Crown Castle (CCI) FY2025 results: revenue $4.3 billion, down 4.4% on the year

Crown Castle owns and leases out shared communications infrastructure across the United States: more than 40,000 towers and other structures such as rooftops. It rents space on those structures to wireless carriers and other tenants under long-term contracts, and it operates as a REIT for US federal income tax purposes.

The fibre business is being sold, so the company is now one segment

Crown Castle used to report two segments, Towers and Fiber. On 13 March 2025 it signed an agreement to sell the whole fibre business: Zayo taking the fibre solutions side and EQT taking the small cell side, for $8.5 billion in aggregate before closing adjustments, expected to complete in the first half of 2026. Because the sale is a material strategic shift, the fibre results and net assets are now presented as discontinued operations and prior periods have been restated. What is left is one reportable segment: towers. The assets being sold are about 105,000 small cell nodes in service or under contract and roughly 90,000 route miles of fibre.

How a tower makes money

The core business is selling access to space or capacity on a tower under long-term contracts, which take the form of leases, licences, subleases and service agreements. Tenants generally pay monthly, sometimes with an upfront payment. Initial terms run five to 15 years, with multiple renewal periods of about five years each exercisable by the tenant, limited termination rights for the tenant, and contractual increases in the rent built in.

The economics turn on adding a second and third tenant to a structure that is already standing. The company states that adding tenants produces significant incremental cash flow because its incremental operating costs are low.

Who pays the rent

T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon Wireless together accounted for about 90 percent of 2025 site rental revenues. Site rental revenues were 95 percent of net revenues for the year, and the company describes the vast majority of them as recurring and drawn from long-term contracts. At the end of 2025, excluding renewals the tenant may or may not exercise, the contracts had a weighted average remaining life of about six years and represented $23.7 billion of expected future cash inflows, excluding amounts owed by DISH Wireless, to whom Crown Castle has delivered a notice of default and termination.

The land under the towers

About 40 percent of the company's towers Adjusted Site Rental Gross Margin comes from towers on land Crown Castle owns, through freehold interests and perpetual easements. The other 60 percent comes from towers on land it leases, subleases, manages or licenses, and the contracts for that land have an average total remaining life of about 35 years including every renewal exercisable at Crown Castle's option.

Where the towers are

About 56 percent are in the 50 largest US basic trading areas and about 71 percent in the largest 100, with a presence in each of the top 100. Most of the tower interests were acquired from the largest US wireless carriers or their predecessors in transactions since 1999, including from AT&T in 2013, T-Mobile in 2012, companies now part of T-Mobile in 2007, and companies now part of Verizon Wireless and of AT&T in 1999 and 2000.

The small business beside it

As an ancillary line, Crown Castle sells pre-construction site development services tied to tenant equipment installations: site acquisition, architectural and engineering work, and zoning and permitting. It stopped offering installation services as a tower product under a restructuring in July 2023, ran a further restructuring in June 2024, and began another in February 2026.

From Crown Castle's annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended 31 December 2025. The filing

Written from the 10-K filed 23 February 2026: read the full 10-K.