presentation and then be available for Q&A afterwards. We have included our standard forward-looking statements waiver with the normal caveats. Fundamentally, DHI Group is listed under the New York Stock Exchange, as Anya indicated, with a symbol DHX. We are headquartered in Denver, Colorado, and our two brands, ClearanceJobs and Dice, are leading platforms for employers to find and engage with top tech talent. What does that mean? Well, we have created platforms that allow our clients, which are recruiters and hiring managers, to connect with technology candidates. These are effectively two-sided marketplaces, and by definition, we have to serve both communities. We have to serve the recruiters' needs as well as the candidates' needs.
This might sound very familiar with the likes of LinkedIn or Indeed, but we have very specific differentiators that make us a go-to tool for finding this tech talent in the United States. First, we have built special search algorithms to find candidates based on their specific technology skill sets. Second, we have spent, quite literally, decades attracting the right talent to our platforms. We have over 9 million technology professionals across both platforms, representing over two-thirds of the total number of skilled technologists in the United States. We are constantly evolving our offering to become more relevant to our communities. This year, this past year, we bought out a brand-new self-service version of Dice online. We just released a premium candidate subscription for ClearanceJobs, which is the very first opportunity for us to monetize our candidate base.
We have received, traditionally, revenues from our clients. Last year, additionally, we bought an applicant tracking system called Agile ATS that is optimized for government hiring, and we integrated it with ClearanceJobs. Just a couple weeks ago, we announced the acquisition of Point Solutions Group, which is a specialty cleared staffing firm that delivers top-secret professionals to about 10 different contractors right now. As I indicated, we largely make our money by charging our clients for subscription-based contracts that allow them to access our platforms. Because we're a subscription-based business at our heart, 90%+ of our revenue is recurring as a result. Moving along to show you the summary of last year, 2025, and our five-year CAGR trends as well embedded in some of the statistics that we're providing.
DHI drove $128 million in revenue last year and $126 million in bookings. The five-year CAGR trends were 2% for revenue and a decline of 1% for bookings. This is very clearly due to the hiring recession we have seen over the past few years, but that environment is changing very rapidly, particularly for the tech staffing sector, which constitutes over 80% of Dice's revenue. Our Adjusted EBITDA margin was 27%. We delivered $35 million of EBITDA. We also delivered $21 million in operating cash flow and $14 million of free cash flow. Almost all of our capital expenditures are used as capitalized labor used in software development, and Greg will brief you on how we have reduced that CapEx spend significantly over the last year.
Very importantly, I think, for this audience, we reinstituted our share buyback program a year ago and repurchased $11.4 million of shares during the year and ended with net debt of $27 million, equating to less than 1x leverage ratio. You can see that we have had a long-term commitment to buying back our shares, and we are currently in the midst of a $10 million buyback program that we instituted at the beginning of February of this year. If you think about the big picture of our platforms and what we facilitate, the United States has become a tech-oriented economy and has grown the tech workforce by approximately 3% each year over the past 25 years. We have a very unique pool of candidates that cannot be found on other career sites.
Based on our research, independent studies that we've actually performed, roughly 20%-30% of our candidates can be found on alternative platforms like CareerBuilder or ZipRecruiter, Indeed, LinkedIn, with an up-to-date profile. In addition, we know that the majority of these other profiles do not append resume or contact information like we do. ClearanceJobs specifically is a dominant leader in its market for delivering access to technology professionals that have a government clearance. Think of that as secret or top secret. There's a number of different government clearances. LinkedIn does not offer a solution to find cleared candidates because it does not have a field for government clearance status, and government workers and military contractors are restricted from using the site because it is known to be a target of foreign spies. Tech professionals themselves are very well compensated.
The average salary for a tech worker in the United States last year was roughly $127,000, whereas the average worker across all occupation codes in the United States made around $50,000. As a company, you basically have two choices when you're hiring tech workers. You could use a recruiter or you can do it yourself. If you use a recruiter, you will generally be charged between 20% and 25% of first year's salary for that individual. The alternative is to pay Dice roughly $7,000 for an entry-level annual subscription or CJ about $15,000 for an entry-level subscription to that platform. You find and engage that tech talent yourself. As you can see by the economics that I just described, even one hire easily pays for itself compared to paying an external recruiting agency.
We generally work with companies that want to hire at least five new tech workers over the course of the next 12 months. Our value to the tech industry was validated by Forbes, as you can see here, back in 2024 when it announced Dice as the number 1 career site for tech and IT jobs. As I indicated earlier, the elevated interest rate environment clearly has suppressed hiring demand since the end of 2022, and that, after all, was the intent of the Federal Reserve. As the famous quote goes, "Every company is a software company now," because of our reliance on technology and automation, and clearly with AI.
For that reason, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and CompTIA, which is an association for technology workers, forecast that over the next 10 years, the tech workforce will grow at least 15%, a growth rate that is twice as fast as the overall employment growth rate for all occupations in the United States economy. That growth rate is coming from the interest and skills that you see on the right-hand side of this page, and that is an ever-growing interest in data scientists and engineers to implement and manage AI, as well as cybersecurity engineers to protect us from ever-increasing threats. Most people do question whether or not AI will reduce the need for developers, for coders, for programmers, and independent studies from McKinsey and a number of different sources indicate otherwise.
As evidence of that trend, at the end of 2025, 55% of Dice jobs required at least one AI skill. That's up from 28% at the end of 2024. Roughly doubling the number of professionals that are requesting or requested for their AI skills. As I stated earlier, our special sauce is a focus on profiling technology skills. This is the essence of the profiles that you'd find in Dice and ClearanceJobs. LinkedIn and other career sites use a profiling taxonomy that's based on titles, and their concept of skills are soft skills like persuasive speaking or public speaking. Again, our special sauce is really the way that we profile and we search for candidates.
We've spent over a decade perfecting a taxonomy that categorizes over 100,000 different technology skills, and candidates identify those skills inside of their profiles. In fact, we received a U.S. patent for this taxonomy of skill sets and their adjacencies, literally about four years ago. Our customers are hyper-focused on hiring people to manage their AI projects, especially entering 2026. Our taxonomy, as an example, does not look at AI monolithically. It breaks it into 360+ distinct skill sets that constitute that term that is called AI. We win in our marketplace, because we are a specialist in technology skills and not a generalist career platform.
Over the years, we've accelerated the pace of our innovation, as I indicated, on both of these platforms, and we've generally had one or two major releases on each platform each quarter, and literally hundreds of releases each year for each platform. For ClearanceJobs, as I indicated earlier, we completed 2 acquisitions in the past nine months to extend the product set that we can sell into our 1,800 client relationships. AgileATS is that applicant tracking system, basically a CRM for recruiters that allows them to manage their candidate pipelines, and it is specifically built to facilitate hiring in the GovTech space. We just announced that acquisition called Point Solutions Group earlier in this month, and it's a specialized cleared staffing firm that supports multiple prime contracts.
We also just released ClearanceJobs Premium Candidate Subscription, which is the first time that we can charge candidates for advanced features that help them in their job search. On the Dice platform, we literally spent two and a half years rewriting the entire code base to deliver a self-service platform. For the very first time in 35 years, you can go to the site, you can put in your credit card, and immediately in the candidate database. We're in the midst of rolling out a full-fledged marketplace for recruiter tools for Dice over the course of this year, and you're gonna continuously hear us update you on that in future earnings calls. If you think about the big picture of our target addressable market for each of these platforms, at the end of fourth quarter, we had approximately 1,800 subscription customers.
We know that the government has publicly stated that there are over 10,000 contractors that hold what's called a facility clearance, allowing them to conduct business with cleared personnel. We also know that there's over 100 government agencies that we can directly contract with, in addition to those military contractors. For Dice, we have approximately 4,100 subscription clients, and we know that there are tens of thousands of customers that fit our ideal customer profile. Before I transition to Greg, I'll leave you with this quick summary of effectively how we make money and how we have strong visibility into future revenue. First and foremost, as I told you earlier, clients pay for the opportunity to access each platform with subscription contracts. There is no charge for a candidate to register, to create a profile and start using the platform.
Because we are largely a subscription-based service with a one-year minimum contract, over 90% of our revenue is recurring, and the majority of our contracts include an auto-renewal clause with an automatic price escalator, much like other SaaS-type businesses. We allow significantly unlimited emails and texts on our platform, which is a key competitive differentiator, especially against LinkedIn, which caps the number of emails that you can send each month. We encourage the recruiter and the candidate to engage in these conversations about job opportunities because that's how they both win, and the reason for them to come back to our platforms time and time again. With that, introduction to our business model, I'd like to introduce Greg Schippers, our CFO, who will take you through the rest of the presentation.
Thank you, Art. I'll take you through some additional financial information now. DHI bookings, which represent the value of our contracts, will be recognized as revenue within 12 months of the contract start date, has declined at a 1% CAGR since 2021, while revenue has risen at a 2% CAGR over the same period. With over 90% of our bookings and revenue recurring, DHI is a very predictable revenue model with approximately 50% of each year's revenue already under contract at the start of each year. DHI's Adjusted EBITDA margin has expanded since 2021 to 27% in 2025. Because of the more difficult market conditions in the last few years, we have reduced costs through restructurings over the past few years. Together, these restructurings have reduced our operating cost by approximately $35 million.
The restructure in early 2025 separated our Dice and ClearanceJobs organizations, which is designed to better deliver results for our shareholders, maximize profitability, and provide stronger long-term strategic options. We are targeting a 25% Adjusted EBITDA margin for 2026. As previously mentioned, challenging market conditions in the HR tech space persisted in 2025, with bookings and revenue declining on year-over-year basis. Also, as previously noted, we managed our cost structure to grow our Adjusted EBITDA margin to 27% in 2025. Our subscription-based business creates predictable revenue, with revenue generally being recognized ratably over the annual contract term as services are delivered to our customers. This slide depicts how our committed contracts at the start of the year, shown as backlog, become revenue over the year, and then how our customers up for renewal during the year drive revenue as the year progresses.
The remainder of our revenue comes from our new business efforts and transactional business, which primarily includes short-term job postings, career events, and our talent sourcing products. DHI produces strong operating cash flows, with the low points for operating cash flows over the past five years at $21 million, and the strong markets in 2021 and 2022 driving operating cash flows to $29 million and $36 million. DHI's capitalized development costs, which are part of fixed asset purchases in our cash flow statement, primarily represent the cost of our internal labor to build the products and features on the ClearanceJobs and Dice sites. With lower internal headcount resulting from the restructurings, capitalized development costs declined to $7 million in 2025 as compared to $12 million in 2024.
DHI's free cash flow, which is operating cash flows less capital expenditures, is driven by Adjusted EBITDA levels and capitalized development costs. Over time, we are targeting free cash flow at 10% or more of revenue. As Art mentioned, we suspended our share repurchase program in the middle of 2023 to focus on paying down debt. Our debt at the end of 2025 was $30 million, resulting in leverage at 0.85 times our Adjusted EBITDA levels. We generally maintain approximately $2 million of cash on hand and utilize our $100 million revolver to manage liquidity. Since 2020, DHI has repurchased over 18 million shares and has reduced shareholder dilution by approximately 4 million shares or 9%.
We recently announced a new buyback program, which allows us to repurchase up to $10 million of common stock through February 2027. ClearanceJobs is a dual-sided marketplace that drove $55 million of revenue in 2025, and is comprised of 1,800 subscription clients in a market with roughly 10,000 client opportunities and 100 government agencies. On this slide, you can see a number of notable CJ customers. CJ's quarterly bookings have seasonality, with the first quarter being the largest of the year. CJ bookings have a five-year CAGR of 9% and most recently, Q4 bookings were up 3% with 90% revenue renewal rate and a 109% retention rate. With the $1 trillion defense budget approved, we expect CJ to return to double-digit bookings growth as we exit 2026.
CJ revenue has a five-year CAGR of 12%, with the fourth quarter of 2025 being up 1% year-over-year. CJ is very profitable with Adjusted EBITDA margin above 40% and low spend on capitalized development. Dice is also a dual-sided marketplace that drove $73 million of revenue in 2025 and is comprised of 4,100 subscription clients in a market with roughly 100,000 client opportunities between its commercial and SRC accounts. The logos on this page represent a sampling of Dice customers. Our market opportunity in commercial is comprised of companies across various industries such as General Motors, VITAS Healthcare, the CIA, and Capital One, who aren't traditionally tech companies, but certainly hire many tech professionals every year and leverage our platform for their tech hiring needs.
Dice's quarterly bookings also had seasonality, with the first quarter being the largest of the year. Dice bookings have a five-year CAGR of -7%, and most recently, Q4 bookings decreased 11% year-over-year as the HR tech hiring environment remained challenged. Dice's renewal rate in the fourth quarter was 78%, while its retention rate was 94%. Dice revenue has a five-year CAGR of -4%, with the most recent quarter being down 17% year-over-year. Dice Adjusted EBITDA margin has increased in recent quarters due to the restructuring discussed earlier and with the most recent quarter at 30%. Dice capitalized development costs have steadily decreased and were $1 million in Q4. Looking ahead, ClearanceJobs and Dice are positioned for growth, supported by large total addressable markets.
$1 trillion defense budget, our cleared staffing offering, and Dice's new self-service option. Our recent acquisitions of Point Solutions Group and AgileATS further strengthens our portfolio as we continue to look for additional tuck-in acquisition opportunities for ClearanceJobs. Today, these initiatives create a clear path for sustainable growth. In summary, DHI is well prepared to capture growth in the tech hiring in coming years. With that, we're happy to take questions.
Thank you so much. For the Q&A, if you would like to participate, you can submit your question at the bottom of your screen. We have a couple here populated. Can you share what you're seeing with candidate availability over the last couple of years and the current trends there?
Yes, I can speak to that. I would say that candidate availability and activity on both platforms have been high. That's because ultimately, if you think about last year, there was a lot of folks that took the administration's offer to leave government, and they were very concerned about their prospects. ClearanceJobs has seen an uptick in the amount of candidate activity just because of that kind of macro trend. Similarly, in Dice's context, there's been a lack of attrition, quite frankly, and churn associated with tech candidates in the workforce in general. They generally call that job hugging.
Nevertheless, they're very interested in seeing what the opportunities are for them to move, because it's been a long period of time since 2022, since there's been kind of a surge of hiring interest and people moving within the overall community. Candidate activity is high.
Okay. Has there been any change to client behaviors and what are you seeing with different industry verticals?
Yes. I would say in the case of ClearanceJobs, last year was a year that was very challenged by the fact that there were multiple threats of government shutdown. We had the largest government shutdown in history, and that took place obviously October and November of last year. When this kind of environment, as well as the threat of DOGE, was kind of part of the environment, we saw the military contractors be very cautious about the use of our platforms and also hiring in general. They were very worried about what was to come. Now, that has changed pretty dramatically with the signing of the defense budget approximately a month ago. It is the largest defense budget that we've ever had in history. More significantly, it is a 13% increase over the previous fiscal year budget.
Just for context, the defense budget generally grows about 3%-4% per year. A 13% increase is really, really significant, and that's changed the sentiment of the military contractors and their kind of optimism around 2026, the calendar year and the fiscal year to come. For Dice, it's been a very interesting environment as well. Obviously, since 2022, as I indicated, there's been kind of a hiring recession across all sectors of the economy with the exception of healthcare.
Dice is very dependent upon technology staffing firms. Roughly about 80%, as I indicated, of our revenue is associated with tech staffing firms. The amount of revenue associated with tech staffing has declined. We've been in a tech staffing recession since the beginning of 2023, but we crossed the line at the end of last year. Tech staffing is actually growing as a sector, and I think it's growing because of the logical necessity for companies to experiment and pilot different AI projects. I think that last year was a year where the sentiment was, "Well, we're gonna wait and see what AI really means." This year there's a surge of activity associated with AI. You could also see that with the announcements of major consulting firms like IBM or McKinsey or Accenture and Deloitte.
A lot of their workload today is associated with AI projects that are being requested by their clients.
Talking about AI, how do you think that longer term it's gonna affect your business, if we have bots doing a lot of tech tasks?
It's a great question that's asked all the time. I would say that a lot of studies have come out saying that AI, the tools that are available for developers like Codex, which is a tool that's built by ChatGPT or OpenAI, the inventors of ChatGPT, of course, and then Claude Code is also a very important tool that has been built by Anthropic. The studies show that they improve productivity by about 10%-20%, we do believe that everybody's gonna be using these tools over the next several years. More importantly, I believe that the thesis that I spoke to with the McKinsey studies and other consulting studies is that you're gonna need developers to essentially build AI-related products for businesses over the next 10 years.
I think that, you know, as any technology change hits environment, there's always this belief that it's going to happen faster than it regularly does, and its impact is probably bigger than initially anticipated. We're at the very earliest stages of implementing AI throughout corporate America, and you're gonna need developers to do so.
Okay. Thank you. How are you implementing AI into your business to make it more efficient?
Great question. We've had a number of different tools that directly use ChatGPT. One example is a tool that analyzes the quality of job postings. We know from years of experience that if you have a low-quality job posting, you're gonna get a lot less applications from candidates to that job posting. We want to help our clients to have a better job posting. We actually score the jobs that are posted on both sites, and if you don't reach an 80% threshold, we tell you we have the ability to essentially improve your job posting using ChatGPT. Press this button, we'll automagically improve it for you. Generally, what that means is we don't touch the skills.
Obviously, the skills that are being requested are those skills, but the corporate summary of culture, values, the project initiatives that are being worked, those are the things that we actually improve in the job posting and people take that for granted. If you're a candidate, you wanna be excited, you wanna be attracted to the company that is offering you a job. We make it more exciting using this particular feature. That's just one. There's a lot of other features, especially involved with matching in our search algorithms that are directly you know, using AI-related technologies.
Okay. How should investors think about your revenue growth and margin profile going forward?
We've guided to the idea that we're going to essentially see a double-digit bookings growth in ClearanceJobs by the end of this year, and we're gonna turn the corner to single digit bookings growth for Dice by the end of this year. We know that as a subscription-based business, our bookings translates to revenue roughly two quarters afterwards, so the revenue would fall into those categories in 2027. We've also guided the fact that we should be able to maintain 40% EBITDA margins plus for ClearanceJobs and mid-20s% for Dice. We also, I think it's very important, target a 10% free cash flow margin, which is significant for our business, and that's the reason why we have confidence in being able to issue a $10 million share buyback program at the beginning of February.
Okay. Talking about buybacks, an investor here has a question about how you think about buybacks versus dividend.
We've never issued a dividend in the history of the company, and we believe that buybacks are a much more tax efficient way to essentially deliver value to our shareholders. We've had a share buyback pretty much every quarter since coming on board in 2018, with the exception of a couple of quarters in 2024, and that was based on, you know, fear of recession and drawing or reducing debt pretty radically in that period of time. We are very much committed to share buybacks.
How do you foresee consolidation in the industry and sort of what is the appetite for you for more M&As?
I think that we are illustrating through the examples that I gave of AgileATS and also Point Solutions Group, that ClearanceJobs can be a platform that expands its total addressable market in multiple dimensions. We don't wanna be pigeonholed as just a job board. Now we have this ATS, which is used by recruiters to essentially, again, manage their workflow, and we have the ability to deliver cleared staffing contractors. I think you will see more and more of these "tuck-in acquisitions" over the course of time to prove that we have a real advantage with the 1,800 clients that we have built relationships with over 25 years, and the authority to sell more products and services to these HR professionals that are looking for solutions to manage their teams.
Okay. Thank you. We're actually over time now, so I wanna hand it over to you, Art, for some closing remarks. I wanna thank you and your colleagues for participating today. The audience, if you have any follow-up questions, you can reach out to us at Sidoti. We'll put you in touch with the company, or you can reach out to them directly. With that, I'll hand it over to you, Art.
I just wanna say thank you very much. I really appreciate the opportunity to speak to everyone, Anya. Our IR advisor is Todd Kehrli with PondelWilkinson. As Anya just indicated, we're happy to take a meeting at any time. Just reach out to us and we'll make sure that we get it on the schedule. Thank you.
Okay. Thank you.