Klarna Q2 2026 Earnings: $9M of Profit, a $69M Loan-Sale Gain and an $11.7B Deposit Base

Klarna made money in the second quarter of 2026 — barely. The IFRS statement of profit or loss shows $1,042 million of total revenue (+27%), $27 million of operating profit and $9 million of net income, against a $53 million loss a year earlier. Inside that revenue line sits a $69 million gain on the sale of consumer receivables — a line that did not exist in Q2 2025 — from U.S. forward flows and a European back-book sale. Klarna has started selling its loans, and the balance sheet they leave is a bank's: $11.7 billion of consumer deposits, which the company says is 88% of its funding, against $9.8 billion of consumer receivables. The same release trimmed full-year GMV guidance to $149–151 billion from above $155 billion. The public Beancount ledger below puts all of it on one chart.

The Headline Numbers​

Klarna Group plc reports under IFRS in US dollars, with a December 31 fiscal year. Q2 2026 is the three months ended June 30, 2026. Every figure below is from the interim condensed consolidated statement of profit or loss and statement of financial position in the Q2'26 earnings release, furnished to the SEC as a 6-K exhibit on August 18, 2026.

The order of the growth rates is the story Klarna wants told: GMV +18%, revenue +27%, and transaction costs only +17%. Revenue per dollar processed rose — the take rate went from 2.64% to 2.84% of GMV — while provisions for credit losses fell to 0.52% of GMV from 0.56%.

The bottom line is thinner than that framing. Net income of $9 million is 0.9% of revenue, and $5 million of it belongs to non-controlling interests; shareholders of Klarna Group plc earned $4 million. The $69 million gain on sale is more than seven times the quarter's net income.

Revenue Deep Dive: Three Lines, One Posting​

Klarna's revenue has three components, and the split matters more than the total:

Transaction and service revenue — merchant fees, membership fees and the rest of the network take — grew 17% to $707 million, "broadly tracking volume, with continued growth in membership fees," in the release's words. It is still two thirds of revenue.

Interest income grew 21% to $266 million. This is Fair Financing, Klarna's point-of-sale installment product, which grew 82% year over year to $4.7 billion of GMV and accrues interest over each loan's life.

Gain on sale of consumer receivables is the new line. The release attributes the $69 million to "the U.S. forward flows and back-book sales in Europe, related to our existing U.S. forward flow arrangement and our newly launched facility in Germany." A forward flow, as Klarna defines it, is a "committed, pre-priced loan sale in which Klarna retains the vast majority of the economics." The first half's gain on sale ($126 million) already exceeds all of FY2025 ($73 million), and management expects the second half to be "marginally higher."

The ledger books all three as one Income:Revenue posting of 1042 MUSD, because that is the filing's total revenue; the split lives in the posting comment and in the table above. That is a deliberate choice. A reader who wants to know what Klarna earns without selling loans can subtract the gain — but the filing reports it as revenue, and the ledger should not decide otherwise.

Management's own wording, read for the signals that matter (Q2'26 earnings release):

• Robust demand / engagement: "Over 120 million consumers now use Klarna, and each is using it for more of their everyday spend — revenue per active consumer grew 24%."
• Product ramps: "Klarna Memberships reached 2 million paying subscribers, eight times a year ago, with subscription revenue up more than 600%," and "The Klarna Card reached 6.5 million active users across 16 countries, up from 1.3 million a year ago."
• Market expansion: "The network keeps widening. Over 1.2 million merchants are now live, up 54%," with J.P. Morgan Payments live on August 6 and "the U.S. remains our fastest-growing large region."
• Pricing: excluding the fair-value presentation change, "on a comparable basis we are earning more revenue on every dollar we process."

Absence is a finding. Klarna does not claim demand exceeds supply, a supply-constrained market or an industry upcycle. The opposite: "German retail sales grew less than 1% in real terms in the first half," and the guidance "assumes Germany stays soft through the second half rather than recovering."

The Margin Story​

Klarna has not had an operating profit in any of the three full years in the ledger. FY2024's positive net income came from $154 million of other income below the operating line, not from operations. Q2 2026 is the first period in the ledger where the operating line itself is positive.

Mechanically, the improvement is in transaction costs. Processing and servicing, provision for credit losses and funding costs together fell from 61.7% of revenue in Q2 2025 to 57.2% in Q2 2026. Provisions grew only 10% ($174M → $192M) against 27% revenue growth; the release credits "improved underwriting," "growing forward-flow arrangements" and "the increasing share of off-balance sheet receivables." That last reason is the same loan sales that produced the gain: a receivable Klarna has sold carries no provision on Klarna's books.

Now subtract the gain. Without the $69 million, operating profit of $27 million becomes a $42 million operating loss. The subtraction overstates the case in one respect: funding costs of $171 million include a $46 million fair-value adjustment on loans sold and held for sale ($23 million a year earlier), so part of the sale economics already sits on the cost side. Net of that line, loan sales contributed about $23 million — still most of the quarter's operating profit.

Klarna manages to two non-IFRS measures, and both are prose-only here. Transaction margin dollars were $446 million (+42%) — total revenue less transaction costs, reconciled in the release by adding back operating expenses to the $27 million operating profit. Adjusted operating income was $91 million, reconciled by adding back depreciation and amortization ($23 million), share-based payments ($38 million) and restructuring ($4 million). Neither number is in the ledger: the gap between $91 million adjusted and $9 million net is exactly what a plain-text ledger should keep visible.

The One Big Question: Who Funds a BNPL Bank?​

Klarna is a licensed bank. That one fact separates it from most of its buy-now-pay-later peers, and it shows up on the right-hand side of the balance sheet.

Three observations follow from the table.

Deposits exceed receivables. Consumer deposits of $11.7 billion cover all $9.8 billion of consumer receivables (the three measurement categories together) with $1.9 billion to spare. The surplus sits in cash and debt securities ($5.3 billion combined). Deposits plus notes payable are $13.4 billion, and deposits are 87% of that sum — in line with the release's statement that deposits represent "88% of our funding."

The book shrank in the first half. Receivables at amortized cost fell $1.6 billion from December, while the fair-value categories — the loans held to collect-and-sell or held for sale — became a larger share. Deposits fell $1.3 billion alongside them; the cash-flow statement shows a $604 million outflow from consumer deposits for the half. Some of that is the seasonal unwind of Q4 holiday originations, but the release is explicit that offloading "is central to our asset-light strategy," and from the second half new U.S. and German Fair Financing originations will be measured at fair value through profit or loss, with the value recognized "in the gain on sale line at origination." Expect the gain-on-sale line to grow and the amortized-cost line to stop tracking volume.

The sold loans are not in the ledger. Receivables Klarna has sold through forward flows or back-book sales are off balance sheet. The ledger follows the filing: it records the $69 million gain in revenue and does not invent an asset for the loans that produced it.

Merchants appear on the balance sheet too. Payables to merchants — money Klarna owes merchants for purchases it has financed but not yet settled — rose to $934 million. That is the other side of the settlement flow our guides walk small merchants through: BNPL accounting for small merchants, from gross-versus-net settlement to 1099-K reconciliation and reconciling Klarna, Affirm and Afterpay settlements. Every merchant's "BNPL clearing" balance is a sliver of Klarna's Liabilities:Current:PayablesToMerchants.

Klarna vs Affirm: deposits vs wholesale funding​

The Affirm ledger closed its fiscal year on the same date, June 30, 2026, which makes the two balance sheets directly comparable.

The two companies have similar-sized loan books and opposite funding models. Affirm funds its loans with securitization notes, funding-debt facilities and convertible notes; Klarna funds them with retail deposits. Klarna's quarterly interest cost on funding was $125 million against $13.4 billion of deposits and notes — roughly 3.7% annualized on period-end balances. Affirm's FY2026 funding interest of $454 million against $9.8 billion of period-end funding debt is roughly 4.6%. Deposits are the cheaper money, and they are the moat Klarna's release is pointing at.

Affirm's equity ratio is flattered by its ~$1.5 billion deferred-tax asset from this year's valuation-allowance release, but even without it Affirm carries more equity per dollar of assets. Klarna runs thinner, which is what a bank with insured deposits can do — and why the loan sales matter: selling receivables frees capital without raising equity. Affirm has sold loans for years and books a larger share of revenue from it. Klarna is now doing the same thing.

Tracking a $17.8B BNPL Bank in Plain Text​

Double-entry makes a balance sheet like Klarna's legible: every dollar of deposits has to land somewhere on the asset side, and every dollar of gain on sale has to come from a line the filing reports. It is how we model every company in the Open Ledger project — one core chart, plus sector accounts only where the filing forces them.

Klarna adds a bank's accounts under the standard hierarchy: Assets:Current:ConsumerReceivables (amortized cost) with separate …FVOCI and …FVTPL siblings so each balance assertion ties to exactly one filing caption, Liabilities:Current:Deposits, Liabilities:Current:PayablesToMerchants, Liabilities:NonCurrent:NotesPayable and Equity:NonControllingInterests. Each is documented in the ledger's main.bean banner with the filing line it carries.

The Q2 2026 income statement as booked. Beancount signs are the usual ones: income is a credit (negative), expenses are debits (positive), and Equity:Adjustments absorbs the net income so the transaction sums to zero:

; Check: -1042 + 233 + 192 + 171 + 130 + 128 + 58 + 91 + 12 + 18 + 9 = 0 ✓
 
2026-06-30 * "Klarna Group plc" "FY2026Q2 Income Statement"
  Income:Revenue                            -1042 MUSD  ; total revenue as filed (transaction and service 707 + gain on sale of consumer receivables 69 + interest income 266)
  Expenses:CostOfRevenue                      233 MUSD  ; processing and servicing costs
  Expenses:CostOfRevenue                      192 MUSD  ; provision for credit losses
  Expenses:CostOfRevenue                      171 MUSD  ; funding costs
  Expenses:ResearchAndDevelopment             130 MUSD  ; technology and product development
  Expenses:SellingGeneralAdministrative       128 MUSD  ; sales and marketing
  Expenses:SellingGeneralAdministrative        58 MUSD  ; customer service and operations
  Expenses:SellingGeneralAdministrative        91 MUSD  ; general and administrative
  Expenses:DepreciationAmortization            12 MUSD  ; depreciation, amortization and impairments
  Expenses:IncomeTax                           18 MUSD  ; tax expense (benefit)
  Equity:Adjustments                            9 MUSD  ; net profit (loss) offset incl. NCI (shareholders 4, NCI 5); RE set by balance assertion

The three Expenses:CostOfRevenue postings are Klarna's transaction costs. Revenue minus those three lines is transaction margin dollars ($446 million) — the ledger does not label it, because the filing does not.

The balance-sheet line that tells the story is the deposit base:

2026-06-30 balance Liabilities:Current:Deposits               -11673 MUSD  ; Consumer deposits
2026-06-30 balance Assets:Current:ConsumerReceivables           8831 MUSD  ; Consumer receivables at amortized cost

The Multi-Year Arc​

Balance-sheet columns are at each period end; Q2 2026 revenue and net income are for the quarter only.

Revenue grew 54% from FY2023 to FY2025 while the business stayed loss-making at the operating line in every year. FY2025 was the expansion year: receivables rose $3.1 billion and deposits $3.5 billion, provisions for credit losses rose from $495 million to $794 million, and funding costs from $503 million to $667 million — the growth came first, the margin afterward. Across all four period ends, deposits exceeded receivables by 16–20%; the funding model has been stable while the lending has not.

Equity is the flat line. Total equity moved from $2.2 billion to $2.7 billion over two and a half years, including the September 2025 listing, while total assets grew by $4.0 billion. Selling loans is the way to keep growing volume without letting that ratio slide further.

The Verdict: Bull vs. Bear​

Bull Case

• Operating profit turned positive at $27 million — the first positive operating line in the ledger's four periods — while transaction costs fell to 57.2% of revenue from 61.7%.
• Deposits of $11.7 billion fund 120% of receivables at an interest cost near 3.7%, cheaper than Affirm's wholesale funding.
• Engagement is broadening beyond pay-later: 2 million paying members, 6.5 million Klarna Card users and a take rate up to 2.84% from 2.64%.
• Full-year transaction-margin guidance was raised to $1.62–1.65 billion even as GMV guidance fell.
• Forward flows turn receivables into upfront gains and free capital; H1 gain on sale of $126 million already exceeds FY2025's $73 million.

Bear Case

• Net income of $9 million is smaller than the $69 million gain on sale; without loan sales, the quarter is an operating loss.
• GMV guidance fell to $149–151 billion from above $155 billion and revenue guidance to $4.08–4.16 billion from above $4.34 billion; Germany, the largest market, is guided soft all year.
• The Q3 guide is adjusted operating income of $5–15 million — in a quarter management calls its "investment quarter," IFRS operating profit could turn negative again.
• The H2 move to fair value makes reported revenue and provisions less comparable with prior periods, just as the company is asking investors to judge it on non-IFRS transaction margin.
• The release does not say demand exceeds supply or that pricing power is rising across the book; the take-rate gain is mix, driven by interest-bearing Fair Financing.

Our Take

Klarna's Q2 is a real improvement on the cost side, and a revenue line that has started to depend on selling loans. The deposit base is the best asset in the story: cheap, stable funding that covers every receivable on the balance sheet, which Affirm does not have. But a company that earned $9 million on $1.04 billion of revenue, with a $69 million gain doing much of the work, has not yet shown that the bank earns money on its own. Watch the ledger for two lines in the second half: Income:Revenue without the gain on sale, and Liabilities:Current:Deposits against Assets:Current:ConsumerReceivables. If revenue keeps growing while receivables shrink, Klarna is becoming the asset-light network it says it is. If it doesn't, the $9 million was a loan sale.