New York, January 5, 2026, 15:08 EST — Regular session
- Workday shares rose about 2% in afternoon trading, outpacing the broader market.
- RBC Capital cut its price target to $300 from $320 while keeping an Outperform rating.
- Focus turns to late-February results expectations and updates on enterprise spending trends.
Workday Inc shares climbed about 2% on Monday, extending a rebound from early-session lows as a bullish analyst call helped steady sentiment around the cloud software maker. The stock was up $4.13 at $209.92 in afternoon trade.
The move matters because Workday has been a pressure point in application software, where investors are debating how quickly corporate customers will turn new generative AI — software that produces content such as text and code — into measurable savings and spending plans.
It also lands at the start of a new calendar year, when portfolio managers often reset exposure to growth stocks after year-end rebalancing and tax-related selling.
RBC Capital lowered its price target — an analyst’s estimate of where a stock could trade — to $300 from $320, while keeping an Outperform rating, which signals it expects the shares to beat the market or peers. “Less prepared peers may remain pressured by the ‘AI is the death of software’ narrative,” RBC analyst Rishi Jaluria wrote in a note. 1
Workday’s gains came with a firmer tape across software and large-cap tech. The iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF was up about 1.2%, while the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-linked QQQ ETF added roughly 0.7% and 0.8%, respectively.
Workday, which sells subscription software for human resources and finance teams, last spooked investors in late November when its growth outlook was viewed as lukewarm despite a profit beat. The company reported third-quarter subscription revenue of $2.24 billion, up 14.6%, and forecast fourth-quarter subscription revenue of about $2.36 billion, with demand described as soft among higher-education customers. 2
What comes next is a tighter calendar. Workday has said it expects to close its planned acquisition of automation platform Pipedream in the fourth quarter of its fiscal year ending January 31, 2026, a deal investors will watch for timing and integration details. 3
The risk is that a tentative pickup in enterprise spending fails to show up in bookings, or that customers keep stretching purchase decisions into longer sales cycles. Another overhang is whether Workday can translate heavy AI messaging into clearer revenue and margin traction, rather than feature-driven churn defense.
On the chart, traders are watching whether the shares can hold above Monday’s low near $205 and challenge the session high around $212, levels that have framed the day’s swing.
The next hard catalyst is the company’s next earnings report, which market calendars currently peg for late February, when investors will focus on subscription growth, operating margin guidance and any read-through on 2026 corporate IT budgets.
