Jacobs Solutions closed the third fiscal quarter of fiscal 2026 as a fundamentally different company from the one investors owned a year earlier. The Amentum spin-off is now twelve months behind the business, and the Critical Mission Solutions and Cyber & Intelligence units that once anchored the high-margin government-services story are reclassified as discontinued operations across every prior period the filing presents. On top of that restructuring, the company completed the long-anticipated acquisition of the remaining PA Consulting stake on March 20 of this year. The total price was roughly £1.21 billion, paid in a combination of cash and stock, and lifted ownership to one hundred percent. The pro-forma Jacobs that emerges is, in management's own framing, a science-based consulting and advisory leader organized around two operating segments, namely Infrastructure & Advanced Facilities and PA Consulting, with a global workforce near forty-seven thousand and a strategy the company calls Challenge Accepted that has been in market for roughly eighteen months.
The quarter itself is a story of two operating divisions moving in opposite directions. Infrastructure & Advanced Facilities posted revenue of $3.7 billion, up thirty-nine percent year over year on the back of stronger Global Operations performance and a tailwind from pass-through cost recognition, while PA Consulting delivered roughly $329.5 million, essentially flat versus the prior-year quarter because delayed client approvals pushed revenue recognition into later periods. Operating profit for the consolidated business reached $286.7 million, up twenty-two percent versus the comparable quarter last year. The shares trade near $146 against a fifty-two-week range with the low around $106. Market capitalization is in the high-teens of billions at the current price. On a trailing basis the equity looks expensive near forty-nine times earnings. The forward multiple compresses to roughly seventeen times on consensus estimates, and that gap is itself the read on what the market is paying for the PA Consulting step-up.
The strongest evidence supporting a constructive view is the backlog. Consolidated backlog reached $28.9 billion at the end of the quarter, up more than twenty-seven percent year over year, with Infrastructure & Advanced Facilities carrying nearly all of that total. The strongest counterargument is that year-to-date operating profit declined roughly a third because of transaction-related charges tied to the PA Consulting deal, and the quarterly effective tax rate ran near forty-three percent, well above the comparable period. The forward variables worth tracking are PA Consulting's growth re-emergence as delayed approvals resolve, Infrastructure & Advanced Facilities' ability to convert the Advanced Manufacturing backlog into revenue, and the pace at which management deploys the remaining $618.8 million of buyback authorization over the next eighteen months.