Toast Sets a Feb 12 Q4 Date. Three Lines Will Move the Tape.

I added Feb 12 to the calendar at 4:18 p.m. yesterday, which is roughly the moment the release dropped on the wire. Toast will report Q4 and full-year 2025 results after the close on Thursday, Feb 12, 2026, with a conference call at 5:00 p.m. ET. That is the kind of announcement the news desks treat as housekeeping and the buy-side treats as the calendar pin for an entire sub-sector. Both are right. The print itself is three weeks out; the framing for the print starts now.

The reason this Q4 matters more than the last several is narrow and worth saying out loud. Toast IQ — the conversational AI assistant Toast moved from pilot to GA in late October — has been in market a full quarter on Feb 12. It is the first reporting period where management has to put a sentence next to the assistant that is not “early adoption is encouraging.” Whether that sentence is attach, seat, or deferred-into-2026, it is the sentence the analysts will key off for the rest of the year. The headline EBITDA and net-add numbers will land where they land; the read on Toast IQ monetization is what re-rates the multiple.

(Editorial flag: the three watchpoints below are my framing for what the desks will index off. They are not Toast IR’s framing and they are not consensus. They are the three lines I will be highlighting in my own notes when the call starts.)

One: ARR per location

The cleanest pre-AI Toast number was always SaaS ARR divided by live locations. It is the metric that strips out payment-volume noise and tells you what a Toast install is worth on a recurring basis. Coming out of Q3, the locations base was running through the 160K mark and ARR was being indexed to the high-teens recurring-gross-profit-growth band Toast guided to in November. The Feb 12 question is whether the ARR per location number has begun to bend upward against that base, or whether the install adds are running ahead of the per-location monetization line. If per-location ARR is flat-to-down while location count grows, that is the platform doing volume; if it is up, the AI bundles are doing the work the bull case requires.

Two: take-rate

The other half of the Toast P&L is the payment-economics line. Take-rate has been the quiet compression risk on this name for two years — every basis point matters at this GPV scale, and the platform has spent 2025 layering FinTech features (lending, payroll, capital) on top of the rail. The Feb 12 question is whether the FinTech mix is finally pushing the blended take-rate up, or whether competitive payments pricing in the enterprise tier is still grinding it down. A flat print is the base case; an up-print is the case the long-only book is paying for.

Three: AI attach

This is the soft one and the one I am most curious about. Toast has not yet disclosed a discrete Toast IQ SKU price; the assistant ships inside the platform fee, and the agent layer (the action-taking pieces) is still being scoped. What I want on Feb 12 is any disclosed attach metric — weekly active locations, queries-per-location, action approval rate — that lets us model what the monetization could look like in 2026. A cumulative-query number alone is a vanity stat. A WAL-over-base number is the floor. An approval-rate-on-agentic-actions number is the ceiling. Watch which number management volunteers, and which they leave to a follow-up.

What I am explicitly not doing

I am not going to put a Q1 2026 number on the table this morning, because Toast has not issued one. The FY26 commentary on the November Q3 call was directional, not granular, and the Q1-specific guide is part of what Feb 12 is for. Some third-party previews are already running (TIKR has one up — flag: that piece is dated after this column and reflects buy-side framing rather than Toast IR), and they are useful as crowd-read, not as numbers I am underwriting myself. The right Jan-22 posture is the one I argued on Monday: the Q4 print calendar is the friend of any operator in a hardware negotiation right now. Wait for Feb 12. Let the tape mark itself.

The calendar is set. Three lines. One print.

— Hana edits The Pass. Tips: [email protected].