Ross Stores, Inc.

What does Ross Stores own?

Ross Stores owns two retail banners: Ross Dress for Less, the largest off-price apparel and home fashion chain in the United States with 1,904 stores, and dd's Discounts, a lower-price chain with 363 stores in 22 states. The company sells brand-name merchandise made by others but owns no product brands itself.

Is Ross Stores publicly traded?

Yes. Ross Stores trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker ROST and is a component of the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq-100. It went public on August 8, 1985, at $17.00 per share, roughly $0.53 adjusted for splits.

Who founded Ross Stores?

Stuart Moldaw, a retail entrepreneur who also co-founded Mervyns and was a founding investor in Gymboree, founded the modern company in 1982 when he and a group of investors acquired a six-store Bay Area junior department store chain and converted it to the off-price Ross Dress for Less format. The original Ross chain dated to 1957.

Where is Ross Stores headquartered?

Ross Stores is headquartered in Dublin, California, in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, having relocated from nearby Pleasanton in the mid-2010s. Its buying offices are in New York and Los Angeles, close to apparel vendor showrooms.

How many brands does Ross Stores own?

Two: Ross Dress for Less and dd's Discounts. Both are internally developed store banners. The company operates no other retail chains and owns no private-label merchandise brands, a deliberate strategy of simplicity in a segment where rivals run multi-banner portfolios.

Who owns Ross Stores?

Ross Stores is publicly owned, with shares held by institutional investors, index funds, and retail shareholders. Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street hold the largest positions, consistent with S&P 500 ownership patterns. No family or individual controls the company.

What were Ross Stores' fiscal 2025 results?

For the fiscal year ended January 31, 2026, Ross reported record sales of $22.8 billion, up 8 percent, with comparable store sales up 5 percent, net income of $2.1 billion, EPS of $6.61, and an operating margin of 11.9 percent. The company opened its first stores in the New York metro area and Puerto Rico.

The name predates the company. From 1957 to 1982, Ross operated as a small, family-operated junior department store chain in the San Francisco Bay Area. In August 1982, Stuart Moldaw, a retail entrepreneur who had co-founded Mervyns and backed Gymboree, led a group of investors in acquiring the six-store chain and converting it to an off-price format under the Ross Dress for Less name. The model imported the closeout-merchandise approach pioneered by chains such as TJX to the West Coast.

Ross Stores went public on August 8, 1985, listing on Nasdaq at $17.00 per share, roughly $0.53 adjusted for subsequent splits. Expansion was rapid through the mid-1980s, reaching 121 stores in 16 states and $534 million in sales by fiscal 1986, before management deliberately slowed growth to rebuild infrastructure. The company reincorporated in Delaware in June 1989 and spent the 1990s building the buying organization and distribution network that underpinned national expansion. By fiscal 2000, sales reached $2.7 billion across 409 stores in 17 states and Guam.

The 2000s brought two structural additions. Store growth accelerated into the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic, supported by four new or expanded distribution centers and new merchandising systems. And in August 2004, the company launched dd's Discounts, opening the first three stores in Vallejo, San Leandro, and Fresno, California, a lower-price concept aimed at households earning roughly $30,000 to $40,000, below the typical Ross customer. By fiscal 2010, the company operated 988 Ross stores and 67 dd's Discounts, generating $7.9 billion in sales.

Leadership transitions marked the modern era. Michael Balmuth led the company as CEO through its largest expansion years before Barbara Rentler, a Ross veteran since 1986, became CEO in 2014, one of the first women to lead a Fortune 500 retailer. Under Rentler the company moved its headquarters from Pleasanton to Dublin, California, pushed the store count past 1,900, and navigated the pandemic, which closed all stores in spring 2020 and still produced a fast off-price recovery. Rentler retired in February 2025 and was succeeded by James Conroy, previously CEO of Boot Barn.

Fiscal 2025, ended January 31, 2026, set records: sales of $22.8 billion, up 8 percent, with 5 percent comparable store growth on top of 3 percent the prior year, net income of $2.1 billion, and EPS of $6.61. The company opened its first stores in the New York metro area and Puerto Rico, ending the year with 2,267 locations: 1,904 Ross Dress for Less in 44 states, the District of Columbia, Guam, and Puerto Rico, plus 363 dd's Discounts in 22 states. For fiscal 2026, management guided to EPS of $7.02 to $7.36 on comparable store growth of 3 to 4 percent.

Ross publishes an annual corporate social responsibility report covering environmental, social, and governance topics. Its environmental work concentrates on energy efficiency across its 2,267 stores and a growing distribution center network, waste reduction and recycling programs, and responsible sourcing standards for its vendor base rather than for owned production, since the company manufactures nothing itself.

On the labor side, the workforce is heavily part-time and hourly, consistent with the retail sector. The company funds local community programs in its store markets and runs scholarship and youth initiatives through the Ross Stores Foundation.

The company is not B Corp certified and holds no consumer-facing sustainability certifications, which is standard for off-price retail, where the environmental story is primarily about building efficiency and secondary markets for goods that might otherwise go unsold.

Ross's public record is comparatively clean for a retailer of its scale. Its recurring exposures are the industry's: wage-and-hour class actions in California and other states alleging overtime, meal break, and rest period violations, which the company has settled periodically as routine costs of operating a 107,000-person workforce, and shareholder scrutiny of executive pay at proxy season.

The company draws periodic criticism over store safety and staffing levels in the context of retail theft, and its stores have appeared in news coverage of organized retail crime waves, an exposure it shares with every large apparel retailer. No major fraud, accounting restatement, or regulatory enforcement action is on record against the company as of November 2026.