Good morning. My name is Cindy, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the EMCOR Group Q1 2026 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' prepared remarks, there will be a Q&A session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star, then the one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press the pound key. I will now turn the call over to Lucas Sullivan, Director, Financial Planning and Analysis. Mr. Sullivan, you may begin.
Thank you, Cindy. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to EMCOR's Q1 2026 earnings conference call. For those of you joining us by webcast, we are at the beginning of our slide presentation that will accompany our remarks today. This presentation will be archived in the investor relations section of our website at emcorgroup.com. With me today are Tony Guzzi, our Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer, Jason Nalbandian, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, and Maxine Mauricio, Executive Vice President, Chief Administrative Officer, and General Counsel. For today's call, Tony will provide comments on our Q1 2026 and discuss our RPOs. Jason will then review the Q1 numbers, then turn it back to Tony to discuss our guidance before we open it up for Q&A.
Before we begin, a quick reminder that this presentation and discussion contains certain forward-looking statements and may contain certain non-GAAP financial information. Slide two of our presentation describes in detail these forward-looking statements and the non-GAAP financial information disclosures. I encourage everyone to review both disclosures in conjunction with our discussion and accompanying slides. Finally, as a reminder, all financial information discussed during this morning's call is included in our consolidated financial statements within both our earnings press release issued this morning and in our Form 10-Q filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. With that, let me turn the call over to Tony. Tony?
Thanks, Lucas. I'm gonna start my discussion on pages three and four. Good morning, thanks for joining us today. I'm pleased to report another outstanding quarter for EMCOR. Our Q1 2026 results demonstrate the sustained momentum we have built over many years, with strong execution across our business segments and continued growth in our core market sectors and geographies. In the Q1, we generated revenues of $4.63 billion, representing year-over-year growth of 19.7% and organic growth of 16.8% when adjusting for incremental acquisition contribution and the sale of EMCOR U.K. Operating income reached $404 million, with an 8.7% operating margin, while diluting the earnings per share of $6.84 represents an increase of 30% versus the Q1 of 2025.
This reflects our strategic positioning in high growth markets and operational excellence across our construction and services platforms. These results demonstrate our customers' continued confidence in EMCOR as one of their partners of choice for complex mission-critical projects. Our construction segments once again performed extremely well in the quarter. The electrical construction segment generated year-over-year revenue growth of 33.1% with a 12.1% operating margin, while the mechanical construction segment achieved 28.9% revenue growth with a 10.9% operating margin. This performance reflects the range of our capabilities across both trades and geographies. It also takes into account increased customer scope and our reputation as one of the premier specialty contractors for complex, fast-paced projects.
Our construction segment's growth was driven primarily by increased activity in network and communications, which is where our data center business rests, institutional, manufacturing and industrial, healthcare, and water and wastewater market sectors. Within our mechanical construction segment, we also benefited from increased commercial market sector revenues driven primarily by the resumption of demand for warehousing, distribution, and logistics projects. Our teams continue to leverage our prefabrication and our virtual design and construction capabilities, excellence in labor management and planning, large project coordination and execution, and a disciplined focus on contract negotiation, administration, and adherence to those terms. The U.S. building services segment delivered solid results, led by impressive performance in our mechanical services division.
While we still face slight revenue headwinds within our site-based business, we've begun to see the benefits of the restructuring on the cost side, which reduced overhead costs. We have a more profitable contract portfolio mix. Our industrial services segment generated revenue growth of 6.4%. That was driven by our field services division. I'm gonna turn to page five. Our Remaining Performance Obligation position strengthened significantly during the quarter, providing excellent visibility for sustained growth. Our RPOs totaled $15.62 billion at the end of the quarter versus $11.75 billion in the year-ago period and $13.25 billion as of December 31, 2025. This represents year-over-year growth of 32.9% and sequential growth of 17.9%.
These diverse RPOs reflect continued strong demand across many market sectors, with particularly robust activity in network communications or data centers, where we continue to expand our geographic footprint and scope of services to better serve our customers. We see no sign of slowing demand in this vertical, where customer investments in AI infrastructure, cloud infrastructure, and overall digital transformation are driving unprecedented levels of activity. We are pleased with the quality and diversity of our work booked outside of the data center space, including notable awards within water and wastewater as we continue to win new projects in Florida, institutional, driven by demand for upgraded lab space by certain colleges and universities, and healthcare, as our customers continue to modernize their facilities while seeking to make them more flexible and responsive.
The strong operational and financial performance I've outlined demonstrate the effectiveness of our strategic initiatives and the depth of our execution capabilities. Our teams continue to deliver exceptional results for our customers while maintaining disciplined financial management and operational excellence and continued good contract negotiation and adherence to the contract terms we negotiate. With that context, I will turn it over to Jason, who will provide a detailed review of our Q1 financial results.
Thank you. Tony. Good morning, everyone. Starting with slide six, which shows revenues, I'm gonna cover the operating performance for each of our segments, as well as some of the key financial data for the Q1 of 2026, as compared to the Q1 of 2025. As Tony mentioned, revenues of $4.63 billion established a quarterly record for EMCOR, increasing 19.7% or 16.8% on an organic basis when excluding acquisitions and adjusting for the sale of EMCOR U.K. Revenues of electrical construction were $1.45 billion, increasing just over 33%. This segment generated increased revenues from the majority of the market sectors we serve, with the most significant growth coming from network and communications, where revenues increased by nearly 50%, driven by strong demand for data centers.
While this accounted for 2/3 of the segment's growth, we did experience notable revenue increases across a number of other sectors, including hospitality and entertainment, due in part to progress made on a stadium project, and institutional as a result of certain public sector projects. In the quarter, our electrical construction segment also benefited from greater levels of short-duration projects and service work. Mechanical construction revenues of $2.03 billion are up nearly 29%. Similar to electrical, this segment once again experienced the greatest growth from the network and communications market sector, where revenues increased by 86%. Increased cooling requirements and advancements in liquid cooling, particularly for AI data centers, continued to drive opportunities for this segment. Beyond data centers, mechanical generated quarterly revenue growth from the majority of the other sectors in which we operate.
Notably, institutional revenues doubled year-over-year. Manufacturing and industrial, including food processing, was up 34%. Commercial increased by 33%, driven by warehousing, distribution, and logistics projects, largely within fire protection. During the quarter, the segment also benefited from increased service revenues as we continued to expand our maintenance and inspection base, both within traditional mechanical services as well as our fire life safety offerings. On a combined basis, our construction segments generated revenues of $3.47 billion, an increase of 30.6%. I should note that this performance established new quarterly revenue records for each of these segments. Moving to Building Services, revenues of $772.6 million grew by 4%, driven by our mechanical services division, which generated a 6% increase in revenues.
From a service line perspective, the most significant growth was seen in repair service maintenance, and building automation and controls. Revenues of our industrial services segment were $381.8 million, an increase of 6.4%. Greater contribution from our field services operations, due primarily to progress made on a large solar project, was partially offset by a reduction in revenues within our shop services division due to lower heat exchanger sales and related services. I'll turn to slide seven for operating income. We generated operating income of $403.8 million or 8.7% of revenues, both of which are records for EMCOR for a Q1. This represents an increase in operating income of 26.7% and operating margin expansion of 50 basis points versus the prior year.
When adjusting for the acquisition transaction costs, which were incurred in Q1 of 2025, operating income grew by 23.1% and operating margin increased by 25 basis points. Once again, if we look at each of our segments, due to the growth in revenues, operating income for electrical construction increased by 28.2% to a quarterly record of $174.5 million. Operating margin of 12.1% compares to 12.5% a year ago. With consistent gross profit margins, this segment continues to execute well across its project portfolio, with the year-over-year decrease in operating margin primarily resulting from an increase in intangible asset amortization given the one month of incremental expense from the Miller acquisition. Mechanical construction had operating income of $221.6 million, an 18.7% increase.
From an end market standpoint, this segment generated greater gross profit across many of the sectors in which we operate, with the largest increases generally tracking in line with the growth in its revenues. Operating margin of 10.9% compares to 11.9% in last year's Q1. As we anticipated when we exited 2025, operating margin of this segment decreased due to a shift in mix that included a greater percentage of revenues from projects where we're acting as either a construction manager or prime contractor, and which inherently carry lower-than-average gross profit margins due to reduced markups on materials, equipment, and subcontractor costs. In addition, we had an increase in the number of GMP or cost plus projects, particularly in newer geographies or on projects where scope or design are still evolving.
Together, our construction segments grew operating income by nearly 23% and earned a combined operating margin of 11.4%. Building services generated operating income of $40.4 million, which represents an 11.1% increase, and operating margin of 5.2% expanded by 30 basis points. This segment benefited from strong performance within its mechanical services division, which experienced a favorable mix given the greater volume of higher margin service and controls projects. Also, as Tony mentioned, while we do face some headwinds within our site-based business, the restructuring we did last year has proven to be successful, resulting in both reduced overhead costs and a more profitable contract portfolio.
Lastly, operating income for industrial services was $12.8 million, an increase of 89.1%, and operating margin of 3.3% expanded by 140 basis points. A reminder, in contributing to the favorable year-over-year comparison, the results for this segment in last year's Q1 were negatively impacted by a $4 million increase in the allowance for credit losses, which negatively impacted operating margin for Q1 of 2025 by 110 basis points. Excluding this impact, the remaining increase in operating income and operating margin was primarily a result of greater gross profit and greater gross profit margin within its field services division. We quickly turn to page eight, I'll cover a few items not included on the previous slides.
Gross profit of $864 million increased by 19.5%, and our gross profit margin of 18.7% remained consistent with that of the prior year, which represents a record level of performance for a Q1. SG&A was $460.1 million, or 9.9% of revenues, compared to $404 million, or 10.4% of revenues a year ago. With the top line growth we experienced during the quarter, we are pleased with the operating leverage we attained as evidenced by the decrease in our SG&A margin. Finally, on this page, diluted earnings per share was $6.84, which represents an increase of 30% or 26.4% when excluding the transaction costs in last year's Q1.
Finally for me, let's turn to slide nine, which covers our balance sheet. Our balance sheet, including $916 million of cash on hand and $1.25 billion of working capital, remains strong and liquid and enables us to continue to fund organic growth, pursue strategic M&A, and return capital to shareholders. During the quarter, we returned $105 million of cash to our shareholders through stock repurchases and our quarterly dividend. Although not shown on this page, due to an increase in accounts receivable, given our strong organic revenue growth and coupled with the payment of the prior year's incentive compensation awards, cash flows from operations in the Q1 were essentially neutral.
However, for the full year, we remain confident in our ability to generate operating cash flow at least equivalent to net income or up to 80%-85% of operating income, consistent with previous years. With that, I'll turn the call back over to Tony.
Thanks, Jason. I'm going to be on pages 10 and 11. Given our strong start to the year and the strength of our remaining performance obligations, we are raising our full year 2026 guidance. We are increasing our revenue and diluted earnings per share guidance to a range that reflects our confidence in the sustained operational excellence that we have exhibited and strong market momentum. Such guidance reflects the demand that we are seeing and our success at winning and executing large-scale projects across many geographies and market sectors. We now expect to earn revenues of between $18.5 billion-$19.25 billion, and diluted earnings per share of between $28.25-$29.75. As a reminder, EMCOR's business is characterized by project cycles and timing that can create quarterly variability.
Our guidance reflects our current expectation of continued strong operating margins throughout 2026, supported by disciplined project selection and execution. We are focused on maintaining pricing discipline while delivering exceptional value to our customers. Our sustained success is built on focus, focused execution across a number of key priorities that differentiate EMCOR and position us for continued growth. I'm now going to highlight four of them. The first one is our training, peer learning, and our productivity initiatives. We continue to leverage our training programs, our Virtual Design and Construction capabilities, and prefabrication facilities and capabilities, and advanced project planning and delivery methodologies. We are committed to improving our means and methods every day, sharing knowledge across our organization, and investing in workforce training, retention, and expansion.
The second item is contract management discipline and negotiation. We deliver exceptional results for our customers. However, we do protect our rights and interests through careful contract management negotiation, particularly on complex, fast-paced projects. Third, we're known for field leadership excellence. One could argue that is our core product. Our field leadership excellence from frontline foremen and superintendents to project managers and executives and subsidiary and segment leaders make EMCOR an employer of choice in our industry. Finally, supporting all that is our commitment to invest with discipline and for the long term. We maintain a disciplined approach for how we grow organically and through acquisition.
This, coupled with the return of cash to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases, has provided the foundation for our compounding record of success over the past decade and provides balance to our approach to capital allocation. These interconnected priorities create sustainable competitive advantage that drives superior, durable performance across many diverse geographies and market sectors.
The fundamentals of our business remain strong, with sustained demand across several key market sectors. We will continue to always face macroeconomic challenges. In fact, I can't remember a time when we haven't had them, such as geopolitical events, rising commodity prices. Our team has consistently demonstrated the ability to navigate complexity and continue to deliver results. Our success is a direct result of their dedication, their resilience, expertise, which results in executional excellence from our teammates across the organization. I wanna thank every member of the EMCOR team for their contributions to our outstanding Q1 performance and over the long term, and for everything you do to serve our customers, keep each other safe, and drive our success every day. Thank you for your time this morning.
We will now open the line for questions. Cindy, I will turn the call over to you.
We will now begin the Q&A session. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on your touch tone phone. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Our first question comes from Adam Thalhimer of Thompson Davis & Co. Go ahead, please.
Hey, good morning, guys. Congrats on the strong Q1 and the record orders. I guess I wanted to start on the book-to-bill and orders. I mean, I think at 1.5 x that was a record book-to-bill for you guys. Tony, you broadly talked about the pipeline, but I'm just curious if you can give more detail on the pipeline and what the expectation should be for orders for the rest of the year.
Well, I think I go back to something I said in our book, right? You know, orders come when they come, projects come when they come. There's variability quarter- to- quarter, both on bookings and when projects start, when they close, and what the pace of contracts are. You know I'm not gonna tell you what I see for orders for the rest of the year other than to say this: We continue to see, and I said it in my script, we continue to see no slowing of demand, especially in data centers and really across other key market sectors. I don't think we're surprised by the demand we're seeing in water and wastewater in Florida, and we're winning a little more maybe than we thought we would.
I don't think we're surprised by the demand, continued demand over multi-years in healthcare. We continue to see a strong manufacturing and industrial business. I mean, projects can come in there a little lumpy, and then they can also come in smaller task orders thereafter. I think the market that surprised us the most over the last six to nine months or two or three quarters has been the institutional market. That has shown more resiliency than we would have thought. I think that's a result of the market positioning we have in some key markets with some universities that are spending money.
I also think that we weren't surprised by the resumption in warehousing and logistics and the transportation network work that we're seeing, and return in the commercial market sector of that, 'cause we could foresee that based on the customer spending patterns. We will continue to grow in excess of non-res, like we have historically, pretty significantly. We will continue to win important new projects in penetrating current geographies we are and investing in new geographies, even if they're may seem adjacent across the data center space. One area I'd always remind people, 'cause I know the question's coming about high-tech manufacturing. I think that's a market of choice for us. We are well-positioned in several key markets, especially in the Mountain West and in Arizona.
We're positioned there specifically across the trades of fire life safety and mechanical and some electrical. We have the ability in other markets to serve, especially fire life safety in just about every high-tech market that exists. We look that as a flex market. They can be very difficult customers to work for in some cases, especially in the semi market. Sometimes we're making a mixed management issue within a geographic market to maybe serve a larger data center campus than maybe go after the next semiconductor fab. Again, we feel good about demand right now. Spending patterns remain and things are pretty much unraveling for the year, much like we expected. We're not chasing margin percentages right now.
We're much more focused on growing margin dollars, which is what you actually spend and invest for the long term.
That doesn't set me up well for my next question, which is on margin percentages. Thank you for that, Tony. That was great color. High level, I did want to see if I can get at the margin potential in the back half. Maybe a way to do it is just, Jason, I mean, you ran through a bunch of issues that impacted you in Q1 in terms of markups and mix, and maybe you can just talk about how those issues play out as the year unfolds.
I think, I think we said this exiting last year, and I think it still holds today, right? If you look at that guidance range we provided, we do have some lower margin scenarios in there which anticipate a changing mix. I think we believe execution's gonna remain strong throughout the back half of the year, which gives us the opportunity to replicate last year's record margins at 9.4%. I think some of these mix dynamics will remain with us throughout the rest of the year. I, I also believe, you know, what we've said kind of over the last several quarters and looking at kind of a rolling 12-month-24-month average, I think that holds true.
Just understanding it's gonna fluctuate quarter- to- quarter just based on that mix, as you kind of saw in mechanical this quarter. I think the fundamentals still hold, and I think really no significant change from what we said one year ago.
Yeah. I mean, I think, I'm always careful of false precision. We give a range for a reason. Could we be up on top of that range a little bit? It's not gonna. We don't think substantially at this point. It would take something, an execution that we're not seeing right now, or we take a booking that happened in a year that had to be done very fast at superior margins. We have a pretty good handle on what our mix looks like, and I think that's one of the things that's a little bit different than us than some other folks. Some of these companies are becoming one-market companies.
We are diverse by nature because of the geographies we serve and some of the companies we have that are earning very good returns that have nothing to do with data centers. Do we do a little better in the data center market? We do, on a margin percentage, but we should. These are fast-paced jobs. They require a very strong dedication of some of our resources. Look, they come with risk, right? I mean, at the end of the day, we're always balancing contract risk versus execution versus type, and sometimes that leads us to take a contract structure that may have inherently lower gross margins but on a risk-adjusted basis.
Then it could lead to follow-on work that comes in a fixed price way, which will then allow us the opportunity to grow margins over time. We feel good about where the margins are on a year-to-date basis. I think the year started out pretty much like we thought, with quite frankly, just stronger revenue than we expected. We're winning in markets right now, and that feels really good.
All right. Thank you guys so much. I'll turn it over.
The next question comes from Brian Brophy of Stifel. Go ahead, please.
Yeah. Thanks. Good morning, everybody. Nice quarter. Tony, you touched on my question at the end of your last answer in terms of potentially shifting some of this mix away from GMP to cost plus, or excuse me, GMP and cost plus to fixed price over time. I guess, help me understand, is that kind of a deliberate decision on your guys' part to start off with maybe some lower-risk structures in these new geographies? I guess, what's the needle mover? What needs to happen for you guys to potentially move these to more fixed price and increase the opportunity for higher margin over time? Is it just you guys need to get comfortable in the new geography, or is there something else?
No, it's, Look, first of all, it's not only our decision, right? Some of our customers prefer to operate in a GMP mode because they anticipate they're gonna have a fair number of change orders, and they wanna get started on the job. It's not only our decision. When it is our decision, I think you outlined it right. It, we have to get comfortable that we know the pace of build and the cost. I mean, I'll just remind folks of last year, right? I hate to always bring up bad news, but this is why we have to think about the business we're in. We were in a market that checked three of the four blocks, other than it was relatively new for the size we were trying to build.
At the end of the day, we took it fixed price. We didn't get the acceleration change order quite what we thought we priced it right, and therefore we ate it. That didn't make us shy away from fixed price work, but it shows you when you don't get it right, you own it. Contract structure is not only our decision, it also comes from our owner. We typically work together. Now, I think most owners, if they think we have a good handle on what it looks like, and they can get a fixed price that looks like can fit their budget, and it takes away all the auditing and contract stuff that goes with a GMP contract, they're more than happy to move away.
The other variation on that is we can get 50% into or 60% into a GMP job. We both feel comfortable that we've locked in cost and scope, and therefore, we will change it to a fixed price contract. I'd like to tell you there's four or five variables here. The variables could be up to six to 12 of contract administration and structure. Ours is always towards the best outcome for us and our owner, and also the best risk-adjusted outcome.
Yeah.
Jason, you got anything to add on that?
Yeah. I don't think anything's changed overall in terms of our appetite for fixed price work or what we see in terms of the market and our customers. I think it's very much specific geographies, specific opportunities, and specific customers in the quarter, which drove the revenue mix to skew more towards GMP.
Especially in mechanical, which makes sense, because you're doing more of these AI data centers now. Unless we're doing fabricated structures for those AI data centers, you could argue modular structures that have really, as part of our build or somebody else's build, they do start those things up more with GMP, and we would prefer they do that as they work out their designs.
Yeah. That's a comment I tried to make about the designs evolving and the scope still evolving.
Understood. That's very helpful. Just as a follow-up, any update on access to craft labor tightness, any notable changes you guys have seen there over the last few months?
No notable changes. We're continuing to recruit heavily with the unions, especially in the Southeast, Texas, Oklahoma, through the Midwest. We're working in a very cooperative fashion. One of the things that have benefited us is some of the programs, and that's one of the appeals of Miller. They are excellent at this. They have a pro trade program that allows a quick training program of two-four weeks, gets people functional. Allows us to bring them in at the right classification. We get them functioning safely and productively on a job site. That's something we're continuing to expand and grow across other core subsidiaries to grow our craft labor force.
I will say that our, and I've talked about this before, our real bottleneck, and it really hasn't been a bottleneck because we have this great amount of work to work on, is supervision. We have to create more foremen. We have to create more general foremen. We have to get project engineers to be able to move to project managers, project managers to be able to move to project executives. That's how we really grow. You know, our constraint on grow, yes, we have to build fabrication shops, whether they're, you know, on-site in tents or whether they're in our fixed facilities. We always have to be thinking about that curve.
We don't like to get too far ahead of that curve, 'cause there may be other ways to skin that cat, on fabrication, like, you know, on-site fabrication and other things. We always have an eye towards developing that supervision level. I said it in my remarks, our core product is really field labor supervision and leadership, and we just apply it in these trades, and we do that very well. Therefore, if you're doing that well, you become an employer of choice because trade craft people typically like four or five things, right? First, they like to know they're gonna get paid every week and their benefits are gonna get paid. In no particular order, that you're gonna give them the safety equipment and tools that they need to be safe. That you have a good safety program.
That the supervision they're working for actually knows what they're doing and can really share means and methods and are plugged into our network to gain more knowledge on means and methods. That they're working for people up through the chain of command that understand the work they're doing. Finally, that if they do a good job and so choose to want to be part of one of our core teams, that we have ongoing work, and if they want promoted, that they have an opportunity to be promoted. EMCOR emphatically checks all those blocks in our subsidiary companies. I think that's why. It's difficult. Our guys are slogging away at it every day on mixed management, but I think we've been able to meet the moment as far as recruitment and retention of trade, excellent craft personnel.
Yeah, understood. Very helpful co-color. I appreciate it. I'll pass it on.
The next question comes from Justin Hauke of Robert W. Baird. Go ahead, please.
Great. Good morning, everybody. I guess, so, you know, we already talked about obviously the Q1, really strong revenue trend. The RPOs up, you know, 18% quarter-over-quarter. I think that's an organic record for you. The revenue guidance only tweaked a little bit higher. You're looking for kinda 9%-13% growth for the year, and, you know, you just did 20%. I guess I'm just trying to understand. I know you've got some tough comps, but, you know, what's the conservatism in that outlook, that would, you know, have the trends decelerate to kind of the more mid-single digits from what you put up, you know, to start the year, especially with those bookings?
I think you just said it in your last sentence. We just started the year. We're sitting here in the Q1 . We have three quarters in front of us. I think we'll know a heck of a lot more on the revenue trend as we exit Q2 and, based on what we see at the end of the year. It's still, I mean, even sitting here with these halfway RPOs, Jason, I still think we have to book 40% of our work.
For the remainder of the year, Let's just use the midpoint of our revenue guidance range. If you take into consideration what's in RPOs that we believe will burn through the rest of the year and what we earned in the Q1, we still need to go out and book about 30%.
30%, yeah.
Of our work. We think we can do that. If we can book more of that and execute it within the year, that's how the revenue guidance will creep up.
We'll have much better visibility. Said simply, we feel good about the revenue trend in the business. We feel good about our RPO bookings. We feel good about the margin in those, in the RPOs. We're sitting here in Q1, April, and we'll have a much better view of that when we talk to you again in late July.
Yeah. I think in the quarter, we made significant progress on a few jobs, some that accelerated maybe a little bit more than we expected. When we look at the rest of the year, I think where we land in that guidance is really gonna depend on how quickly we mobilize on some of the new work we just booked, right? We had strong bookings in the Q1. How quickly do those jobs mobilize? How quickly do we assemble a labor force? How quickly do they start burning? That's what's really gonna dictate where we land.
Okay. All right. And just to clarify. Previously, it was 40%-45% of new work you had to book, and you're saying it's 30%? I just wanna make sure that.
For that range, you're right. Given we have one quarter behind our belt.
Sorry.
The strong bookings we had in the year.
Yes. Okay. Then I guess going back to the GMP contracts versus fixed price, can you give us, I'd just be curious to know kind of what's the mix in the RPOs today of, you know, what your contracts look like today versus a year ago or maybe five years ago in terms of, you know, how they've trended to more fixed price.
I don't think we could do that analysis from five years ago with any precision because things change halfway through a lot of times, and it ends up something different. I think versus a year ago, I think incrementally it's moved a little more to GMP, and I would say this is, you know, not analytically precise, but I think that's mainly in mechanical, and it's mainly driven by, I think the larger scope of work, which we're guessing. I mean, do we know that emphatically? We have a pretty good idea because of the power requirements and the interact cooling we're doing, which is driven primarily, which we think, by AI data centers.
And, you know, these are some of the large language model data centers, and we think that's the case because of where some of them are being built. A lot of this, you know, we can tie all that together because of access to power and proximity and all that. I think that's really the difference. Where that will land later, we'll see. Not all GMP contracts are built the same way. At the end of the day, there has been a little bit of a mix shift to there, and it only takes a couple points to change 10 basis points or 15 or 20 basis points of margin. I would offer, though, that we wouldn't take these things if we weren't driving more margin dollars by doing it.
Correct.
Versus other opportunities.
Yes. Okay. All right. That's helpful. That's it for me. Thank you.
Thank you.
The next question comes from Avi Jaroslawicz from UBS. Go ahead, please.
Hey. Good morning, guys. Thanks for taking the question.
Sure.
Just wanna discuss this acceleration in organic growth that we saw here in Q1. Sounds like some of it was due to increased mix of prime contracting and pass-through revenues that you called out. Just when we think of that relative to the high single-digit to low double-digit organic growth that you've discussed previously within the construction business, is that, you know, kind of upper single-digit to low double-digit framing around your self-perform work, or was that including the prime contracting?
It was including-
It was all in.
Yeah, it was all in.
It was all in.
I mean, I think, you know, the preponderance of what we do is self-perform, but there's two places where it's more pass-through. One is I wouldn't even call it pass-through. We don't pass anything through without a markup in the construction business. It'd be primarily in our water and wastewater business, which we have a great team executing very well down in Florida, and it would be in our the one thing we do at EMCOR on an EPC basis at scale. Yes, we do chiller plants that way, we do other things, but the one place we do it at scale is in the food processing business. It's a very good business.
It's a multi-trade package, we have more of that revenue passing through right now in our manufacturing and industrial market sector, and that comes at a little lower over margin. If you look at it on a return on capital basis, it's very good work. You know, when we look at projects, Avi, we look at it both ways. We look at a project like that as almost the same way we look at an acquisition. What's the cash flows look on that project versus what we've invested to do it? What does it allow us to do from a further with a customer, both from an aftermarket basis and also follow on work? We have customers that we've been on site doing large projects every three to five years.
We made continuous presence at those sites doing small fixed price projects and maintenance projects. You wanna say for nothing's ever forever, but we've been there 20 years almost now. You know, that's a part of the business. Those are the two places where that pass-through revenue is the most significant. That can affect margins, you know, 10 or 15 basis points in a quarter to the negative. Again, I'll go back, they generate really good margin dollars and really good return on capital on those projects.
In this quarter, it was the food processing, right? We still have the water and wastewater in our backlog. I think that's when you could see as the year progresses. In this quarter, it was very much coming from food processing, though.
Okay. Got it. Makes sense. Yeah, I was in part looking at the water and wastewater growth in the quarter, and so just trying to piece it all together.
I'll get ahead of one of the other questions, and somebody can maybe drop out of the queue. We're not foregoing any data center work to do this work. That's either a different team that does this kind of work or a different market sector, I mean, different geography and different skills and capabilities. We're not foregoing any projects in the data center or high tech world because we're doing water and wastewater and food processing work.
Really it's incremental growth at the end of the day.
Okay. That makes sense. Then just also when we last spoke, I think you framed productivity and pricing together contributing about five percentage points to construction revenue growth this year. What do you have embedded for that in the updated guidance? Is it still about 5%, or has that ticked up?
I think the way we termed it is, less than half, right, at the lower end. About 30%-40% of our growth comes from pricing and productivity. Now you have to tie that also into mix, right, Jason, to get to that answer. I don't think there's anything different than what we've done historically.
Okay. Appreciate it. Thank you.
The next question comes from Sangita Jain of KeyBanc Capital Markets. Go ahead, please.
Good morning. If I can ask a follow-up on the mechanical margins discussion. Will these projects later on have incremental phases that you will then take on as fixed price? Is the nature of these projects such that even the follow-on phases will be GMP?
Well, the margin headwind in mechanical, some of it's GMP, other's mix because of the food processing work. We hope to have follow-on phases over a number of years. They won't be as large.
I think it's to be determined what that contracting mechanism is, right?
Yes.
They could be fixed price in the future on some of these jobs if we get more comfortable with our labor force, we get more comfortable with the design. They may stay GMP because we do have two customers who just prefer GMP work. I think it's gonna be dependent on the individual jobs, and I think we'll know more as the year progresses.
Yeah, I think we're beating this a little too hard right now, collectively on the phone. We contract lots of different ways, and sometimes our fixed price work on something like food processing, because we're servicing it more as a prime, is a fixed price contract. It doesn't have the same market characteristics and margin opportunity that a fixed price contract can be on a single trade contract doing a data center or a manufacturing plant or a hospital. Other parts, we're doing GMP work on data centers because a customer can't nail down scope or renew a geography, or that's their preferred way of doing the business, and they do that that way across their whole portfolio.
I think we always think about operating in bands of margins, and as long as we're sort of within that 12- month -24- month look on bands of margins, we're performing pretty well. Then we take it a separate step further. At the part we're in the business, I think anybody that knows us, EMCOR's a return on invested capital type mentality. If we can generate more margin dollars and balance that against the margins, we're happy. I know we're all trying to nail down this number of nine-point whatever% for the year. A, we're not that good. That's why you have a range. B, we have 12,000 projects going on right now of all kind of different contract structures. Is it a little bit on incremental towards GMP?
I look at that as a positive because maybe we shoved some risks off the table where we shouldn't have been taking the risk on a fixed price contract, and allows us to penetrate a customer further. I think we're trying to put too fine a point on something that you can't put a fine point on.
Yeah. I just go back to those 12- month -24- month month averages, to Tony's point. If you look at mechanical prior to this quarter and you look at those eight quarters, margin for mechanical was as low as 10.6% and as high as 13.6%. We're still right. You know, we're bouncing around those eight quarter averages. I, I don't see anything here that's fundamentally different.
Yeah, we grew mechanical operating income 18.7%, and we grew electrical operating income 28.2%. I'd say on any given day, sign me up for that.
Understood. That's very helpful. Can I follow up on the 1.5 book-to-bill? Can you give us a little bit of a look as to are you being able to book longer dated backlog? I know that the space has traditionally been more of a booking, you know, a short-term booking cadence business. Can you tell us if some of these large projects give you a longer look into your performance maybe into next year?
I don't think in a significant way. I mean, I think if you look at the end of last year, we would've said at the end of 2025, 82% of that RPO is gonna burn within 12 months. Where we sit today, we say 78% is gonna burn within 12 months. A little bit longer, a little bit more extending beyond the 12 months, but not in a significant way. If you look at our total RPO, I'd be surprised if $6 billion-$6.5 billion goes even into 2027.
Right. That'll increase as the year goes on.
Yeah, of course.
Got it. Thank you very much.
Yeah, thank you.
The next question comes from Tim Mulrooney of William Blair. Go ahead, please.
Tony, Jason, thanks for taking my questions. Just a couple quick ones here. I heard you say that productivity and pricing is contributing, I don't know, Mitch said, like, 30%-40% of total growth this year. You're growing, call it, 10%-12% organically, if you exclude contribution from acquisitions. This implies pricing is maybe adding 3-4 points to growth, which I'm just wanting to confirm is directionally correct. The reason I want to is 'cause that surprises me a little bit. Like, we're hearing about pricing being very strong, particularly around AI infrastructure, where you, EMCOR, are critical to the whole process. Like, but you're not the largest cost bucket for a long shot.
It seems to me that pricing would be a lot higher than 3-4 points, but maybe I'm missing something.
Look, I think in general, when contractors talk about strong pricing, a lot of times they gotta execute the work. We're saying our expectation going into the year on pricing is we're working with really smart customers. We never assume our customers don't have alternatives. I've never assumed that any time in my career. That we wanna be with these contractors, these customers long term. I think when you look at our gross margins and you look at our execution over a long period of time, and our ability to retain customers, then at times we replace other contractors on sites, when I don't remember us ever being replaced on a site. I think we get the price, productivity, execution just about right.
I've never been the guy that's gonna sit here, there's people throwing work at us, and we just catch it in buckets. Some of my peers that say that, I'm not sure they have the long-term view of the market that we have, what pricing really means in contracting. Price in our business comes in a lot of different ways. If the assumptions you're making on the productivity of your labor, especially as you move further down the labor curve, there's more of a mix of people you're less familiar with or more untrained. Pricing also can cover what you expect on unforeseen job conditions. You know, you don't get in an adversarial relationship with customers you're gonna work with a long time if there are small changes on a job.
Maybe you're giving up some of that in the execution of the job to retain the customer. I think the pricing environment's good, and I think we're almost getting paid for what we're worth. I would take probably better contract terms, better change order administration, and give up some price any day as you execute these large, fast-paced jobs for what are some of the most sophisticated customers in the world. JC, you have something to add on that?
No, I just think when you look at the number of jobs we're executing today versus the number of jobs a year ago, and you kinda back into the growth rate in jobs or even average contract values, I think it supports what we're saying, which is that really volume, demand, and productivity are the core drivers of our revenue growth.
That's right.
Okay. That's very clear. Thank you.
Our next question comes from Manish Somaiya of Cantor. Go ahead, please.
Good morning and congrats again to the team. Couple of questions. Maybe Tony, for you first. When I think about the contracts that you're being awarded, especially the mission-critical projects, are you seeing both electrical and mechanical scopes? Or is that-
I mean, I think underneath your question, are we combining electrical and mechanical scopes and bidding the jobs that way? Absolutely not. Are we on some sites, both electrically and mechanically? Yes. Do we make decisions contingent on that? Absolutely not. These are separate scopes of work. These are separate teams. If we're fortunate enough that we have two EMCOR companies on that site, or even three when you include Fire Life Safety, does the job tend to go better for the owner in those cases? Probably, yeah. Our guys know each other. They know how to work together. They're working with the same VDC tools. The integration becomes better on the drawings. You know, they can talk to each other and get coordination better on the job sites to prevent trade stacking.
Do we specifically bundle the two things together and bid it as a package? No, we don't do that. Almost never. I don't wanna say never. Nothing's never, but we almost try not to do that as a general rule.
If you look at our bookings and you say, okay, there's a significant increase in data center bookings or networking communications RPOs, that's coming from both mechanical and electrical.
Electrical.
When you look at the revenue growth within each segment, let's just again look at network and communications. Round numbers, electrical's up $240 million, and mechanical's up $280 million. We're seeing that growth in both, and we're seeing the bookings from both.
Okay. That's super helpful. Jason, on the cash flow aspect, how should we think about the cash flow use reversing over the course of the year? Is that second half-weighted typically, or?
I think-
You know, saw that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think if you look at the pattern we've had over the last two years or so, we think that pattern will hold true through the remainder of the year. You know, Q4 tends to be the strongest for us from a cash flow generation perspective. Q1 tends to be the weakest. If you look really over 2024 and 2025, we expect those patterns to be about the same.
Okay. Then just, Tony, back to you. Maybe if you can just talk about the M&A pipeline, you know, what you're seeing out there, you know, what are still the missing pieces within EMCOR, geographically or product-wise. Then, you know, maybe if you can also just give us a sense as to what you're seeing so far in the Q2.
Well, I won't answer that.
In terms of demand.
I won't answer that question. We're reporting on the Q1 today. Look, our acquisition pipeline is good. Deals happen when they happen. Our primary area of interest is electrical construction. We're a medium voltage company or line voltage company. We're not really looking to grow the high voltage market or the T&D market. We do have a position there, but it, you know, it's mainly in the Mountain West, and it's a very good company, but we're not looking to become Quanta in the T&D business. We're gonna continue to do low to mid voltage acquisitions in electrical. We still have places where we can expand geography or strengthen geography in a lot of cases now.
I think what we've had great success with is either buying at a an acquisition at scale, which is a Miller. That's a great example of that. We also have many examples at EMCOR, which is, I think, where you create the most value, is where we take a electrical contractor that was just a good industrial or healthcare contractor, could do really sophisticated work. We know that there's customers that want us to do data centers in that market. We were able to come in and take that group of folks and take their core business, have them continue to do that.
Through our peer learning and help, we can then have them expand into data centers. That comes at much better valuation than the folks that are doing 80% of their work in data centers that everybody's frothy over and want to spend 12x or 15 x earnings. We're not gonna do that for a one-market company and a one-sector company. Secondarily, we'll buy mechanical construction. We've tended to do that more, buy and then take a larger platform like Batchelor & Kimball and grow organically. The reason that sets up, they can do that well is because the amount of prefabrication on a mechanical job, they can take more labor hours off the job, and therefore they feel much more comfortable.
That's sort of the fire protection story too, which is the other part in mechanical that we would grow through acquisition and organically. With the fire protection, we're both growing the construction capability and the aftermarket capability. The other area of interest for us is, of course, the mechanical service space. We do both. They're not large compared to the construction acquisitions, but we'll do larger acquisitions there. There we're buying, you know, footprint. We're buying technician capability, and sometimes those acquisitions are as small as a $2 million asset deal to open up a market or strengthen our market, whether it's a certain type of equipment, a certain kind of capability.
We also love to continue to support our customers through building controls and automation in mechanical services acquisitions, where, you know, we're one of the more significant independent building controls, and we have a number of different brands we're a dealer for, and we have good capability, and that's both on the front end of the business in the design, the development of the user interfaces, and of course the installation and the commissioning to make sure it works. Those are our primary interests as we grow through acquisition. I would also argue that we also, you know, are not immune to doing the right kind of fabrication acquisition. We haven't done a lot of that to date, but we would do that if we thought we could add.
We have ongoing work that we could take some of that capacity and then also kit up or some call it modular more than we're doing today. It's not something we've done, but it's something we look at all the time. Jason, did I miss anything?
I think that's a good summary.
Yes, indeed. Well, thank you so much, guys, and, best of luck.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from Adam Bubes of Goldman Sachs. Go ahead, please.
Hi, good morning. This is Anuj on behalf of Adam. Wanted to understand what is your prefabrication capacity today, and how much capacity do you plan to add this year? Additionally, if you can discuss the puts and takes of internalizing fabrication versus leveraging fabrication for third-party sales.
I think the best way to think about how we think about it is to look at our CapEx spending. We don't necessarily look at it as we're destined to add this much square footage because I think you got to take the fabrication that we do and break it into two or three pieces. One is the traditional fab we do just about every contract that we have, which they're doing some pipe fabrication, little bit of fittings on the sheet metal side, and they do that to support the aftermarket and the smaller projects in their market. We do a lot of that. The second fabrication is more dedicated fabrication, especially in our bit larger mechanical and electrical contractors, and that breaks into two pieces too.
There's especially electrically, there's almost a catalog we can do that says we're taking all these different parts from distributors and OEMs, putting them together, so it almost kits out to the site. Then there's job specific where we're making conduit racks and different bends that we're doing specific to that job that looks more like what we do in the mechanical side, where there we can have pretty significant pipe shops, pipe rack shops that do a variety of sizes from small bore to large bore. Then we also have sheet metal shops where we're hoping to generate off those coil lines somewhere between 800,000 lbs and 1,200,000 lbs a year.
Now, again, there's the third part of that is part of that fabrication, if we can do on job site in a tent and bring equipment in and not have to move it as much, we do that too. We're much more adaptable maybe than some others at fabrication, and I think that distinguishes us from other people is, for the most part, you never say everything's every, but for the most part, EMCOR is fabricating for EMCOR and doing it as part of our job design. We do have cases where people want us to build that other people installed, but that's a small minority of our fabrication versus others. I think part of that is because we tend to have our trades focused on it.
We're not a multi-craft workforce, maybe like a non-union workforce can be in some markets. Hence my discussion about if we did fabrication and looked at it that way, that would be a fabricator we'd buy that we think we could bring more value to, by looking at more multi-trade work. Jason?
No, just if you look, Tony made the point about our CapEx over the last several years, and we've said it before. If you take even just a three-year look, our CapEx, if you're looking at a CAGR, is growing twice what our revenue is, and that's those investments we're making in prefab. If you look at 2026, I think we'll spend somewhere between $115 million and $125 million on CapEx, and I think a significant part of that will be fitting out fabrication facilities or upgrading the ones we have today.
Thank you. That helps. Just one more follow-up. Demand remains particularly in your data center business. What, if anything, sets the ceiling on level of growth you can achieve from a capacity standpoint? Is it labor, equipment procurement, et cetera?
Well, it's emphatically not equipment procurement because on data centers, most of the major equipment is being bought by the owners or the owners through the GCs because they're deciding which sites they wanna do it. We really have nothing to do with what they're doing on the major end product equipment in data centers. In small cases, we still do, but for the most part, the owner's buying the equipment. I think I've addressed where the bottleneck could be. We've been great at producing leaders. Our bottleneck is field leadership, and it gets to the frontline leaders, foremen, general foremen, and project managers or project executives. No one can grow, you know, without that constraint. We feel pretty good about our beating our growth targets we have out there. We wouldn't have taken the work.
Therefore, we feel pretty good that in this quarter that year-over-year, you know, it's up plus 30%, up plus 17% sequentially. We feel we can fill the teams either through increased scope or the teams that we've built to service that demand. You know, the law of large numbers eventually tells you that your growth rate's going to slow, but the dollars stay up. I'd say the same thing about. That's my whole margin point. We're in the search for margin dollars right now more than margin percentages.
Thanks. That helps. I'll pass it on.
All right. Is that it? All right. Thank you all. We'll see you again at the end of July. Thanks for your interest today.