Walgreens is shutting down some of its pharmacies this year, but the chain is not going out of business. The company now expects to close fewer than 100 stores in 2026 — a much smaller number than the roughly 700 closures once projected internally. That figure comes from Bloomberg reporting, cited in Feb. 28, 2026 coverage by Inc. and Fast Company. Walgreens still operates nearly 8,000 stores across the U.S. and Puerto Rico and serves more than 9 million customers a day, the company said in a January 2026 release.
That distinction matters because Walgreens is often confused with Rite Aid, a smaller, separate pharmacy chain that did shut down completely in 2026 after filing for bankruptcy twice in two years.
Key facts
- Fewer than 100 Walgreens stores are closing in 2026 — down from an internally projected 700.
- The company still runs nearly 8,000 stores and serves more than 9 million customers daily.
- Walgreens and Rite Aid are separate companies; only Rite Aid closed entirely.
- Sycamore Partners took Walgreens private in August 2025 in a roughly $10 billion deal.
- About a quarter of Walgreens’ remaining stores are currently unprofitable, according to executives.
Why stores are closing
The closures trace back to October 2024, when Walgreens’ board approved a “Footprint Optimization Program” to shed unprofitable stores. Company executives have said roughly a quarter of Walgreens’ remaining stores are not currently profitable, which gives a sense of how large a pool of locations could still be candidates for closure in future years.
Making sense of the closure numbers
The various closure numbers floating around describe different time spans, which is where confusion tends to creep in. Here’s how they break down:
- 2026 alone: Walgreens expects fewer than 100 stores to close, according to Bloomberg reporting.
- The 2024 plan through fiscal 2027: Walgreens’ SEC filing called for approximately 900 to 1,000 closures.
- The 2024 three-year total: The filing put the total at approximately 1,200 to 1,300 stores, including about 300 closures approved before the program.
The fewer-than-100 figure covers 2026 alone, while the larger totals came from Walgreens’ 2024 multi-year plan.
What changed since then is who owns Walgreens. In August 2025, private equity firm Sycamore Partners completed a roughly $10 billion deal to take the company private, ending its decades-long run on the stock market. Reporting from IBTimes UK and Newsweek attributes the smaller 2026 closure number to that shift: instead of a broad reduction across the network, the new ownership is targeting specific underperforming stores rather than closing them by the hundreds all at once.
A Walgreens spokesperson described the company’s goal as “becoming America’s best retail pharmacy, beginning with improving the in-store experience for our customers and patients.”
Local closures reported this year point to a mix of reasons — expiring leases, distribution consolidation, and in some cities, theft and safety problems layered on top of weak sales. In Chicago, executives told residents at a community meeting in May that a South Side store near 86th Street and Cottage Grove had lost more than $1 million and was scheduled to close June 4, citing theft and declining sales as reasons for the losses. A public radio station in Chicago reported that pharmacy closures, including that one, have landed disproportionately in the city’s Black and Latino South and West Side neighborhoods, adding to concerns about “pharmacy deserts” where residents have fewer nearby options for prescriptions.
Job cuts and a distribution center closure
Beyond store closures, Walgreens has confirmed at least 628 job cuts tied to its restructuring:
- 469 positions at its Deerfield and Chicago, Illinois offices.
- 159 in Texas connected to the shutdown of a Houston-area distribution center on June 1, 2026.
Which stores have closed so far
No single official, complete list of every 2026 Walgreens closure exists — the company’s own store-closing webpage gives customers guidance rather than a full address list, and media-compiled lists have been wrong before. In 2024, for example, a Walgreens spokesperson publicly disputed a Maine television station’s report naming five specific stores as closing, saying the company hadn’t finalized those locations yet. Local news outlets are often the fastest way to confirm a specific closure, as the examples below show — but even those reports can be incomplete or change before a store’s final closing date.
Still, local outlets have reported several 2026 closures or planned closures:
- Chicago outlets reported that the Walgreens at 8628 S. Cottage Grove Ave. was scheduled to close June 4.
- ARLnow reported that storefront signage said the Walgreens at 1301 S. Joyce St. in Arlington, Virginia, closed May 5.
- Walgreens confirmed that the 2727 W. North Ave. Milwaukee location would stop filling prescriptions after June 23, with records moving to 3522 W. Wisconsin Ave.
Other lists circulating online name additional addresses in California, Florida, Missouri, New York and elsewhere, but those have not all been independently confirmed as closed. Treat those addresses as a starting point rather than a final answer — the only sure way to know about a specific store is to check with Walgreens directly.
What to do if you use Walgreens for prescriptions
If you’re not sure whether your local store is on the closing list, the safest move is to check the Walgreens website or call that specific store directly.
Walgreens says routine and auto-refill prescriptions may be automatically set up at a nearby store if a location closes and you haven’t chosen a new pharmacy — but that doesn’t apply to everything. Prescriptions for controlled substances, such as certain painkillers or anxiety medications, may not transfer automatically because of federal rules, so it’s worth confirming ahead of time where your records will go and picking up any refill you need before a closure date arrives.