Over the trailing twelve months to the third quarter of FY2026, free cash flow grew 205.6% while net income grew 94.8%. Operating cash flow grew 223.9% over the same period. The resulting free-cash-flow margin of 46.3% sits in the 95.16th percentile of its own history.
A growth number the filings cannot fully explain
Set against a narrative of record backlog, the TTM revenue figure in the structured data is harder to square: revenue fell 36.6% year over year, placing the current reading in the 5.17th percentile of its historical range. There is a partial offset. Comfort Systems’ MD&A commentary, not captured in this analysis, would be the place to look for segment-level detail before drawing a conclusion either way.
Where the cash is going
Operating margin widened to 18.8%, up 5.38 percentage points year over year, while gross margin stood at 26.8% and net margin at 30.9% on a TTM basis, with no comparable year-over-year figures available for either. The diluted share count, meanwhile, fell 0.74%, a marginal reduction that is not large enough on its own to explain the move in cash flow.
Lowering that growth assumption by 5 percentage points moves model value down 23.9%; raising it by 5 points moves it up 31.5%, making growth the larger lever here. FCF margin matters too, but on a smaller per-unit scale: each 1 percentage point of lower margin moves model value down 2.05%. If the past year’s FCF-margin move were to persist at current revenue, the model implies a value change of 302.7%, a figure that illustrates how sensitive the model is to treating this year’s margin level as durable rather than transitory. These are model values under stated assumptions, not a comparison with the share price.