Costco today
In the United States, Costco's main competitors operating membership warehouses are Sam's Club (a subsidiary of Walmart) and BJ's Wholesale Club. Costco employs 316,000 full and part-time employees worldwide. Costco had 90.3 million members in 2017. In 2020, Costco had 105.5 million members. In 2021, the company had 111.6 million members. As of November 2023, Costco had 129.5 million members. As of February 2026, Costco has over 145.9 million cardholders and 81.4 paid memberships, which is up approximately 5% year over year.
Costco was the first company to grow from $0 in sales to $3 billion in sales in under six years. For the fiscal year ending on August 31, 2012, the company's sales totaled $97.062 billion, with $1.709 billion net profit. As of 2019, Costco is ranked No. 14 on the Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations by total revenue. The ACSI (The American Customer Satisfaction Index) named Costco number one in the specialty retail store industry with a score of 84 in 2014.
From December 2013, Costco's board of directors was chaired by co-founder Jeffrey H. Brotman and included Sinegal, co-founder and director, and two company officers: the president and CEO W. Craig Jelinek and CFO Richard A. Galanti. On August 1, 2017, Brotman died. As of August 2017, Sinegal and Jelinek remained on the board. Jim Sinegal stepped down in 2018.
During the 2010s, Costco outgrew its original three-building headquarters campus in the Pickering Place area of Issaquah—known simply as Buildings 1, 2, and 3—and was forced to put new employees into various leased buildings throughout the city. In April 2019, Costco broke ground on Building 5, a multilevel parking garage with an attached meeting center and fitness center, followed in January 2020 by Building 4, a nine-story office tower next to Interstate 90. The two new buildings were finished in June 2023, and then Costco moved its headquarters employees from Buildings 1, 2, and 3 into the new Building 4. The three original buildings were repurposed for the use of Costco's information technology department.
In September 2024, Costco raised its membership fees, increasing Gold Star and Business memberships from $60 to $65 and Executive memberships from $120 to $130, affecting 52 million members, and raising the Executive reward cap from $1,000 to $1,250. In June 2017, fees had increased from $55 to $60 for Gold Star and Business and from $110 to $120 for Executive memberships. In 2024, Costco implemented barcode scanners at warehouse entrances, requiring members to scan the QR code on their physical or digital card to prevent membership sharing, replacing the practice of showing cards. Also in 2024, food court access was restricted to members only, ending non-member purchases. Starting June 2025, select locations, such as Manhattan, will offer exclusive 9 a.m. shopping hours for Executive Members to provide a less crowded experience. These changes align with Costco's strategy to bolster its membership model, which generated 65.5% of its 2024 net operating income, by enhancing exclusivity and revenue.
In November 2025, Costco filed a lawsuit against the federal government seeking a complete refund of tariffs imposed by the Trump Administration. The lawsuit, filed with the United States Court of International Trade in New York, asks the Supreme Court to find the administration's use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose tariffs unlawful.
