Texas Roadhouse sales surge as tech boosts speed, efficiency, takeout

Texas Roadhouse’s 7.1% same-store sales jump did more than pad a quarterly headline. It signaled a shift in how the chain is organizing labor on the floor, with technology and takeout pushing more work into tighter turns, faster table resets and sharper handoffs between hosts, servers and kitchen crews.

The company said comparable restaurant sales rose 7.1% in the quarter ended March 31, with traffic up 4.5% and pricing up 3.1%. Revenue reached $1.633 billion, up 12.8% from a year earlier. Average weekly sales climbed to $174,151, including $25,374 in to-go sales, and takeout made up 14.6% of weekly sales, the highest share since the pandemic era.

That mix matters on the ground. More off-premise volume means more tickets that have to be built, packed and timed without slowing the dining room, while the in-house side still has to move guests through quickly enough to protect table turns. Texas Roadhouse said its technology investments are meant to make the restaurants faster and more efficient, including table tablets for payment, digital kitchen display systems and a new waitlist management system. The company is also testing handheld ordering devices for servers. For managers, that can mean cleaner communication and less chaos at peak times. For line cooks and servers, it can mean less scrambling over missed tickets and fewer bottlenecks at the host stand, but it also raises the bar for speed and consistency.

The financial picture showed why the company is leaning on execution. Restaurant margin dollars rose 10.5% to $264.4 million, but restaurant margin as a percentage of sales fell 36 basis points to 16.3%. Commodity inflation was 6.2% and wage-and-other labor inflation was 3.8%, a reminder that stronger sales do not erase pressure in the back of the house or on payroll. Texas Roadhouse said it implemented an early-April menu price increase of about 1.9% and expects 7% commodity inflation for the full year.

The chain is still expanding while it tunes the operating model. It opened four company restaurants and two franchise restaurants in the quarter, had opened seven company restaurants year to date and had 22 more under construction. Comparable sales at company restaurants were up 6.5% in the first five weeks of the second quarter. Texas Roadhouse also said same-store sales have now risen for 60 consecutive quarters excluding the pandemic, a streak that stretches back to 2010.

Behind that run is a larger footprint and a longer operating history. As of Dec. 30, 2025, Texas Roadhouse and its franchisees operated 816 restaurants across 49 states, one U.S. territory and ten foreign countries. Founded in 1993 by W. Kent Taylor in Clarksville, Indiana, the chain has spent years building a model around speed, volume and control. The latest quarter shows that when the tools work, the pressure inside the restaurant shifts just as quickly as the sales do.