Automatic Data Processing (ADP) FY2026 results: revenue $21.9 billion, up 6.7% on the year

ADP runs payroll and the human resources administration around it for other companies, on subscription, and takes over those functions outright for clients who want that. It was founded in 1949 to solve clients' payroll problems, and the filing describes the company 77 years later as serving over 1.1 million clients and paying over 42 million workers in more than 140 countries and territories. In the United States it pays one in six workers, and it moved $3.5 trillion of its clients' pay and taxes in the year to 30 June 2026. The stock is listed on the NASDAQ Global Select Market. There are two reportable segments, Employer Services and the Professional Employer Organization.

Employer Services

This is the larger side and it serves everything from a single-employee business to enterprises with tens of thousands of staff worldwide. The solutions are payroll services, benefits administration, talent management, workforce management, compliance, human resources management, retirement services and insurance services, sold as cloud platforms or as outsourced work. Roughly three million client employees are covered by the outsourcing arrangements other than the co-employment one below.

The three platforms

RUN Powered by ADP serves over 980,000 small businesses, combining payroll, HR and compliance in one place with round-the-clock support from ADP's payroll staff, and it connects to the workforce management, workers' compensation, benefits and retirement products. ADP Workforce Now is used by over 90,000 mid-sized and large businesses in North America, putting payroll, HR, time, benefits and compliance on a single platform. ADP Lyric HCM is the global platform for large enterprises, joining HR management, payroll, workforce management, talent and data analytics, and the filing describes it as mirroring practically any structure of work groups, whether divisions, regions or teams that change. The platforms carry generative AI inside them, and the company reports that human oversight is retained on pay, compliance and workforce decisions.

ADP TotalSource

TotalSource is the professional employer organisation, which works through co-employment: an employee who works for the client is employed by both the client and ADP. ADP takes on employer responsibilities such as processing the payroll and filing the taxes while the client keeps control of its business and its management decisions. It runs on the Workforce Now technology and is sold to small and mid-sized businesses, who get employee benefits, a risk management, safety and workers' compensation programme, and day-to-day expertise without having to staff a full HR department. The PEO business is offered for employees located in the United States only.

Outside the United States

Global solutions serve over 70,000 clients, joining HR, pay and workforce management with localisation built in so the experience is the same from country to country. ADP Global Payroll covers multinational organisations across more than 140 countries and territories, and country-specific products sit alongside it. Wage and tax collection or remittance is offered in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, India, China, Hong Kong, Macau, Malaysia and Taiwan. The most material markets for everything except the PEO are the United States, Canada and Europe.

Selling, competing and spending

Sales run through a direct sales force, digital sales, and indirect channels including marketing relationships with certified public accountants and banks. No single client or group of affiliated clients accounted for more than 2 percent of the annual total in fiscal 2026. A small client can be installed in as little as 24 hours; a large Employer Services client with several deliverables generally takes six to nine months, and a large multi-country Global Payroll or Lyric implementation can run past two years. Longer-term contracts typically start at terms of two to seven years. Competitors are other business outsourcing companies, providers of enterprise resource planning services, other cloud-based HCM providers, financial institutions, other PEOs, and clients' own in-house departments. Research and development took approximately $1.405 billion in fiscal 2026, against $1.388 billion the year before. There are 67,000 associates.

From ADP's annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended 30 June 2026. The filing

Written from the 10-K filed 5 August 2026: read the full 10-K.