BURLINGTON STORES, INC.
BURL · Consumer Discretionary · $21.9B mkt cap · FY2026 filings · Wide moat ·
On the watchlist
The five investor questions
2022–2026 (latest 5 aligned FYs; v3 window cap 5): revenue $9.3B to $11.5B, increasing; diluted EPS 6.00 to 9.51, increasing. Latest-filed diluted EPS remains usable for Business Trend, but an integer share-count change lacks enough evidence to confirm a comparable EPS basis; valuation growth therefore stays at 0%.
Median gross margin 41.7% over 10y, very stable.
Not enough years of ROIC data to score returns on capital.
Net debt/EBITDA 0.6x, interest coverage 12x.
Owner earnings +12.2%/yr, share count shrinking (buybacks).
The returnsOnCapital component abstained: Not enough years of ROIC data to score returns on capital. The other four 20% weights were renormalized over the scored 80%.
Price vs. conservative owner-earnings floor
A cautious baseline, not a price target: what the shares may support if normalized owner earnings simply hold steady.
- Owner earnings (normalized)
- $340M
- Owner-earnings floor / share
- $60.17
- Capped-growth comparison / share
- $60.17
- Recent price
- $349.97
- Price vs. owner-earnings floor
- 482% above owner-earnings floor
What today’s price assumes: owner earnings growing ~42%/yr over 5 years. The floor assumes owner earnings stay flat (0% growth).
How to read this
We solve for the constant annual change in owner earnings that would make the five-year floor equal today’s price. This keeps the existing model inputs and calculation unchanged; it is an expectations lens, not a forecast.
This floor assumes trailing owner earnings persist — unreliable for declining businesses. The recent FY revenue series does not trigger the three-consecutive-declines flag.
Cohort context: median current price is 239% above the floor across 48 of the current top 50 companies by Moat Score with both values.
Score records captured Jul 26, 2026.
Exactly which 50 companies?
FTNT, META, MEDP, IBEX, MSFT, GOOGL, LULU, ANF, IDXX, TXRH, FHI, QLYS, FFIV, ADBE, LLY, MANH, VEEV, GRMN, SSD, MNST, DOCS, MCO, CPRT, NTAP, LRCX, NVDA, CORT, SFM, MPTI, ULTA, SN, RMD, ROL, PAYC, IRMD, INTU, DECK, MORN, LGCY, DAL, GWW, ISRG, MPWR, CTAS, LOPE, MRK, CMG, FAST, BKNG, ORLY
Missing a usable price or floor: ANF, BKNG.
Model details under moat-index@3.0.0: zero-growth floor 11.1×, capped-growth comparison at no more than 18×; 9% discount rate; high-end growth 0% (capped at 4%) using min(5y revenue CAGR, 5y diluted-EPS CAGR), clamped to 0%–4%; maintenance capex uses min(capex, D&A); abstain when D&A is unavailable. This is a disclosed model range, not intrinsic value as fact.
16 years of fundamentals
The business, in plain English
BURLINGTON STORES, INC. booked $11.5B of revenue in FY2026 in the Consumer Discretionary sector and kept 43.8% of it as gross profit — a solid-margin business by that measure. After every other cost, 5.3% of each revenue dollar reached the bottom line.
Across the filed record, revenue grew from $3.9B (FY2012) to $11.5B (FY2026) — about 8.1% a year compounded over 14 years.
The balance sheet carried $2.1B of total debt in FY2026 against $610M of owner earnings — roughly 3.4 years of owner earnings to retire it all. Balance-Sheet Safety scores it 72/100.
This breakdown is generated from the filed numbers and sub-scores above — no outside narrative, no estimates. Where a filing doesn’t disclose an input, the sentence that would need it is omitted instead of guessed.
Not disclosed in BURL’s filings for these years — we don’t estimate it.
Gaps in a line mean that item isn’t in BURL’s filings for that year — the series is never interpolated or estimated. The Table view lists every filed value, including operating and net margins, total debt, and share count.
Moat Score history
Score history begins Jul 26, 2026 — the record builds from here and can’t be backfilled.
Tier changesSame-methodology crossings of the Wide / Narrow / Shallow bars
- Normalizer upgraded unstamped (version unknown)tomoat-xbrl-normalizer@1.1.0 — readings across versions aren’t comparedJul 26, 2026
- Methodology upgraded moat-index@2.0.0tomoat-index@3.0.0 — readings across versions aren’t comparedJul 23, 2026
- Methodology upgraded moat-index@1.2.0tomoat-index@2.0.0 — readings across versions aren’t comparedJul 20, 2026
Scores are logged append-only and never overwritten — this record can’t be backfilled, which is exactly why it’s worth keeping.
Track record
How BURLINGTON STORES, INC.’s moat rated in each of the years we can reconstruct from its filings — scored only on what was knowable at the time — and what its price and returns did afterward. The score never saw a price; the two are joined only in hindsight, for education, not as a signal.
How to read this: each dot is what the engine would have scored BURL on that December 31; the line below is its total-return price path (dividends reinvested) in the years since.
Two tracks, one timeline: the score has its own 0–100 scale (top), the price its own 100-based scale (bottom) — never a shared axis. The indexed price path isn't available for this company yet; gaps in the score line are years with no reconstructed rating (see the table for why). The Table view carries every value.
What followed, in the years it rated Wide
In the reconstructed history shown, BURL did not rate Wide-moat in any year, so there is no wide-moat track record to report. That absence is itself the honest answer — we don’t manufacture a comparison where the rating never earned one.
Consumer Discretionary context
#38 of 487 scored Consumer Discretionary companies, ranked by Moat Score.
Nearest peers by Moat Score
- #36AZO AUTOZONE INC81.7 out of 100, Wide moatWide moat
- #37AMZN AMAZON COM INC81.4 out of 100, Wide moatWide moat
- #39NATH NATHAN’S FAMOUS, INC.80.7 out of 100, Wide moatWide moat
- #40RVLV REVOLVE GROUP, INC.80.7 out of 100, Wide moatWide moat
Compare BURL with its nearest peers →All Consumer Discretionary companies on the Index →
Common questions about BURL
- Does BURLINGTON STORES, INC. have an economic moat?
- Based on its FY2026 SEC filings, the Moat Index scores BURLINGTON STORES, INC. (BURL) 81.0 out of 100 — a Wide moat. The five questions behind that score begin at 20% each; if exactly one genuinely lacks data, the other four weights are renormalized and disclosed. revenue and EPS trend 81, pricing power 71, returns on capital not measurable from the filings, balance-sheet safety 72, capital discipline 100.
- Is BURL trading below the conservative owner-earnings estimate?
- The conservative owner-earnings floor is $60.17 per share. It capitalizes normalized owner earnings at a 9% rate and assumes 0% growth. Versus a recent price of $349.97, that is 482% above owner-earnings floor. The model also publishes a capped-growth comparison, but the floor is the cautious baseline. It assumes trailing owner earnings persist and is unreliable for declining businesses. This is an educational estimate from primary SEC filings, not intrinsic value as a fact or investment advice.
- How has BURL's Moat Score changed over time?
- The record logs 16 readings since Jul 17, 2026; the latest reads 81.0 out of 100 (wide moat). No tier changes on record yet. (Methodology or normalizer upgrades on Jul 20, 2026, Jul 23, 2026, Jul 26, 2026 re-based the score; readings across versions aren't compared.) The history is append-only — readings are only ever added, never rewritten.