Welcome to the Marsh Annual Meeting of Stockholders. I will now turn the meeting over to Connor Kuratek, Deputy General Counsel, Chief Compliance Officer, and Corporate Secretary of Marsh.
Good morning, and welcome to the Marsh 2026 Annual Meeting of Stockholders. My name is Connor Kuratek, and I am the Deputy General Counsel, Chief Compliance Officer, and Corporate Secretary of the company. We're pleased to host our annual stockholder meeting virtually, which allows us to be more inclusive and reach a greater number of our stockholders. This meeting is being recorded and will be available online after the meeting. We ask you do not record the meeting. Please note that remarks made by management may include statements relating to future events or results, which are forward-looking statements as that term is defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Please keep in mind that a variety of factors could cause actual results to differ materially. In addition, remarks made today may refer to non-GAAP financial measures.
Please refer to our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission for additional information. We will now start the business portion of our meeting, which will be conducted by our independent chair, Ed Hanway. Next, our President and Chief Executive Officer, John Doyle, will provide some remarks about Marsh. Finally, we will have a question-and-answer period. Validated stockholders may ask questions in the designated field on the web portal. We will do our best to respond to as many questions as possible. Questions on the same topic or that are otherwise related may be grouped, summarized, and answered together. I will now turn the meeting over to our independent chair, Ed Hanway.
Good morning. I'm Ed Hanway, the Independent Chair of Marsh. On behalf of the company, its directors and officers, welcome, and thank you for coming to our annual meeting of stockholders. I am now proud to introduce the company's independent directors. Tony Anderson, former Vice Chair and Midwest Area Managing Partner of Ernst & Young. Bruce Broussard, Interim CEO of HP and former President and CEO of Humana. Peter Harrison, former CEO of Schroders and former Chairman and CEO of RWC Partners. Judith Hartmann, Executive Board Member of Bayer AG, former Operating Partner of Sandbrook Capital, and former Deputy CEO and Global Chief Financial Officer of ENGIE. Deborah C. Hopkins, former Chief Executive Officer of Citi Ventures and former Chief Innovation Officer of Citigroup. Tamara Ingram, former Global Chairman of Wunderman Thompson. Jane Holl Lute, Strategic Director of SICPA North America.
Steve Mills, former Executive Vice President of Software and Systems of IBM. Morty Schapiro, Executive Vice President and Senior Advisor of TWG Global and President Emeritus of Northwestern University. Jan Siegmund, former Chief Financial Officer of Cognizant Technology Solutions and ADP. Lloyd Yates, President and Chief Executive Officer of NiSource. John Doyle also joins me. In addition to being the company's President and CEO, John is also a member of the Board of Directors. Wendy Fletcher of Deloitte & Touche is also in attendance. Deloitte & Touche is the company's independent registered public accounting firm, and Wendy is available to answer questions during the Q&A session later in the program. The 2026 Annual Meeting of Stockholders is officially called to order. After proceeding with the formal part of the meeting, we will announce the preliminary voting results.
We have received affidavits confirming the distribution of the 2025 Annual Report, the 2026 Notice of Annual Meeting and Proxy Statement, and voting instructions to stockholders of record on March 23rd, 2026. Representatives of Broadridge have been appointed to serve as inspectors of election for this meeting and have taken their inspector's oath. The inspectors have reported that more than 50% of the outstanding shares are present in person or by proxy, and so a quorum is present for the transaction of business. We are meeting today to vote on the matters described in the proxy statement. Voting will take place on these matters after they are presented. The first order of business is the election of the nominees listed in the proxy statement to serve as directors with terms expiring in 2027. No other nominations were submitted to the company.
The company has a majority voting standard in the case of director elections that, like today's, are uncontested. Accordingly, each nominee must receive a majority of the votes cast with respect to his or her nomination in order to be elected to the board. The second item on the agenda, commonly known as say on pay, enables our stockholders to approve by non-binding vote the compensation of our named executive officers as disclosed in the proxy statement. The third and last item on the agenda calls for the stockholders to ratify the appointment of Deloitte & Touche as the company's independent registered public accounting firm for the fiscal year ending December 31st, 2026. The audit committee previously approved this appointment. The polls are open. Stockholders present who have already voted by proxy need not vote again unless they wish to change their votes.
Any stockholder who has not yet voted or wishes to change their vote may do so by clicking on the voting button on the web portal and following the instructions there. The polls are now closed. The preliminary tally, based on the votes cast as of the start of this meeting, shows the following results. The nominees for election to the board have been duly elected. The compensation of the named executive officers has been approved by advisory vote, and the appointment of Deloitte & Touche as the company's independent auditors for 2026 has been ratified. The Inspectors of Election will provide a final certified report of the vote following the meeting. That report will become a part of the record of this meeting and is not expected to affect the outcome of the voting announced today.
A summary of the outcome of the vote will be posted to the company's website, and details of the final voting results will be filed with the SEC. The formal portion of Marsh's 2026 annual meeting is now adjourned, and it gives me great pleasure to turn things over to John.
Thank you, Ed. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I am pleased to speak with you about our performance in 2025. First, I want to thank our colleagues for their hard work and dedication to our clients, our communities, and each other. I also want to recognize our Executive Committee. Paul Beswick, Chief Information and Operations Officer, Kate Brennan, General Counsel, Carmen Fernandez, Chief People Officer, John Jones, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, Dean Klisura, CEO of Guy Carpenter, Mark McGivney, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer, Ted Moynihan, CEO of Marsh Management Consulting, Martin South, Chief Client Officer, Nick Studer, CEO of Marsh Risk, and Pat Tomlinson, CEO of Mercer. Since the start of the year, we have had one new addition to our Executive Committee, two leaders take on new roles, and one move into an expanded role.
These changes are all about growth, enhancing the client experience, and delivering the benefits of our Thrive program. Thrive is helping to drive growth through investments in talent and AI, strengthen our brand, and increase efficiency. I'm grateful to work alongside these experienced leaders and our talented colleagues. Inspired by our purpose to build the confidence to thrive through the power of perspective, we help clients overcome challenges and find new opportunities. I want to thank our board of directors, led by Ed Hanway, our chairman. We are fortunate to have such a strong group of directors, and we appreciate their trusted counsel and guidance. 2025 was an important year for our firm. We took significant steps toward our vision of becoming the most impactful professional services firm in the world while delivering solid financial performance.
Our balanced approach to capital management helps us deliver solid results in the near term while investing for sustained growth over the long term. Among the highlights for the year, we grew total revenue by 10% to a record $27 billion with underlying revenue growth of 4%. Our adjusted operating income grew 11% to $7.3 billion. This is on top of 11% growth in 2024. Our adjusted operating margin increased 30 basis points, marking the 18th consecutive year of reported margin expansion, and adjusted EPS grew 9%. We generated $5 billion of free cash flow, a new record. We invested approximately $850 million in acquisitions that enhanced our talent and capabilities, extended our reach, and increased our scale. We returned significant capital to our shareholders. This included a 10% increase in our dividend, our 16th consecutive year, and $2 billion in share repurchases, the largest amount in our history.
We successfully completed the integration of McGriff, our largest acquisition ever, formed Business and Client Services, or BCS, launched our new brand, and announced the Thrive program, all of which improve our growth profile in the years ahead. This is the most complex environment that I've seen in my 40 years in business. Military conflicts, trade wars, culture wars, social unrest, extreme weather, and the emergence of new technologies are testing the strategies of businesses and governments alike. We're helping clients meet challenges and find opportunities to thrive amid the complexity. One powerful example of how we are living our purpose is our support for clients amid the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. Our primary concern has been the safety and wellbeing of our colleagues and clients and helping them navigate the challenges in the region.
Marsh is advising clients on how to build greater resilience in their business planning. We're helping them address supply chain issues, review cyber exposure, and we're advising on investment decisions. Of course, we're working with clients to manage insurable risks, particularly in marine, aviation, and energy. We've also engaged with governments as they work to minimize economic disruption and maintain global trade, enhancing economic resilience. Challenging events like this underscore the purpose of our work. It's also why we believe Marsh provides a unique value to clients who need strategy, talent, investment, and risk advice in complex times. I would also like to touch on how AI is enabling and accelerating our strategy. We are leveraging our scale and capacity to invest in AI to drive even greater value from our proprietary data assets and our role as our clients' trusted advisor. We are focused on three main pillars.
The first is growth. We are building AI-enabled applications and services that are generating new revenue streams and enhancing our world-class capabilities and data-driven insights across risk, health, human capital, consulting, and investments. Our second pillar is productivity, which focuses on deploying AI capabilities to boost the performance of our colleagues. The third is efficiency. A critical reason for creating BCS is to leverage the efficiency potential of AI. Our client relationships, data and insights, and the expertise of our professionals worldwide, built over 155 years of market leadership, are why we see AI as a powerful accelerator and enabler in delivering value to our clients, colleagues, and shareholders. Marsh is a market leader with a proven track record of growth and exceptional performance.
Our success is driven by the unique strengths of our business, market-leading positions, the data and analytics advantage, and the talent and dedication of our colleagues. Our colleague value proposition, which shapes the experience our people have at Marsh, is further strengthened by our new expanded brand. This enables us to amplify our value proposition for clients and also foster a collaborative culture for colleagues with greater opportunities for teamwork, knowledge sharing, rewards, career mobility, and professional growth. Our more than 95,000 colleagues worldwide share one code of conduct, the greater good, which underpins our values, ethical commitments, and standards of business integrity and professionalism. We're passionate about bringing our purpose to life every day on behalf of our clients, communities, and one another. In closing, I want to thank our colleagues again for their commitment.
I also want to thank our clients for their continued confidence in us, and our investors for their support. Together, we are building a new, more impactful Marsh, and we're excited to continue helping all of our stakeholders meet emerging challenges, seize opportunities, and thrive.
Thanks, John. We will now open it up to the Q&A. I'll start with a few stockholder questions that we received in advance of the meeting, and as we go through, I'll let you know if any new questions come in. To be efficient with our time, I will group and summarize questions related to the same topic for you to answer together. First off, we've received a question about the philosophy behind the components of our executive and director compensation programs, including the impact of equity awards on our stockholders and whether there are any programs that give executives and directors the ability to purchase Marsh stock. Could you please comment on the elements of our compensation program, John?
Thanks, Connor. Sure. With respect to executive compensation, the principal elements of our program include base salary, an annual bonus, and annual long-term incentive awards. We believe that these components align with value creation for our stockholders and balance risk and reward. Our independent directors receive a basic annual retainer and an annual stock grant as compensation for their services. The board regularly reviews its compensation program with the advice of an independent compensation consultant and believes that it's appropriate and aligned with market practice. We believe that the annual LTI program aligns the interests of our senior executives with stockholders who are seeking a return on their investment. Each year, we consider the potential dilutive impact of the equity award program. At this time, we believe the program is appropriate to attract and retain the most highly qualified and capable professionals.
We also maintain an employee stock purchase program, which allows our colleagues to purchase shares of the company at 95% of the average market price each quarter.
Thanks, John. We also received a question about Marsh's recent stock performance. Could you also provide some color here?
Sure. Our stock price is not lost on us, and we take the price performance seriously. Having said that, it's important to separate company-specific execution from broader market dynamics. From a macro perspective, we've seen a rotation into higher beta stocks in what has been a risk-on environment. This, along with declining commercial insurance pricing, has contributed to our sector being somewhat out of favor, which has weighed on relative multiples across the sector. Despite that backdrop, our company has demonstrated relative strength, excuse me, year to date in our stock performance versus many of our direct peers. There have also been some concerns around AI, and that's created some uncertainty in some corners of the market, and insurance brokers are no exception here.
I spoke about it in my prepared remarks, but we are proactively leaning into AI, and as I've said many times, I believe that we will be an AI winner. We've also repurchased our stock at a higher rate. As I mentioned last year, we repurchased $2 billion worth of our stock, which is a record for us as a company, and we also purchased $750 million in the Q1 . We continue to view Marsh as a highly defensible business with strong fundamentals, durable cash flows, and a service offering that is more important than ever to our clients. Connor?
Thanks, John. There are no new questions that are active in the queue. That officially concludes the Q&A session.
Okay. Thank you, Connor. In closing, I'd like to thank everyone for your participation in our annual meeting of stockholders. I'd also like to thank our team for facilitating this meeting so that we could hear directly from our stockholders. Operator, this concludes today's call.
That concludes our meeting today. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect.