CVS Health expects to open roughly 60 stores in 2026, the company’s first increase in its store count in several years, after closing 271 locations in 2025 alone and roughly 900 more between 2022 and 2024. The shift marks a real change in direction for a chain that has spent years shrinking its retail footprint, even as the company says the new openings will be smaller and more selective than the stores it has been closing.
Why CVS has been closing stores for years
The closures trace back to a density-reduction plan CVS first announced in 2021, aimed at eliminating overlapping locations built up over decades of expansion. According to CVS’s own annual filing, the company closed 271 retail stores in 2025 as part of what it called an “enterprise-wide restructuring plan intended to streamline and simplify the organization,” following roughly 900 locations closed between 2022 and 2024. A company spokesperson said the decisions were based on population shifts, consumer buying patterns, and pharmacy density rather than a reaction to industry pressure.
Outside pressures were real, too. CVS, along with its health insurer Aetna and pharmacy benefit manager Caremark, has spent recent years cutting costs and renegotiating terms with insurers to improve the retail pharmacy business’s performance, while also facing intensifying competition from discount retailers and rising rates of theft. CVS has maintained that even after its multi-year realignment, 85% of people in the U.S. still live within 10 miles of a CVS Pharmacy, though that figure comes from the company itself rather than an independent audit.
The retail struggles compounded pressure building elsewhere in the company. CVS Health’s Aetna insurance arm posted elevated medical costs in its Medicare Advantage plans over the past two years, squeezing profits at the same time the retail pharmacy business was already contending with thin reimbursement margins from pharmacy benefit managers. That combination pushed CVS Health leadership toward company-wide cost-cutting alongside the physical downsizing of the store network, rather than treating the closures as a retail-only decision.
CVS is not shrinking in isolation. Rite Aid filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2023 and again in 2025, closing hundreds of stores in the process, and Walgreens separately announced plans to close roughly 1,200 underperforming locations over three years starting in 2024. The pharmacy sector as a whole has consolidated sharply since the pandemic, squeezed by the same thinning reimbursement margins, rising theft and shrink, and a shift of prescription volume toward mail-order pharmacies and big-box retailers with their own in-house counters.
Free retirement updates: Want plain-English help keeping more of your money in retirement? The free Retirement Shield newsletter covers the benefits, deadlines, and money mistakes that cost retirees, a couple times a week. Subscribe free.
What CVS plans to open in 2026
The roughly 60 planned openings this year will cover several different formats: full-size CVS stores, CVS pharmacy counters operating inside Target locations, and standalone pharmacy-only units. Company representative Amy Thibault said a small number of closures are still expected in 2026, mostly tied to expiring leases or relocations to better sites rather than a continuation of the broader downsizing.
The pharmacy-only format is the newest piece of the strategy. These locations run less than half the size of a standard CVS and concentrate on health-focused items such as over-the-counter cough and pain medicine, carrying far fewer general consumer products than a traditional store. CVS opened about a dozen of these smaller branches in 2025 and is continuing that format into 2026, a notably more modest scale than the 30 new pharmacy locations, including some inside Target stores, that the company said it would open in 2025 even while closing hundreds of others.
CVS has said the smaller pharmacy-only locations cost meaningfully less to build and staff than a full-size store, which lets the company test sites in areas it might otherwise consider too small to support a traditional CVS, including strip malls and standalone lots in fast-growing suburban markets rather than only the enclosed retail centers the chain has traditionally favored.
What the reversal could mean for older customers’ pharmacy access
Years of consolidation have not fallen evenly across the country. Industry analysis of the pharmacy sector published in an August 2026 review of chain pharmacy closures describes a widening gap between cities, where consolidation tends to leave another pharmacy nearby, and rural communities, where a single closure can leave patients without a reasonably close option. Older adults make up a disproportionate share of the people living in areas classified as pharmacy deserts, since they are more likely to need regular prescription refills and less likely to have another nearby chain to switch to.
That access gap has followed a consistent pattern through the recent wave of consolidation: rural counties and lower-income urban neighborhoods are disproportionately the parts of the country left without a nearby retail pharmacy, since those lower-volume locations are exactly the ones a chain trims first when shrinking its footprint. A modest return to net store growth does not reverse that pattern on its own, since new openings tend to follow population growth and profitability rather than backfilling the specific communities where a pharmacy already closed.
A modest net increase of roughly 60 stores, against a national footprint of several thousand CVS locations, will not undo years of closures on its own, and CVS itself expects some additional closures even in 2026. But the reversal from years of steady net shrinkage to net growth is a signal that the company sees the worst of its store-count consolidation as behind it. Anyone who depends on a specific CVS location for prescriptions, immunizations, or Medicare-related pharmacy services is still better served checking that a favorite location remains open before relying on it for a fall refill or flu shot, since individual relocations and lease-driven closures are continuing even as the overall store count grows.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by The Money Overview editorial team before publication.
More Financial Reading
