Cintas (CTAS) FY2026 results: revenue $11.3 billion, up 8.9% on the year

Cintas is a Washington corporation that supplies more than one million businesses, mainly in the United States and also in Canada and Latin America, with products and services that keep their facilities and staff clean, safe and presentable. The range covers uniforms, mats, mops, shop towels, restroom supplies, workplace water services, first aid and safety products, automated external defibrillators, eye-wash stations, safety training, fire extinguishers, sprinkler systems and alarm testing. It was founded in 1968 by Richard T. Farmer, who left his family's industrial laundry business to build uniform programmes around a new fabric and then bought that family business in the early 1970s, adding products and services around the core uniform work over the years. The financial year ends on 31 May.

The segments

The Uniform Rental and Facility Services segment covers the rental and servicing of uniforms and other garments, including flame resistant clothing, along with mats, mops, shop towels and other items, plus restroom cleaning services and supplies and catalogue sales made to customers on the route. The First Aid and Safety Services segment covers first aid and safety products and services and workplace water services. The rest of the business, the Fire Protection Services and Uniform Direct Sale operating segments, is reported in All Other. In fiscal 2026 Uniform Rental and Facility Services was the largest of the three by some distance, with First Aid and Safety Services and All Other each around a tenth of the total.

The UniFirst merger

On 10 March 2026 Cintas agreed to acquire UniFirst, a North American supplier and servicer of uniform and workwear programmes, facility service products and first aid and safety supplies, in a transaction valued at approximately 5.5 billion dollars. Under the agreement a Cintas subsidiary merges into UniFirst and UniFirst then merges into a second Cintas subsidiary, with UniFirst shareholders receiving 155.00 dollars in cash and 0.7720 of a Cintas share for each share held. Completion depends on listing approval for the new Cintas shares on NASDAQ, expiry of the waiting period under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act and other antitrust consents, consents relating to certain UniFirst permits, and the absence of any order prohibiting the mergers. UniFirst shareholders approved the deal at a special meeting announced on 12 June 2026.

How the work reaches customers

In Uniform Rental and Facility Services the products and services go out on local delivery routes running from rental processing plants and branches. In First Aid and Safety Services and in All Other they go through a distribution network and local delivery routes or local representatives. At 31 May 2026 the company had approximately 12,500 local delivery routes, 484 operational facilities and 12 distribution centres.

Making and buying

Cintas buys finished products from many outside suppliers, each of which must comply with a vendor code of conduct as a condition of doing business, and it trains the employees responsible for supply chain management on the issues involved. Alongside that it runs five manufacturing plants covering standard uniform needs, buying the fabric from several suppliers. Finding qualified suppliers that meet its standards and getting products in on time are described as ongoing market risks.

Strategy and people

The stated objective is to exceed customers' expectations in order to maximise the long-term value of the company for shareholders and working partners, pursued by selling more to existing customers and by widening the customer base into segments not historically served. Service professionals visit customers regularly, and the combination of that contact and the distribution system is the platform for launching further products and services. The customer base is widened through a national sales organisation that can treat any type of business as a prospect, through geographic expansion and through acquisitions as they arise. At 31 May 2026 Cintas employed approximately 48,100 people, whom it calls employee-partners, of whom approximately 800 were represented by labour unions.

From Cintas' annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended 31 May 2026. The filing

Written from the 10-K filed 29 July 2026: read the full 10-K.