Paychex, Inc Q3 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

Paychex, Inc (NASDAQ: PAYX) Q3 2026 Earnings Call dated Mar. 25, 2026

Presentation

Operator

Good morning, and welcome to Paychex’s Third Quarter Fiscal 2026 Earnings Call. Participating on the call today are John Gibson and Bob Schrader. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded, and your participation implies consent to our recording of this call.

I would now like to turn the call over to Bob Schrader, Paychex’s Chief Financial Officer.

Bob Schrader — Chief Financial Officer

Thank you for joining us to discuss Paychex third quarter fiscal 2026 results. Our earnings release and presentation are available on our Investor Relations website. We plan to file our Form 10-Q within a couple of business days. This call is being webcast live and will be available for replay on our Investor Relations portal. Today’s call includes forward-looking statements that refer to future events and involve some risks. We encourage you to review our filings with the SEC for additional information on factors that could cause actual results to differ from our current expectations. We will also reference non-GAAP financial measures. A description of these items along with a reconciliation of non-GAAP measures can be found in our earnings release.

I would now like to turn the call over to John Gibson, Paychex President and CEO.

John Gibson — President and Chief Executive Officer

Thanks, Bob. Hello, everyone. I’ll cover this quarter’s operational highlights, and Bob will come back and discuss our financial results and outlook, and then we’ll open it up for your questions. We delivered a strong quarter with revenue up 20% and adjusted operating income up 22% year-over-year, driven by effective execution and progress advancing our strategic priorities, most notably, the Paycor integration and acceleration of our transformational AI initiatives. In this very dynamic environment, financial strength is important, and our free cash flow generation continues to be robust, as Bob will highlight later. Amid a dynamic macro backdrop, our clients’ workforce levels remained stable, supported by our solutions that help manage costs and source talent in a tight labor market. In a highly regulated industry, our compliance depth, advisory expertise and award-winning platforms provide a clear competitive advantage in navigating a constantly changing and complex regulatory environment.

As we embed AI into our expert-enabled technology, we are strengthening that advantage by leveraging our vast data to scale our expertise, enhance productivity and elevate client outcomes. As you all know, we operate in HR benefits and payroll, some of the most mission-critical aspects of a business, and we are honored that 800,000 clients rely on us for trusted support and advice. For many of our clients, we effectively serve as their HR department, managing a foundational part of their business, their people. Errors paying employees, withholding taxes or administrating benefits carry significant regulatory and reputational risk driving demand for trusted compliant solutions where accuracy matters most. Demand for our comprehensive advisory and benefit solutions remain strong, differentiating us from the tech-only providers.

Clients are increasingly turning to our HR professionals for strategic advisory expertise and assistance over routine transactional support. Robust revenue growth in retirement, ASO and PEO highlights the durability of our model and reinforces our expectations of a long secular growth runway for these businesses. Our ASO and PEO worksite employee growth continues to outpace the industry, reflecting our value in navigating regulatory complexity and ensuring compliance, often for clients with no or, as I said, limited HR support. Our PEO business remains strong with high single-digit worksite employee growth, driven by robust demand and record retention rates. Our PEO solution empowers small businesses to offer competitive benefit packages on par with Fortune 500 companies, aiding talent attraction and retention in a tight labor market. January enrollment in our at-risk Florida MPP Medical Plan went well and in line with our expectations, helping drive sequential revenue growth.

We received positive feedback on the new AI-driven benefits intelligence we embedded in the enrollment workflow this year. It leverages employee-specific data to recommend plan choices and streamline benefit selection. We continue extending our SMB benefit leadership with Paychex Perks, our award-winning digital marketplace offering affordable, transferable benefits to our clients’ employees. Perks is a compelling growth opportunity that empowers our clients to offer meaningful benefits with no added cost to the employer or administrative burden. In the first 18 months, Perks has grown to over 25 benefit offerings with purchases from nearly 350,000 unique employees, creating a direct end-user relationship with portable benefits that they can keep if they change employers. By bringing enterprise level benefits down market, we are enabling our clients to better compete for talent and addressing a historically underserved market.

The Paycor integration continues to progress well. We remain on track to exceed our fiscal ’26 synergy targets we discussed last quarter. Leading indicators such as bookings and broker referrals have reaccelerated to pre-acquisition levels, and we are adding sales headcount to capture the demand we see. We are gaining momentum cross-selling Paychex ASO, PEO and retirement solutions to Paycor’s clients, and we continue to win larger-than-expected ASO deals and broker referred PEO opportunities. This momentum reflects the hard work and alignment of our teams and positions us well going into fiscal year ’27. Our Paychex Flex and Paycor platforms were recognized as industry-leading HCM solutions with two 2026 Lighthouse Tech Awards. This achievement underscores our commitment to empowering businesses with modern AI-powered solutions that simplify HR processes and drive business outcomes.

Integral to our growth strategy, we continue to accelerate in embedding AI into our workflows. This amplifies our expertise with human-in-the-loop oversight and strong governance. We now have over 500 AI-powered capabilities and agents that can drive higher productivity and smarter decisions and outcomes. Our generative AI-powered employment law and compliance platform processed tens of thousands of inquiries this quarter, helping clients and Paychex HR experts navigate complex and always changing wage and employment law. Internally, we are expanding AI use cases to enhance the client experience and sales effectiveness. Following successful pilots last quarter, we are scaling the use of our voice and e-mail agents for payroll processing, enabling service teams to focus on proactive higher value advisory support.

We also expanded our agentic AI sales and service tools to the entire sales team with a goal to drive revenue growth and efficiency. AI agents orchestrated real-time information across service and product systems, equipping thousands of service personnel to support clients more effectively. This agent swarm architecture really removes prior friction and serves as a foundational capability to future agentic developments. Our strategic AI investments are bolstering our leadership in HCM innovation. We are moving from insight and efficiency tools to proactive agents that leverage our vast and growing data set to complete work to drive business success.

Payroll and HR, as we know, are mission-critical and highly regulated functions where accuracy and compliance matter more than automation alone. We believe Paychex’s proprietary payroll data, regulatory expertise and advisory relationships creates a sustainable advantage that will enable us to respond and responsibly embed AI into our solutions while maintaining a durable competitive moat. In our business, trust is critical. It’s not just what you do, but it’s how you do it that matters to prospects, clients, partners, employees and key stakeholders. That’s why I’m proud that Paychex was once again named one of the world’s most ethical companies by Ethisphere for the 18th time. This rare achievement highlights our unwavering commitment to ethical operations and corporate responsibility.

Supporting communities is also integral to our identity, and I am pleased that Paychex was recognized as a Leading Corporate Partner by United Way Worldwide, reflecting our commitment to making a positive impact where we live and work. Lastly, I’d like to thank our team for the exceptional hard work during this busy year-end season and through a very, very challenging year of integration. The work that they’ve done to support our clients to come together is truly exceptional, and I think really is positioning us well as we move into fiscal year ’27.

I will now turn the call over to Bob to discuss our financial results and outlook.

Bob Schrader — Chief Financial Officer

Thank you, John. I’ll start with our third quarter financial results, then provide an update on our outlook. Total revenue increased 20% over the prior year to $1.8 billion. This represents an acceleration in the organic growth of the business relative to the first half of the year. Management Solutions revenue grew 23% to $1.4 billion, driven by product penetration and price realization. Paycor contributed approximately 19 percentage points to growth. PEO and Insurance Solutions revenue increased 9% to $398 million driven primarily by strong growth in the number of average PEO worksite employees as well as an increase in PEO insurance revenues. Interest on funds held for clients increased 33% to $57 million, largely due to the addition of Paycor balances.

Total expenses increased 24% to just over $1 billion, primarily driven by the Paycor acquisition. Excluding Paycor, we estimate that expenses grew in the low single digits during the quarter. Operating income margin was 43.8%, and adjusted operating income margins increased approximately 80 basis points to 47.7%, driven by increased productivity and cost discipline while increasing our investments in AI. Diluted earnings per share increased 9% to $1.56 per share and adjusted diluted earnings per share increased 15% to $1.71 per share. Our financial position remains strong with cash, restricted cash and total corporate investments of $1.8 billion and total borrowings of approximately $5 billion as of the quarter close.

Our cash flow generation continues to be a strength of our model. Operating cash flows were nearly $2 billion year-to-date, and our free cash flows increased 27% year-over-year. After the quarter closed, we did repay the initial $400 million tranche of debt from our Oasis acquisition that matured in March. Our recent $1 billion stock repurchase authorization underscores our commitment to delivering long-term shareholder value. We returned $463 million this quarter and over $1.5 billion year-to-date to shareholders in the form of cash dividends and share buybacks. And our 12-month rolling return on equity remains robust at 41%.

Shifting to our guidance for FY ’26, which is based on current market conditions. We reaffirm our prior fiscal ’26 outlook, except for raising our interest on funds held for client expectations. Interest on funds held for clients is now expected to be in the range of $200 million to $210 million. All other guidance metrics remain unchanged. I’m going to turn to the fourth quarter to provide you a little bit of color on the fourth quarter. We would anticipate fourth quarter growth to be approximately 12% with an adjusted operating margin of 41% to 42%. The fourth quarter growth rate reflects a couple of dynamics. First and foremost, I think most of you know, we anniversary the Paycor acquisition during the quarter, and to a lesser extent, Q3 benefited modestly from the timing of certain items relative to Q4.

However, our second half outlook remains consistent with our expectations and the organic revenue growth acceleration we saw in Q3. We believe Paychex has never been better positioned to succeed in the AI era of HCM and deliver shareholder value. Our business fundamentals remain strong. As the best operators, we have unrivaled operating and free cash flow margins with an opportunity for further expansion. Our financial strength and the durability of our business model are evident in our consistent performance as a Rule of 50 Company. We are committed to returning capital to shareholders and confident in our ability to deliver sustained value through continued revenue and earnings growth. I will now turn the call back over to John for questions.

John Gibson — President and Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, Bob. We will now open the call to questions.

Question & Answers

Operator

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from Bryan Bergin with TD Cowen. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Bryan Bergin — Analyst, TD Cowen

Hi, guys, good morning. Thank you. Bob, can you put some finer points just first on the level of organic growth in the third quarter, and then bridge that forward to your commentary on the fourth quarter. If you can kind of unpack that 12% growth across the business, I think that would help.

Bob Schrader — Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, Bryan, I think consistently, even if you go back to Q4 of last year, the organic growth of the business has been a bit weaker. I think a lot of that had to do with comparability issues, particularly in the PEO business with our MPP plan in Florida. But if you go back to Q4 of last year, I think we’ve seen sequential improvement each quarter in the organic growth of the business. So if you look at the first half, total revenue organic growth was roughly 4%, and that improved from Q1 to Q2. And then when you look at the back half, whether it’s Q3 or Q4 combined, we would expect — it accelerated in Q3, and we would expect to see similar organic growth performance in Q4.

And so you’re now getting to a back half organic growth rate that’s closer to 6%. And then when you put the two of those together, it’s roughly 5% on a full year basis. So again, I think there’s a couple of drivers of it. One, to be fair, is the easier compare on the PEO business. I mean, I think you’ll see that. The headline PEO number sequentially went from 6% last quarter to 9%. There are some timing things there, but there’s certainly strength in the underlying operating performance of the business, particularly in the PEO, and we can get into that probably in maybe some later questions. But we did anniversary the headwind from the MPP enrollment. So that’s why you’re definitely seeing the combination of an easier compare, stronger operating performance driving accelerated organic growth in the back half of the year.

Bryan Bergin — Analyst, TD Cowen

Okay. As far as the 4Q exit rates that are implied, as we think forward into fiscal ’27, any important considerations that you want to share?

Bob Schrader — Chief Financial Officer

Yeah. And I maybe head off the question that I’m probably going to get as it relates to next year in guidance. And we’re going to — we’re in the early stages, I would tell you, of our operating plan, and we’re going to finalize that over the next six weeks to eight weeks. And I know we kind of established a precedent coming out of COVID in providing maybe some more details around what we were thinking for next year. I think we needed to do that given some of the uncertainty in the environment back then. Our preference now is to kind of build the plan, come out in Q4 like we historically did, and consistent with what our competitors do and provide guidance at that point in time. That being said, we obviously have visibility to what’s out there in the models and fact set.

And when I look at that, I really don’t see any reason that I need to steer you in one direction or another. I’m fairly comfortable with what’s out there. And I think, Bryan, what you’ll see is the organic growth rate, whether it’s Q3 or Q4, we’re really looking at the back half because there are some timing differences, particularly in the PEO between Q3 and Q4. When we look at the organic growth rate in the back half of this year, it pretty much aligns with kind of what’s assumed for — from a consensus standpoint for next year.

Operator

Thank you. And we’ll take our next question from Mark Marcon with Baird. Your line is now open.

Mark Marcon

Thanks for taking my questions and nice performance this quarter. I’m wondering if you could talk about a couple of things. One, just you did mention that Paycor was seeing new broker engagements, or are we — a renewal of some of the broker engagements in that pipeline. I was just wondering if you could just talk about new sales, generally speaking, during the core selling season? What did you end up seeing this year? And how would you describe the competitive environment, win rates, etc.?

John Gibson — President and Chief Executive Officer

Hey, Mark, this is John. I’d say the competitive environment is stable and the same. It’s competitive. I wouldn’t say I’ve seen much change there. From a sales perspective, look very pleased with our performance in Q3, not only in line with our expectations, but quite frankly, we were accelerating par and bookings growth in the third quarter. And we’ve kind of seen that sequentially as we come out with the disruption, as you know, at the start of the year with the integration of the teams continue to grow there. PEO, double-digit bookings. Paycor, double-digit bookings as well. We actually see bookings and the par referral continuing to accelerate back to pre-acquisition levels. We’re actually adding headcount in the enterprise space. Again, remember, Paycorp for us is a brand for the enterprise market, 100-plus, and we think that’s a great opportunity for our HR outsourcing services as well as technology solutions.

And so we’re going to continue to go after that as well. So we continue to gain momentum, I think, across the board, and we feel good about where we are positioned going into ’27, both in terms of our competitive positioning, our headcount, and I think you really look at it. I mean, we’re entering ’27 with all of the integration work behind us that we did early in the beginning of the — this fiscal year. And we’re entering with not only an aligned team, but really the most comprehensive and I think, flexible and innovative set of solutions in the marketplace. And so I feel good about where we are.

Mark Marcon

That’s great to hear. And then I thought the gross margin performance was particularly impressive. When we take a look — if we’re defining gross margin as revenue minus direct costs. And part of that was obviously the higher interest income off of the float. But beyond that, it looks like it’s doing extremely well. How much of that is related to some of the AI initiatives that you’ve put in place in terms of embedding AI across your service infrastructure and making them more productive versus other initiatives that you’ve put in place in terms of perhaps shifting some of your costs to lower-cost labor markets like India? And how much more can we do there? Because it’s been fairly impressive. I’m wondering if this is basically setting us up for continued margin expansion for multiple years?

John Gibson — President and Chief Executive Officer

Mark, I think that we have a long track record of being able to drive as the best operators margin expansion as we grow revenue in the business and I think you’re going to continue to see that. We use every lever imaginable to do that. I think that when you look at AI, as you know, we’ve been using AI and predecessor type of models for many, many years since I’ve been here. And now with this new technology that almost every day, something new is coming out, what we’re seeing is pretty impressive. It’s pretty incredible. Some of the things we’re doing in terms of agentic AI models, which we’ve now released to scale after the pilots, doing voice payroll, doing e-mail payrolls, what we’re seeing early stages in our beta groups in sales using our Sales Guru tool and what we’re seeing from a service perspective.

So I feel good about what the opportunities are. Look, if we grow the top line, we are going to be able to grow margins and expand margins over time. And then when you look at these new tools that we can put in our arsenal as the best operator, I really feel good about where we are. And I would say that it’s part of the thing on ’27 we’re just getting in, that’s a big debate right now. I think that’s the big question is how much — how do you begin to quantify the real positive impact from sales productivity, the way we’re using it in marketing? What the potential is from a service perspective?

So I can assure you, we’re going to have some very lively discussions next week during our planning sessions about exactly the potential that this technology has, both to drive the top line, but also to continue to expand margins. So I think there’s more room ahead and every year something new comes out, and we are innovators in that regard and are going to grab every tool we can to continue to drive efficiency.

Operator

Thank you. We’ll go next to Tien-Tsin Huang with JPMorgan. Your line is now open.

Tien-Tsin Huang

Hey, thanks. Hi, John and Bob. I wanted to ask on the advisory work, John, that you talked a little bit about. I think that’s probably underappreciated in terms of what Paychex does there. How AI proof is the advisory side of the business? Because I get the question quite a bit that can rules-based advice from AI come in and supplant what Paychex does on the advisory side. But I’m guessing that a lot of your advisory work is centered around compliance and very complex data issue that only Paychex has. Can you maybe elaborate on that?

John Gibson — President and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, yeah, look, Tien-Tsin, I think this is something I think is extremely interesting for people to understand. For the vast majority of our clients, we are their HR department, right? So not only do we provide them the advice, we literally are talking to them and holding their hand when they’re making some of these decisions and supporting them. You look at our PEO, the most comprehensive part of our model, we’re actually in a co-employment arrangement. We’re actually helping represent them and deal with their employee situations, which are numerous, I may ask, in today’s world. And so we’re actually doing so much more that there’s no way that I think technology is going to replace that, at least that I see in the short term.

Now your point is we actually own the patent on using agentic AI in a mesh form in structured and unstructured data to answer HR and compliance data. Why is that? Because we have a huge compliance regulatory team that’s constantly keeping that system up to date. What I will tell you is the changes in Akron, Ohio, are not automated. Someone has to go on to Akron’s website, has to look at it, has to interpret it, has to watch what’s going on in Ohio courts to understand how it’s being interpreted and then put that into a system to be able to respond to a client who’s asking a question about whether or not they can terminate a client in Akron, Ohio or not. So I think that part of the both the — we’ve got the AI embedded tools. And now we’ve actually launched those tools inside of our — with our HR Generalist.

We’re actually seeing pretty significant productivity improvements since we’ve done that. Our clients — we’re embedding that into our platforms, so our clients can gain access to that. I think that’s going to drive more efficiency. But at the bottom line, for most of our clients and increasingly upmarket, we are becoming the HR department and HR partner for helping people manage people. So as long as our clients have people, they’re going to need Paychex holding their hand and helping them understand how to work with those people in my opinion.

Tien-Tsin Huang

Yeah. Well said, your opinion is very important, John. That’s why I’m asking it. So thank you for going through that. Maybe just as a follow-up, thinking about these agents as they get deployed and as you said, the proprietary data that you have, does this get monetized through your normal way pricing that you typically would put through in the spring? Or do you think of this as a new monetizable opportunity for Paychex?

John Gibson — President and Chief Executive Officer

Well, I think we’ve been monetizing our data and providing insights going back to the early days. We won the — in 2022, we won the best use of AI in HCM with our retention insights. That was before all this AI madness befell us. And the fact of the matter is that we’ve been doing that. We monetize that with our clients. It actually provides them insights about how to retain their clients. I think what you’re seeing today is we’re applying it into our products and services to improve the user experience. We’re putting it in there to be able to improve really the insights that we can provide in other areas such as benefits. We mentioned what we’re doing in the PEO, which was just phenomenal. The way the tool helped advise clients, employees and what benefits package was right for them.

So I think you’re going to continue to see us use it to really drive better outcomes. And you made a critical point. In order for AI to work, you have to have a large, robust data set. And the other thing that we’ve learned, and particularly when we’re building the agentic AI models for payroll, you had to have a constantly moving set of data. And so the way I look at it is this flywheel effect. Now that we’re capturing every interaction that we have from an HR payroll and compliance perspective with our clients through every form of communication, every interaction we have with them or one of their employees adds to our data set and with our tools constantly looking and doing the analysis around what are common trends, we’re getting more insights.

And those insights are allowing us to be more proactive with our clients. So as the transactional work gets automated, it frees up our time to be able to gain the more insights and then the system is proactively giving our HRGs a list of insights that they can then call clients and make recommendations on. Whether that’s compensation, whether that’s retention, whether that’s workplace trends that we’re seeing in specific geographies that they need to be aware of. So I think it’s just going to continue to improve the value proposition that we have and I think it’s also going to improve the outcomes that our clients see.

Operator

Thank you. We’ll move next to Bryan Keane with Citi. Your line is now open.

Bryan Keane — Analyst, TD Cowen

Yeah. Hi, good morning. I was hoping you guys could just talk a little bit about the strength of PEO insurance. It jumped above the range at 9%. Can you talk a little bit about some of the drivers and some of the sustainability as we head into the fourth quarter?

Bob Schrader — Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, maybe I’ll start, and then John can add some color. I think it’s two-fold, Bryan, as I alluded to earlier. I think it’s strength in the underlying operating performance of the business. So we saw a double-digit demand for PEO. We continue to see record WSE retention in the PEO. We saw high single-digit worksite employee growth. PEO business is all about worksite employees, and we continue to outpace the competitors in that space with our ability to drive worksite employee growth. So the underlying operating performance is strong. January is the big annual enrollment. So we anniversary — two things, we anniversary the tougher compares from the prior year when MPP was down, but we got through that annual enrollment. And I would tell you, enrollment in our MPP is up modestly.

So you have an easier compare. We grew the enrollment. And then when you zoom out a little bit and you look at medical enrollment across all the PEO, not just the at-risk business in Florida, but across the entire PEO space, our medical enrollment was up high single digits, near double digits as we went through this annual enrollment period. And I think that’s the strength of the PEO value proposition. The ability for us to offer to our small business clients, the ability to offer medical insurance and workers’ comp insurance, leveraging our scale to be able to offer affordable benefits to them, we had a pretty good year-end enrollment related to that. So it’s really a combination of all those factors. I would also just say, and I’ve alluded to this a little bit.

On the agency side, we had some timing benefit. You get some timing between Q3 and Q4 between carrier bonuses. SUI revenue can be a little bit stronger in Q3, a little bit weaker in Q4. And so relative to our expectations, there was a little bit of timing that came into Q3, but all in all, really strong performance and pretty much what we planned in the back half of the year, and it’s nice to see that come into fruition.

John Gibson — President and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah. I just want to add to this. I mean the PEO performance is amazing, outpacing the industry, I think, rather significantly. Double-digit revenue growth, double-digit bookings, seeing success upmarket. I think this is another point. Again, I’ll make it, it’s going to be interesting. We’re having success with the Paycor sales team into the broker channels, positioning PEO upfront. So this is one of those, what I call, revenue geography problems. So a Paycor rep is out and they’re talking to a broker, what would have normally been because all they have was HCM to sell. It was going to be an HCM sell. All of a sudden, the discussion comes about what the problem is, and we got multiple solutions. And now we’re selling a PEO.

And we had some — and it’s larger deals than what we typically would see coming in. So in January, that was another big positive that, quite frankly, I think, is going to continue to help us and move forward. I would also say, because I do want to say this, look, the agency was certainly still a drag in the quarter to the segment, but we saw sequential improvement. And I’d actually say even in bookings, which is the precursor to revenue moving, we actually saw solid bookings there in the quarter. And so I’m pleased with the team has made a lot of changes there. We’ve made some changes in the agency. We’re trying to be more innovative because the market is the market. Healthcare issues are healthcare issues. Soft workers’ comp are soft workers’ comp. We’re building strategies to work around those situations and the team is making some progress there. So that also contributed a little bit as well.

The other thing that I think is — that I would point out for you guys to go back and look at, and I think it’s probably a story that we plan on duplicating in the enterprise space. If you go back and look at our PEO success, and you go back to 2020 through 2025 and look at those five years, I think you’re going to find that our CAGR of worksite employee growth is in the double digits and far surpasses any of the other providers that I’m aware of, both public and private in terms of growth. Now what was the setup for that? 2028, we make an acquisition of Oasis. Prior to that, we made a decision that strategically we were going to position the Company as an HR advisory company that we believe there was more than technology that our clients are going to need and want, and we started to really grow our business organically.

We then went and made an acquisition. One year after that acquisition, we’re growing that business at industry, and we’re gaining share in that industry. I think that’s exactly what you should expect us to try to do and we are doing with the Paycor acquisition. We saw the opportunity to take HR advisory solutions upmarket. We wanted more capability to be able to do that, more distribution. And now we’re a year into it, and I think we’re well positioned to duplicate the story that we did in PEO in the enterprise space.

Bryan Keane — Analyst, TD Cowen

Got it. Got it. And just a quick follow-up, Bob. The 12% revenue growth you called out for Q4, I think that’s a point below the Street. But it sounds like some timing, maybe there was a slight benefit, some of the stuff you just talked about, obviously, in the PEO business from Q3 to Q4. But organically, the organic growth doesn’t move much. Maybe just talk about the — some of the benefit, maybe if Q3 should be stronger organically than Q4?

Bob Schrader — Chief Financial Officer

No, I think you would probably see a slight uptick of continued acceleration in the organic growth of the business in Q4 relative to Q3. So we should see sequential improvement there. And I mean, as you guys know, we don’t give quarterly guidance. I’m trying to give you some color on each call to help you with your models going forward. I would tell you, we were intentionally conservative last quarter when we kind of provided some color on Q3. Obviously, Q3 is a big quarter for us. You have year-ends, you have selling season, we have our year-end processing fees, which is a lot of money and margin that hits in the month of January. We had our large enrollment in the PEO. So we were intentionally conservative. I would tell you Q3 was in line, a bit better than our expectations.

And as I mentioned, there were some puts and takes between Q3 and Q4 and largely the back half of the year was in line with our expectations. And again, you’ll continue to see some sequential improvement in — assuming we deliver the forecast and the guidance, you’ll continue to see some sequential improvement in the organic growth of the business, which I think positions us well, as John mentioned, as we move into FY ’27.

Operator

Thank you. We’ll move next to Andrew Nicholas with William Blair. Your line is now open.

Daniel Maxwell

Hi, guys. Good morning. This is Daniel on for Andrew today. Thanks for taking my questions. Real quick, just turning back to the revenue timing. It sounds like that was mostly concentrated in PEO. Is there any way you can size how large that was? And looking forward, can sequential growth in PEO specifically continue into the fourth quarter off of that?

Bob Schrader — Chief Financial Officer

Yeah. I think the growth rate in Q4 will be lower because of some of those things. I don’t have the exact percentage. And I think when we — again, if we look at it, the two quarters combined, Daniel, you’ll see a sequential or if you look at back half because of some of those puts and takes between the quarter, you’ll see a fairly significant lift in the organic sequential growth of the PEO insurance in the back half relative to the first half. But the overall growth rate, I think when you start doing the math, you’ll see that the math is going to show you that the growth rate is going to be a little bit lower in Q4 than Q3. But when you put the two of them together, it’s a fairly big step-up in the sequential organic growth relative to the first half of the year.

Daniel Maxwell

Great. That’s helpful. And then for my follow-up, going back to the mention of a reacceleration of referrals and bookings to pre-acquisition levels. Can you add any incremental detail on specific areas of momentum there and maybe just level set after a few quarters of integration, where the lion’s share of the synergy opportunities now sit, whether that’s on the revenue or the cost side?

John Gibson — President and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, Daniel. What I would say is very pleased with the acceleration we’ve seen each quarter as we came through the first quarter when we did all of the reorganization. And as we talked about, we made a conscious decision when the deal closed almost a year ago now, April a year ago, that we were going to get the hard work out of the way and we saw the opportunity rather than dragging it out. And so we took — we did that. And of course, from the time you announced the deal in January of last year to the time that we closed the deal in April, as you can imagine, a lot of competitive noise in the market, a lot of questions from brokers about what’s going to happen, and we couldn’t say much.

So as we’ve gotten our story out there and gain momentum, we’ve continued to build momentum each of the quarters. And as we said, we’ve gotten ourselves back to where we were pre both in terms of bookings volume. It was double digits again year-over-year and broker engagement. So I would say it’s getting back to kind of where we were, except for now we have the cross-sell opportunity. So where I would say expense synergies are pretty much behind us at this point in time. We’ve taken those actions. We’ve exceeded the expectations that we laid out as part of the deal model. Now you’re in what I call normal DNA, best operators continuing to improve the model of both companies and look for opportunities. Where the opportunity is now, and we continue to build momentum on is around the cross-sell inside the client base, 401(k), ASO, PEO, all of our other products and services. You’ll be seeing us putting our Perks product into the Paycor ecosystem as well. So that’s where we see the opportunity as we roll into fiscal year ’27.

Operator

Thank you. We’ll go next to Kevin McVeigh with UBS. Your line is now open.

Kevin McVeigh

Great. Thank you so much. Hey, I wonder, can you just remind us what the initial Paycor revenue and expense synergies were and where we are today on those? Because it seems like you’ve been doing a nice job on kind of the integration, but just remind us what the — again, the revenue and expense synergies were because I guess we’re bumping up on a year, I think that would help?

Bob Schrader — Chief Financial Officer

Yeah. Kevin, if you go back to, I think, when we originally announced the deal, I’m kind of losing track of the quarters. But at one point in time, I think the expense synergies were in the $80 million to $90 million range. I think the last update that we gave that we expected those to be in the $100 million range. And as John said, now we’re kind of moving into BAU. We’ll continue to look for opportunities, and we haven’t stopped even though we kind of exceeded our target, and I think we have ideas certainly in areas around procurement and things like that, I think there’s additional opportunities. But that was kind of the last update on the expense synergies.

And then I think the update we gave on revenue synergies was a current year update. We expected it to contribute 30 basis points to 50 basis points of growth. This year I would say we’re probably on the high end of that. And as John said, we’re building momentum. And really, listen, I think the expense synergies are not why we did the deal. I think they probably justified the purchase price, but really the value creation opportunity longer term with this deal is the cross-sell. We know we’re extremely effective and have driven a lot of growth in our model, selling and expanding the share of wallet within our existing client base. When we look at where that growth has come from our higher-value solutions, ASO, PEO, retirement solutions, those are solutions that John mentioned play well more upmarket.

And so listen, I think we’re excited about the opportunity. Paycor average client size is quite a bit larger than ours, and those clients are more apt to have some of the needs that those solutions meet. We’re trying to be intentional and cautious and thoughtful in going after the opportunity. We know that we’re extremely effective at doing it, might not always be the best client experience. And so we’re trying to go after it the right way, and we’re building a lot of momentum there. And as we move for, we expect to continue to be able to capitalize on that opportunity.

Kevin McVeigh

Helpful. And then just a real quick follow-up. John, you had some great commentary on the AI opportunity. As you think about AI across 100-person client as opposed to an 8, is the go-to-market strategy on that different in terms of the consumption patterns? Or how are you positioning for — because obviously, you serve a terrific market from kind of micro to medium. Just any thoughts on the shift in the go-to market through an AI lens?

John Gibson — President and Chief Executive Officer

Well, I think, Kevin, I’ll take a shot at it. As I said, for the vast majority of our clients, we are their HR department. And you mentioned the eight-man company, they don’t have an HR director, right? Probably they have a payroll person. And I think the thing that you find with our ASO and our PEO business is that a lot of the clients are foregoing building that capability, right? So what they’re saying is, why would I build a department when I can leverage Paychex at scale, their technology, now you get their data sets and our insights and our HR expertise and depth of knowledge. And oh, by the way, we have actually employment lawyers on staff that support those people. So you’re getting a lot more capability. So people are avoiding building HR departments.

So I think the value proposition there is I’m going to leverage something at scale and AI really makes — if you’re a scale player, really makes a big difference is what I’ll tell you because I have a lot more insights about what restaurants are paying in Rochester, New York or San Francisco, I’ve got that data. I can bring that together and now present it in a way to give you advice. If you add your own HR director, you’re not going to get that. So those are things we can do. When you get into 100-plus, and I would actually say even larger than that. What has been a pleasant surprise to us as we’ve had more conversations with the Paycor client base is how much they’re looking for our support. So now you’re talking a 250-person or 500-person company that does have an HR department that’s probably understaffed and under-equipped. And we can bring our expertise, our technology, our additional support staff and begin to augment their HR organization and allow their people to spend more time on strategic HR activities.

So I think when you start looking at companies trying to figure out how do I become more efficient, what I think you’re going to find companies ask themselves is, yeah, do I apply AI into my HR department and try to make it a little more efficient? Or should I really radically think about my HR department differently, right? Should I go and leverage someone who can provide both the tools and the people and have the breadth of the data we have to provide the insights. Is that a better alternative? And that’s a traditional enterprise HR outsourcing value proposition. I think AI allows us to do that at scale and do it at all sides of the market.

So one of the things we’ve actually began to introduce at Paycor that they didn’t have is a managed payroll and a managed benefit offering. So now we’re typically the tech players say, here’s the tool, knock yourself out. We’re now — and we’re getting clients that are asking us, would you mind doing it for us or doing it with us. And so now we’re approaching that market with either you can buy our tech and get technical support or you can come and we can do it for you. So I’m really excited about the opportunity here. And I think at scale, AI takes large data sets. We have large data sets, and I think we can add value to our clients in their HR departments regardless of whether they’re eight people or 100 people.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Samad Samana with Jefferies. Your line is now open.

Samad Samana — Analyst, Jefferies

Hi, good morning and thanks for taking my questions. Good to hear, it sounds like trends are getting pretty good. You had mentioned recently that maybe the initial land per client was a little bit smaller than historical or like fewer add-on modules at the point of sale. I’m curious if you’ve seen that trend change as well, if that was a onetime kind of occurrence, what you saw last quarter and if that’s improved? And then I have one follow-up question. Thank you.

John Gibson — President and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah. Samad, I would say that the market has been relatively stable in that regard. I think we probably had higher expectations going into the year about the number of modules that we would be able to add and I would say that did not change much in Q3 selling season from what we saw before.

Samad Samana — Analyst, Jefferies

Understood. And then in the PEO business, I think that as we all try to figure out what’s happening underlying the hood in terms of different verticals and what the employment outlook looks there. Can you remind us what the kind of vertical exposure inside of the PEO business is broadly speaking, versus, let’s call it, white collar, blue collar? And then related, just as you think about the high single-digit PEO, WSE growth, how much of that is driven by net new deals versus headcount growth within the installed base? Thank you again.

John Gibson — President and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah. So on the industry thing, again, as big as we are, we take every — we’re very broad in terms of where we are. Now I would say that when you look at our aggregate business because we did an analysis on this and you look at the actual job codes of our employee bases across the business, and I would say there’s not a major variance in the PEO business. We skew a little bit more towards the blue and gray than what you would see in the general workforce. Again, some of that has to do with large enterprises are more white collar. So they have 5,000, 10,000, they have more white collar type of jobs. So a little bit more blue and gray across the business, and I think that applies to the PEO. We had good net new client and worksite employee gain in the PEO.

Bob Schrader — Chief Financial Officer

And I would say that’s the entire driver. I mean, employment has been relatively flat. And it is most years. I mean it’s driven by the double-digit demand that we talked about, Samad, as well as the record retention. So it really is — net new is driving the growth in worksite employees.

Operator

Thank you. We’ll go next to Ramsey El-Assal with Cantor Fitzgerald. Your line is now open.

Ramsey El-Assal

Hi, thank you for taking my question this morning. I wanted to ask about something you mentioned, which was that Paycor bookings had reaccelerated to pre-acquisition levels. How should we think about the bookings conversion to revenues for Paycor relative to legacy Paychex? Do the larger clients translate into sort of a slower conversion process or not so much?

John Gibson — President and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, it is a little longer than what we’re accustomed to. I think that’s a fair thought. There’s a couple of quarter lag, as far as I can tell. Again, just what I see in the data is a couple of quarters.

Bob Schrader — Chief Financial Officer

It obviously depends on the size of the client, but it is much longer than ours where we could sell them and implement them in the same day, same week. So yeah.

Ramsey El-Assal

And is that the same for — I mean, that would — I understand that would be the case for sort of a new client implementation, but does that also apply to cross-sell or new product attached? Or is that something that you can kind of turn on more quickly?

John Gibson — President and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, that’s far more quickly. I mean, again, those cadences, if you recall, one of the things, again, that we did is to drive all the disruption upfront. And we — so we integrated all of our ancillary products that I think it was in probably the first quarter post the acquisition. So those things are very similar to the legacy Paychex.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from James Faucette with Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open.

James Faucette — Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Great. Thank you very much. I wanted to ask a quick macro question and I guess, tied to margin question is you mentioned that you still see kind of a tight labor environment. Just wondering if you can provide any anecdotes or color on that comment? And then as it relates to margins, I know you said that you expect there’s some margin expansion to go. Just wondering how we should think about the Paycor integration and how that matures and getting past some of these acquisition-related costs because they still look elevated? Just looking for a little color on the timing around those couple of things. Thanks a lot guys.

John Gibson — President and Chief Executive Officer

Well, I think on the macro side, I think what we’ve said is and what we see is that it’s been relatively stable. It’s really a low fire and a low hire type of environment right now. We’ve not seen a significant change in this fiscal year in terms of the small business index that we report. And again, I think we’re in a dynamic environment right now where, again, what we hear from clients, particularly in the small end of the market, less than 50, is continued inability to find qualified people for the jobs that they have open, and we’re doing a lot of things to try to support them there. And then I think you’ve got a degree of potential hesitancy to add in this uncertain environment as you move upmarket. But again, when we look across the business, it’s been relatively flat employment levels.

Bob Schrader — Chief Financial Officer

Yeah. And just on the integration-related stuff question as it relates to margin, James, I mean, we’re backing a lot of that stuff out. So that’s really not included in the adjusted operating margins. I think if you were to look at our margins from a GAAP standpoint, they’re still pretty high, probably in the 40% range. But I think John hit on it, and I think we still think there’s room — as we move forward, as we continue to embed AI in all of our processes across the company, we feel like there’s still plenty of room to expand margins. That’s certainly part of our DNA.

And we’re always trying to make that trade-off of trying to find ways to be more productive, more efficient, so we can expand margins, continue to deliver the strong earnings growth that our investors have come accustomed to and at the same time, making sure that we’re investing back into the business, which is a priority for us to make sure we have a sustainable model as we move forward. So we’ll continue to — that’s been our model and that’s how we go about our business here. And I think today, just margins are high from a non-GAAP standpoint. But given some of the advancements in technology, we feel like we still have a runway to be able to shuffle all those different priorities and expand margins.

James Faucette — Analyst, Morgan Stanley

Thanks so much, John. Thanks, Bob.

Bob Schrader — Chief Financial Officer

Yeah.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Daniel Jester with BMO Capital Markets. Your line is now open.

Kyle Aberasturi

Hey, good morning. This is Kyle Aberasturi on for Dan Jester. Thank you for squeezing me in here. Just a quick one from me. I was wondering if you guys quantified how much impact the annual form filing revenue had on the business in the quarter? Thank you.

Bob Schrader — Chief Financial Officer

How much impact it had? I mean it’s always a large number in Q3. I would say it’s probably consistent with maybe where it was in prior years. Obviously, it’s pretty high margin revenue. So that’s why you see the higher margins in Q3 relative to the rest of the year. I’d say the one comment that there related to the year-end filing, we definitely saw a little bit better price realization there discounting on that was better than what we had seen historically and certainly a little bit better than what we had assumed in our forecast. That is a lever that sales reps can use, particularly as they’re getting towards the end of the calendar year and selling new deals, that’s kind of a discounting lever that they use.

And we fly a little bit blind in finance because we don’t really know how that’s going to come through until it actually builds in January. And I would tell you that the discount on it and the price realization was a bit better than what we assumed. But not a big growth driver year-over-year and similar performance probably than what we’ve seen in past years.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from David Grossman with Stifel. Your line is now open.

David Grossman — Analyst, Stifel

Good morning. Thank you. I think last quarter, your bias was the low end of the revenue growth range. And I’m just wondering and reiterating the guide that are we still favoring the low end? Or just given some of your commentary about the third quarter and going into the fourth quarter, are you feeling better about the business and feeling maybe we’re better than the low end?

Bob Schrader — Chief Financial Officer

Yeah I think we would stay where we’re at, David. That’s why we reiterated as we mentioned. Listen, I think we are a little bit conservative than what we guided towards in Q3. There were some puts and takes. I mean, obviously, we feel good about the business. We felt good about the business last quarter as well. It’s nice getting through Q3 and throwing up the quarter that we had. John mentioned a lot of positive momentum. I’d have to say it’s probably one of the stronger selling seasons that I’ve seen in a while. And we have a lot of momentum in a number of businesses. So we feel good. And obviously, that translates into the P&L further down the road, particularly when you’re talking about the enterprise space. And so I’d say largely, the back half, as I mentioned, is in line with our expectations, and that’s why we’re kind of leaving it where we had said it was going to be last quarter.

David Grossman — Analyst, Stifel

Got it. And sorry to kind of stick on the financials here. But just you did make a general comment about a certain level of comfort with where consensus was for next year. And I know you don’t want to make any specific comments about next year. But is there anything now that you’re a combined company that — how we should think about pays or pricing and management solutions going into next year, particularly given now that we’ve got Paycor in the base? I know it sounds like pays look like they’re pretty stable, but I thought I should just ask the question. Anything you want to call out there on either pays or pricing.

John Gibson — President and Chief Executive Officer

No, David, I don’t think there’s any changes that we’re making in any of our assumptions. I think, as you know, we had clients of all sizes before we had Paycor. We’ve added more upmarket. But I think relative to our assumptions and what we’re expecting, we’re expecting very similar macro environment that we’re seeing right now in a very uncertain time. And that’s the other thing that I’m sure Bob and I are going to be having a lot of conversations about.

And by the time we consult with the Board in a few months, and we come back to you, hopefully, we have even more certainty about the external environment and what the risks are going into ’27. So we’re just — we’re trying to be prudent here. As you can imagine, this is a very unique time on a macro basis. And every day, something could change that could impact where we are. Right now, we feel in good shape. What we’re seeing is stable macro environment, no signs of recession in any of our datas or indicators, nothing that would indicate that we would change what we’re thinking in terms of pace on any of our segments at this point in time.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Jacob Smith with Guggenheim Securities. Your line is now open.

Jacob Smith — Analyst, Guggenheim Securities

Hey, thanks for taking my question. A quick one. Just you’re a second company in the mid-market through Paycor, can you really talk about expanding headcount to capture opportunity? Just what are you seeing out there that’s giving you conviction?

John Gibson — President and Chief Executive Officer

Well, I think the key thing is going into that, we have a list of — we know who the clients are and the prospects are, and we have territories and we have open territories that we want to fill. And so we’re continuing to expand that. I think before we bought Paycor, they were expanding headcount because they saw more opportunity. And we believe now with our comprehensive offerings that we have, the opportunity has expanded. And so that’s what gives us confidence to be able to expand the headcount and go after and capture the upmarket, not only for HCM, but as I said, really bringing our entire HR advisory value proposition to the enterprise market.

Jacob Smith — Analyst, Guggenheim Securities

Great. Thanks for taking my question.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Ashish Sabadra with RBC Capital Markets. Your line is now open.

Ashish Sabadra — Analyst, RBC Capital Markets

Thanks for taking the question. I was wondering if you could provide some color on the year-on-year growth in Paycor in the quarter? And any — if you could quantify the contribution for form filings for Paycor in the quarter? Thanks.

Bob Schrader — Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, Ashish, I mean, we — I think as we’ve talked about in the past, the lines are somewhat blurred and have become increasingly blurred between what’s Paycor and what’s Paychex based on our early on decision to integrate those two businesses. And so I think if we look at it, our best estimate is if you were to look at the organic growth of the Paycor business, it was consistent in Q3 with what we saw in the first half of the year, which is in that upper single-digit range. I would tell you what’s less blurred, and this is how we’ll talk about the business as we move forward is when we look at our enterprise business.

So when we look at our client base above 100 irrespective of whether — which sales organization sold it, which platform that it was on, that business has been growing. I would tell you, in the first half of the year, it was growing upper single digits. And in Q3, it grew around 10%. And so that’s how we’re managing the business. That’s how John and I are thinking about it. That’s how we’re going to market.

And as we move forward after we anniversary the acquisition and we provide color on the different areas of the business and how they’re performing, that’s how we’re going to be looking at it. And again, I think that’s similar and maybe not too different than what the other assets in that space are growing at. And our expectation would be that we would prospectively be growing at or above the other assets in that segment of the market. And that’s currently where that enterprise space performed in Q3.

Ashish Sabadra — Analyst, RBC Capital Markets

That’s very helpful color. I was just wondering if you had some initial thoughts on pricing for next year? And how does that trend compared to your historical range? And also maybe a quick one on discounting. You made some comment around discounting was much lower. I think that was specifically for forms filing. I was wondering if you could comment on discounting for ASO in general? Thanks.

John Gibson — President and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah. So I’m going to say this, we’re going into our budget meeting. This is where we discuss competitively how we want to position ourselves going into the next market. We have a tradition of being able to drive value to our clients and get price accordingly. So I’m not going to make any comments on how we’re going to set pricing going into next year at this time. So I don’t want to give anybody a heads up. So — but I think our model and our long-term model is still in existence and viable, but we’re not going to talk about the exact ranges we’re looking at.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Scott Wurtzel with Wolfe Research. Your line is now open.

Scott Wurtzel — Analyst, Wolfe Research

Hey, guys. Thanks for squeezing me in. I’ll limit it to one. Just going back to the PEO. I mean, it sounded like your commentary on enrollment sounded pretty positive. And I remember, I think you guys made some changes to benefits offerings and everything. But I also wonder, is there any elements of you think that employees are maybe just sort of adjusting to this higher healthcare premium inflation environment, and that could also be kind of helping to drive some of this enrollment growth that we’ve seen as well? Thanks.

John Gibson — President and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah, Scott, I think everyone is adjusting. I think we adjusted our plan designs. I think employees are adjusting in terms of what they’re going to do and employers are adjusting how they’re going. I mentioned the use of AI. I will say this. In tests where AI was used and where it wasn’t, the choices that employees made, I think, improved their outcomes and improved our outcomes. So — and what do I mean by that? As you know, you can immediately go to the cheapest plan. But given your — the circumstances or what you spent last year or changes that may have happened in your life relative to dependence, that may not be the most economic plan for you to participate in these AI tools ability to model that for you and for you to maybe make the middle plan choice versus the lower end plan choice is, as I said, a better outcome for the participant. And of course, that impacts a benefit for us as well because it’s a higher price plan.

Scott Wurtzel — Analyst, Wolfe Research

Great. Thanks, guys.

John Gibson — President and Chief Executive Officer

Thanks, Scott.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Kartik Mehta with Northcoast Research. Your line is now open.

Kartik Mehta — Analyst, Northcoast Research

Hey, good morning, John and Bob. John, you talked about Paycor revenue synergies as we go into FY ’27 and the opportunity to really take advantage of that. I’m wondering how the sales force alignment is going because I’m guessing that that’s part of the revenue synergies that you’d be able to capture?

John Gibson — President and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah. So on the alignment question, just so everyone’s kind of clear on it. I think this is the challenge and hopefully, we don’t talk about Paycor anymore going forward because Paycor for us is a brand that we’re using to go and target the enterprise market as we’re designing 100-plus. And we’ve taken all the assets of the company regardless of where they were, and we’ve placed them in that business unit for that unit to focus on that particular market. We’re doing marketing there specifically for that target segment. So now we’re spending marketing money in that segment. We’re putting sales reps into that segment to go after that segment, and we’re going to capture as much of the market as we can at 100-plus.

Now once, let’s say, a lead comes in digitally from marketing spend at Paycor, and we look at that lead and we go, hey, that looks like a great PEO opportunity. We’re going to move that over to the PEO, right? And so all of a sudden, you’ve got an expense that’s on the Paycor side of the equation. Same thing is happening with our reps as well. So we’ve got this — if this is your question, the segmentation of the sales force is clear, how we’re going to market from a brand perspective is clear.

And then what we’re doing is both in terms of using our AI and also our incentives for all of our sales reps is making sure we have every sales rep in the market looking and representing the entire capabilities of the Company. And so that goes back to every rep is representing the comprehensive capabilities of the Company, whether that’s technology, whether that’s the platform, whether that’s do it yourself, do it for you or do it with you, we’re offering every rep in every market the capability to do that, if that makes sense.

Kartik Mehta — Analyst, Northcoast Research

Yeah. And then just a follow-up question, Bob, and this might be crazy considering it’s Paychex, but I thought I’d ask anyways. Any thought about potentially using a little bit of leverage to buy back stock considering where the stock price is?

Bob Schrader — Chief Financial Officer

Yeah. I mean, Kartik, listen, I think you saw our — we just recently announced a new shareback authorization significantly larger than what we’ve had in the past. And when you look at — there’s obviously, at least in my opinion, there’s a disconnect between the underlying fundamentals of the business and the valuation. And that obviously, I was always taught to buy low and sell high. And so you’ve seen us be a little bit more opportunistic there. I would tell you, I don’t think we’ve necessarily changed our overall philosophy around share buybacks, but we know we’re going to have to buy shares back in the future to offset dilution. And we’ve done more of that this year than what we normally would have, as you guys can see in some of the disclosures.

So I don’t ever want to say never. Our leverage is pretty low. That’s obviously a Board-level decision. And as you can imagine, I’m assuming a lot of CEOs and CFOs are in this market are having these conversations with their Board on a regular basis, and John and I are certainly doing that. And so we’ll continue — we have lots of priorities from a capital allocation standpoint. Certainly, we want to continue to invest in the business, but we’ll continue to have those conversations. So I don’t want to say never, but something that we’ll continue to evaluate.

Operator

Thank you. And our next question comes from Jason Kupferberg with Wells Fargo. Your line is now open.

Jason Kupferberg — Analyst, Wells Fargo

Thanks, guys. Good morning. I wanted to ask about Management Solutions specifically. I think the organic growth was 4% in the quarter. I think that’s the same as we saw last quarter. Do we expect that to accelerate in Q4? And if so, is that because you’ll start to lap Paycor during the quarter? Or would there be other accelerants we should be considering? Thanks.

Bob Schrader — Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, hi, Jason, yes, so I would say I think it was 4% in Q2 and 4% in Q3. I would tell you, one was a round up and one was probably round down. And so you’re also seeing a sequential improvement in the organic growth of Management Solutions as well. Part of it is when you get to Q4, we would expect that to continue and maybe accelerate a little bit to the point that you’re making. You’re anniversarying the acquisition. So now we have a scale business that’s growing faster than the overall growth of the business. So that would be accretive to the organic growth. And then we’re continuing to build momentum on the synergy opportunity. And I think that showed up in the Q3 selling results, and that will eventually make its way into P&L. And so you should see improvement in Management Solutions organic growth as we move into Q4 as well.

Jason Kupferberg — Analyst, Wells Fargo

Okay. Understood. And then just a clarification. I know we’re not changing EPS guidance, but we did up the float income guide a little bit, which I would have thought would have lifted the EPS, I don’t know, maybe 1% or so. I mean there’s only a quarter left in the year. So just curious, is it just some conservatism there leaving the EPS guide as is? Or are you going to reinvest some of that upside float income?

Bob Schrader — Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, probably a combination of both. I think we’re certainly going to look for opportunities as we move through the balance of this year to invest. We want to get out of the gate strong when we get into next fiscal year. So it’s always balancing those trade-offs, Jason. John and I will manage through that as we go through the quarter and see where the opportunities are. But it’s really a combination of maybe a little conservatism in where we may potentially want to take advantage and make some investments as we end the year.

John Gibson — President and Chief Executive Officer

Yeah. The great position we find ourselves in is we have — we have plenty of opportunities for investment coming out of the third quarter that have the opportunity to both accelerate growth and accelerate margin expansion. And that’s — we’ve got a lot of decisions to make over the next couple of weeks as we go through our planning process. And anything that we’re thinking is a good investment in the first quarter in ’27, I don’t think that we want to wait to make that investment. So we’re certainly trying to contemplate that as we go into our planning session next week.

Operator

Thank you. At this time, there are no further questions in queue. I will now turn the meeting back to John Gibson.

John Gibson — President and Chief Executive Officer

Okay. Well, thank you, everyone. Just to highlight, we delivered a strong double-digit revenue and earnings growth, continuing just really to reflect, I think, very disciplined execution and focus of the teams. I do want to call out, we’re approaching a one-year anniversary mark of the acquisition of Paycor and I want to call out the Paycor team in particular. The group has been through a lot. If you think back a year ago this day and what we were starting to prepare for and take the organization through. And I think the way that we’ve responded and the way we’ve continued to come together and build momentum as this fiscal year has come together has been just really impressive.

I said it a year ago, we will be better together, and we are better together. And I’d point to you the example of what we did in the PEO industry and how we focused on that strategically many years ago, I think that’s a good model for us to replicate as we go into fiscal year ’27 and beyond in the enterprise space. So I think Paychex has never been better positioned than it is today.

I think we’ve differentiated ourselves in the marketplace repeatedly. I think in this new AI era, our scale, our breadth, our capabilities from an expertise perspective and the fact that we’re dealing in mission-critical type of work where errors are costly, I think that you’re going to continue to find more and more clients of all sizes turn to Paychex to be their HR department and to provide them leading class technology and advisory solutions in the years ahead. So I like where we’re positioned, and I want to thank you for your interest in Paychex.

Operator

[Operator Closing Remarks]