognized over the estimated average lifetime of a paying user, which the letter puts at 27 months. Revenue in the second quarter of 2026 therefore still carries the very strong bookings of 2025 — bookings grew 70% and 63% year over year in the third and fourth quarters of 2025, per the letter’s charts.

The deferral line shows the turn. Deferred revenue increased by $99 million in the quarter, against $365 million a year earlier, per the revenue-to-bookings reconciliation. Less new money is going into the deferral pool, and that pool is what future revenue is drawn from.

The third-quarter guidance makes the gap explicit: revenue is guided to grow 4% to 10% while bookings are guided to decline 14% to 18%. The letter’s own footnote explains it — third-quarter revenue “includes flow-through from prior period bookings, particularly elevated bookings throughout 2025.”

Did Roblox meet its Q2 2026 guidance?

On revenue and cash, yes; on bookings, only just. The April 30 letter guided:

	Q2 2026 guide	Q2 2026 actual
Revenue	$1,390–1,450M (+29% to +34%)	$1,469M (+36%)
Bookings	$1,550–1,610M (+8% to +12%)	$1,557M (+8%)
Adjusted EBITDA	$68–83M	$152M
Operating cash flow	$260–275M	$318M
Free cash flow	$230–245M	$294M

Revenue, adjusted EBITDA and both cash-flow lines came in above the top of their ranges. Bookings came in $7 million above the bottom of its range (our arithmetic), which the letter itself describes: “year-over-year bookings growth of 8%, landed at the low end of our guidance range.” On a constant-currency basis bookings grew 7%.

The April letter also said to expect “a sequential decline in DAUs,” and that happened: DAUs fell to 123 million from 132 million in the first quarter, a drop of about 7% (our arithmetic), while still growing 10% year over year.

What does Roblox say caused the bookings slowdown?

A decline in how much users spend per hour played, not fewer users. The letter says “the bookings shortfall reflects a decline in per hour monetization most notably with younger cohorts in the U.S. and Canada,” and gives three reasons:

• A shift in what people play. Engagement moved from “high monetizing, 2025-vintage viral games, to both new and evergreen games with lower hourly monetization.”
• Its own discovery algorithm. In April, Roblox changed its “Recommended For You” algorithm to optimize for long-term retention, evaluating player behavior over 28 days instead of seven. The letter says this “intentionally provides more impressions for highly retentive games at the expense of near term monetization,” and that the near-term impact on younger cohorts “has been larger than we anticipated.”
• Disabling cross-experience game passes, which the letter says hurt monetization “to a lesser degree.”

The payer numbers fit that explanation. Average monthly unique payers rose 15% to 27 million, faster than bookings at 8%, so bookings per payer fell roughly 6% (our arithmetic). Hours engaged rose 5% to 29 billion, half the 10% growth in DAUs, and in the US and Canada hours grew just 1% on 6% DAU growth.

Did age verification hurt Roblox in Q2 2026?

The second-quarter letter does not name it as the cause of the bookings slowdown. Safety changes were the stated reason for the earlier guidance cut: the April 30 letter lowered the full-year outlook “to account for a continuation of the safety headwinds we have experienced to date.” By the end of the second quarter, 57% of global DAUs had completed an age check, with the US and Australia above 70% against a long-term goal of 90%.

The 10-Q keeps the risk on the list in general terms: “Our safety changes have impacted and may continue to impact engagement, retention, revenue, and bookings.” The letter also says on-platform communication, which fell in the first quarter after Roblox began requiring age checks for chat in January, has started to improve but is not yet back above pre-age-check levels.

What happened to Roblox’s full-year guidance?

It is gone. Roblox had cut its 2026 outlook once already — full-year bookings guidance went from $8,282–8,553 million in the February 5 letter to $7,330–7,600 million on April 30, about $950 million (11%) lower at the midpoint (our arithmetic). With the second-quarter results it stopped issuing a full-year number, saying it is “accelerating our previously announced transition to quarterly-only guidance by one quarter, issuing guidance for Q3, but not the full year.”

The third-quarter guidance in its place:

	Q3 2026 guide
Revenue	$1,413–1,490M (+4% to +10%)
Bookings	$1,576–1,653M (-18% to -14%)
Consolidated net loss	$307–348M
Adjusted EBITDA	$0–41M
Operating cash flow	$110–175M
Free cash flow	-$60M to $5M

The letter expects DAUs to rise sequentially in the third quarter but says “monetization softness observed in Q2 is expected to persist in Q3,” and that it expects fixed-cost deleveraging and more spending on AI infrastructure. Free cash flow near zero, after $294 million this quarter, also reflects what the guidance table calls capital expenditures and purchases of intangible assets, which the letter describes as back-half loaded: $170 million in the third-quarter guide.

Is Roblox still generating cash?

Yes, for now. Operating cash flow was $318 million and free cash flow $294 million, up 60% and 66%. Cash, cash equivalents and investments were $6.1 billion at June 30. Roblox repurchased 8.2 million shares for about $380 million in the quarter under a $3 billion authorization announced May 19, with the intent to buy back $1 billion over the following twelve months. The fully diluted share count was 752 million, up 2% year over year.

What to watch in Q3

• Bookings against the $1,576–1,653 million guide. The direct test of whether the per-hour monetization decline has stopped getting worse.
• DAUs and hours. The company expects a sequential DAU increase; whether hours keep up with users shows whether engagement per user is still thinning.
• Bookings per payer. Payers grew 15% while bookings grew 8%; that gap is the monetization problem in one ratio.
• Deferred revenue. The quarter’s $99 million increase compares with $365 million a year earlier; a smaller deferral pool now means slower revenue later.
• Free cash flow against -$60 million to $5 million. The guide has $170 million of capital spending against $110–175 million of operating cash flow.

Quick answers

How much revenue did Roblox make in Q2 2026?

$1,469 million, up 36% from $1,081 million a year earlier and above the top of the $1,390–1,450 million range Roblox guided to on April 30. Bookings were $1,557 million, up 8%.

Why did Roblox’s bookings slow down?

The shareholder letter attributes it to lower spending per hour played, mostly among younger users in the US and Canada, as engagement shifted from high-spending 2025 hit games to lower-monetizing ones and a discovery-algorithm change favored retention over near-term spending.

Did Roblox cut its 2026 guidance?

It cut full-year bookings guidance on April 30, to $7,330–7,600 million from $8,282–8,553 million, and on July 30 stopped giving full-year guidance. For the third quarter it guided bookings of $1,576–1,653 million, down 14% to 18% year over year.

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Sources and method. Company figures — revenue, bookings and their reconciliation, the income statement and per-share data, adjusted EBITDA, cash flow, cash and investments, buybacks and share count, DAUs, hours and payers, cost components, age-check penetration, the monetization explanation, and the third-quarter guidance — are Roblox’s own disclosures in Exhibit 99.1 (shareholder letter) to the Form 8-K filed 2026-07-30 (accession 0001628280-26-051059) for the quarter ended 2026-06-30, read directly from SEC EDGAR and linked above. The quarterly DAU, hours and bookings series, including the 2025 bookings growth rates, were read from the letter’s highlights charts. Second-quarter guidance, the April full-year guidance and the first-quarter net loss, adjusted EBITDA and cash flow come from Exhibit 99.1 to the Form 8-K filed 2026-04-30 (accession 0001628280-26-028882); the February full-year guidance from Exhibit 99.1 to the Form 8-K filed 2026-02-05 (accession 0001315098-26-000009). The safety-risk sentence comes from the Form 10-Q filed 2026-07-30 (accession 0001628280-26-051082). The EDGAR filing index shows the 8-K accepted at 16:13 ET on July 30, after the close.

No consensus estimate is included, so this piece makes no claim that the quarter beat or missed expectations; the only comparison is with the company’s own guidance and the year-ago quarter. This piece makes no claim about the share-price reaction.

Our arithmetic, labelled as such: revenue about $19 million above the top of its guide; bookings $7 million above the bottom of its guide; the roughly 7% sequential DAU decline; the roughly 6% decline in bookings per monthly unique payer, derived from the reported 8% and 15% growth rates; and the roughly $950 million (11%) cut to the full-year bookings guidance midpoint between February and April. These are approximations built on the disclosed figures, not reported numbers. The interpretation — that revenue is lagging a bookings slowdown and that the deferral pool is the bridge between the two — is our analysis, not a company statement, and is not a forecast.

Related: Reddit Q2 2026, Apple Q3 FY2026, Amazon Q2 2026, Coinbase Q2 2026 and Strategy Q2 2026, all also reported July 30.

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