Regional banking company United Community Banks (NYSE: UCB) reported Q4 CY2025 results beating Wall Street’s revenue expectations, with sales up 10.5% year on year to $278.4 million. Its non-GAAP profit of $0.71 per share was in line with analysts’ consensus estimates.
Is now the time to buy United Community Banks? Find out by accessing our full research report, it’s free.
United Community Banks (UCB) Q4 CY2025 Highlights:
- Net Interest Income: $237.9 million vs analyst estimates of $235.5 million (13.1% year-on-year growth, 1% beat)
- Net Interest Margin: 3.6% vs analyst estimates of 3.6% (6.7 basis point beat)
- Revenue: $278.4 million vs analyst estimates of $274.3 million (10.5% year-on-year growth, 1.5% beat)
- Efficiency Ratio: 54.4% vs analyst estimates of 53.8% (59.3 basis point miss)
- Adjusted EPS: $0.71 vs analyst estimates of $0.71 (in line)
- Tangible Book Value per Share: $22.24 vs analyst estimates of $22.09 (11.2% year-on-year growth, 0.7% beat)
- Market Capitalization: $3.95 billion
Chairman and CEO Lynn Harton stated, “The fourth quarter marks a great ending to a rewarding year. Our teams delivered healthy loan growth for all of 2025, leading to improvement in our earning asset mix. That improvement, combined with our focus on deposit pricing, drove a 36 basis points expansion in our net interest margin year over year, with four basis points of improvement coming in the fourth quarter. All our key performance metrics improved significantly when compared to 2024. Believing this performance will continue, we took the opportunity to repurchase one million common shares at an average price of $29.84 per share and redeem $35 million of senior debt in the fourth quarter.
Company Overview
Starting as a small community bank in 1950 and expanding through strategic acquisitions across the Southeast, United Community Banks (NYSE: UCB) is a regional bank holding company that provides financial services including loans, deposits, wealth management, and merchant services across the southeastern United States.
Sales Growth
In general, banks make money from two primary sources. The first is net interest income, which is interest earned on loans, mortgages, and investments in securities minus interest paid out on deposits. The second source is non-interest income, which can come from bank account, credit card, wealth management, investing banking, and trading fees. Over the last five years, United Community Banks grew its revenue at a mediocre 10% compounded annual growth rate. This was below our standard for the banking sector and is a rough starting point for our analysis.
Long-term growth is the most important, but within financials, a half-decade historical view may miss recent interest rate changes and market returns. United Community Banks’s recent performance shows its demand has slowed as its annualized revenue growth of 6% over the last two years was below its five-year trend. 
Note: Quarters not shown were determined to be outliers, impacted by outsized investment gains/losses that are not indicative of the recurring fundamentals of the business.
This quarter, United Community Banks reported year-on-year revenue growth of 10.5%, and its $278.4 million of revenue exceeded Wall Street’s estimates by 1.5%.
Net interest income made up 83.4% of the company’s total revenue during the last five years, meaning United Community Banks barely relies on non-interest income to drive its overall growth.
While banks generate revenue from multiple sources, investors view net interest income as the cornerstone - its predictable, recurring characteristics stand in sharp contrast to the volatility of non-interest income.
Software is eating the world and there is virtually no industry left that has been untouched by it. That drives increasing demand for tools helping software developers do their jobs, whether it be monitoring critical cloud infrastructure, integrating audio and video functionality, or ensuring smooth content streaming. Click here to access a free report on our 3 favorite stocks to play this generational megatrend.
Tangible Book Value Per Share (TBVPS)
Banks operate as balance sheet businesses, with profits generated through borrowing and lending activities. Valuations reflect this reality, emphasizing balance sheet strength and long-term book value compounding ability.
Because of this, tangible book value per share (TBVPS) emerges as the critical performance benchmark. By excluding intangible assets with uncertain liquidation values, this metric captures real, liquid net worth per share. Other (and more commonly known) per-share metrics like EPS can sometimes be murky due to M&A or accounting rules allowing for loan losses to be spread out.
United Community Banks’s TBVPS grew at a mediocre 4.7% annual clip over the last five years. However, TBVPS growth has accelerated recently, growing by 10.1% annually over the last two years from $18.34 to $22.24 per share.
Over the next 12 months, Consensus estimates call for United Community Banks’s TBVPS to grow by 8.7% to $24.18, paltry growth rate.
Key Takeaways from United Community Banks’s Q4 Results
It was good to see United Community Banks narrowly top analysts’ revenue expectations this quarter. We were also happy its net interest income narrowly outperformed Wall Street’s estimates. On the other hand, its efficiency ratio missed and its EPS was just in line. Overall, this quarter could have been better. The stock traded down 3.4% to $31.37 immediately following the results.
Is United Community Banks an attractive investment opportunity at the current price? If you’re making that decision, you should consider the bigger picture of valuation, business qualities, as well as the latest earnings. We cover that in our actionable full research report which you can read here (it’s free).
