Acadia Healthcare Company, Inc. (ACHC): what the price requires

The current priced-in claim for Acadia Healthcare Company, Inc. (ACHC) is temporarily suppressed because the live engine record is unavailable. The dated report remains a snapshot, not a current market read.

Generated: 2026-07-19 · Source: https://boothcheck.com/report/ACHC

Headline

FieldValue
TickerACHC
CompanyAcadia Healthcare Company, Inc.
Current price$30.27/sh

What The Price Requires (Inversion)

The assumption today's price embeds, recovered by inverting the valuation.

FieldValue
Inversion basiswhole-company
Multiple paid9x operating income

The price sits below what even a 5%/yr operating-profit decline would warrant; the inversion reports a bound, not a solved growth path.

Solve inputs: computed at a 7% cost of capital with 4% terminal growth over a 5-year stage (computed at the 7% minimum rate; the CAPM rate 5.2% sits below it).

How unusual the bet is: within-range

ReferenceValue
vs own history-1.19σ
cohort percentile (of 113 peers)5
implied end-window share0%

Valuation X-Ray

The price is justified by relative-multiple.

How the valuation models price the stock relative to the market price. Price/FV above 1.0 means the market pays more than that lens defends (expensive); at or below 1.0 the lens can defend the price.

FamilyMedian price/FVModelsReads
Asset1.48x2expensive
Earnings—0—
Relative0.33x1justifies
Growth—0—

Families that justify the price: Relative

The models below discount at their own flat-beta convention rates (cost of equity 9.3%, WACC 5.7%); the inversion above states its own rate.

Per-Model Detail (n=3)

ModelFamilyFVPrice/FVApplicableMethodology
DCF Perpetual GrowthGrowth——noReference only (OCF-based, capex excluded): OCF $0.2B
DCF Exit MultipleGrowth$0.00—noNegative/zero FCF or EBITDA — equity value floored at $0
Relative ValuationRelative$92.760.33xyesP/S fallback (negative EPS): Sector P/S 2.5x × TTM revenue — excluded from consensus
Simple DDMGrowth——no—
Two-Stage DDMGrowth——no—
Simple Excess ReturnAsset$21.551.40xyesReference only (book value floor): BV/sh $21.55, ROE negative
Two-Stage Excess ReturnAsset$19.401.56xyesReference only (book value with convergence): BV/sh $21.55, ROE converges to ke
Discounted Future Market CapGrowth$23.701.28xnoRev $3.4B, growth 7% (input: historical growth; tapered), Terminal P/S: 0.7x / 0.8x / 1.0x (bear / base = today's held flat / bull, cap 8x)
Peter Lynch Fair ValueRelative$0.00—noNegative/zero EPS — earnings-based value floored at $0
Margin TrajectoryGrowth——no—
Earnings Power ValueEarnings——no—
Residual IncomeAsset——no—
Graham NumberAsset——no—
EV/EBITDA RelativeRelative$0.013027.00xyesEBITDA $0.19B × sector EV/EBITDA 12.0x (excluded from median)
FCF YieldEarnings——no—
SBC-Adj FCF YieldEarnings——no—
Ben Graham FormulaEarnings——no—
ROIC-Justified P/BAsset——no—
P/Sales SectorRelative$92.760.33xnoRevenue $3.37B × sector P/S 2.5x
PEG Fair ValueRelative——no—
Earnings YieldEarnings——no—
Funds From Operations MultipleRelative——no—
Clinical Phase NPVGrowth——no—
MertonAsset——no—
V5 Mechanical———no—

Solvency

FieldValue
Share count CAGR (dilution)0.0%
Burning cashno

Operating profit is negative or near zero and the company has no demonstrated through-cycle (mid-cycle) operating margin to normalize against, so years-to-repay cannot be computed honestly.

Operating profit is negative or near zero and there is no demonstrated through-cycle (mid-cycle) operating margin to normalize against, so interest coverage cannot be computed honestly.

Bullet Takeaways

Bull Case

Look at where the cash goes, and the bet becomes legible. Acadia spends to add beds inside facilities it already owns and to stand up joint ventures with health systems, and the 2025 filing shows that strategy converting to demand: same-facility revenue grew 4.9%, driven by patient-day growth of 2.1% and admissions growth of 2.3%, with revenue per patient day up 2.8%. The 10-K is explicit that the growth in patient days came "from the addition of beds to our existing facilities and ongoing demand for our services". That is the cleanest version of capital allocation in healthcare services: you are not paying full acquisition multiples for new revenue, you are pouring concrete next to a building you already run. Total revenue rose $158.8 million, or 5.0%, to $3,312.8 million.

The second piece of the bull case is that the demand is structural, not promotional. Behavioral health capacity in the United States is short of need, and Acadia operates across the full continuum, acute psychiatric, residential, and comprehensive treatment. The 10-K names the company's central strategy plainly: "A principal element of our business strategy is to grow by acquiring other companies", and alongside that it builds. A network of this scale carries a referral and payor-contracting position that a single facility cannot replicate, which is the durable part of the moat. Peer Universal Health Services frames the competitive landscape in its own 10-K as one where "there are other facilities that provide services comparable to those offered by our facilities", including tax-supported and nonprofit operators, so scale and breadth of service line are what separate the for-profit operators that win contracts from the ones that do not.

The last leg is the valuation floor under the bet. At today's price the asset-value methods and the peer-multiple lens both find support: book value sits near the price, and a revenue-multiple read against the sector lands well above it. The company is profitable at the operating line, $574.4 million of trailing operating income, and it is not burning cash. So the bull case is not a moonshot. It is that a profitable, scaled operator with a self-funded bed-expansion runway has been priced as if the operating story has stalled, when the same-facility numbers say it is still compounding. If denials normalize and the bed pipeline keeps filling, the earnings the market is currently refusing to credit come back into view.

Bear Case

The bear case starts with the demand-cycle question hiding inside a steady-looking top line. Same-facility revenue growth decelerated from 7.7% in 2024 to 4.9% in 2025, and patient-day growth slowed from 3.2% to 2.1%. A facility operator adds capacity years ahead of the patients who fill it, so a network mid-build into softening volume growth is the classic spot where margins get squeezed: the beds, the salaries, and the rent arrive before the revenue does. Salaries, wages and benefits ran $1,691.0 million, more than half of revenue, and that cost base does not flex down when admissions cool.

The deeper problem is who pays. Acadia tells investors directly that it "derive[s] a significant portion of our revenue from Medicare, Medicaid and other payors", and the reimbursement environment is moving against volume-based payment. The 10-K warns it expects programs "that condition reimbursement on patient outcome measures, to become more common and to involve a higher percentage of reimbursement amounts", and notes that the enhanced premium tax credits from the American Rescue Plan Act expired on December 31, 2025, which can reduce the insured population that walks through the door. When a government payor sets your price and the rule book is shifting toward outcomes and away from days, the operator absorbs the gap, and the recent denial and bad-debt pressure the company has flagged is that gap showing up early.

The balance sheet turns those operating risks into equity risk. Net debt of $2.38 billion is roughly 4.1 times operating income, and the company's own filing acknowledges that a default "under the indentures governing the Senior Notes, and the remedies sought by the holders of such debt, could adversely affect our ability to pay the principal, premium, if any, and interest on the Senior Notes", with no assurance it can obtain waivers if it cannot comply. Layer in that the company is "subject to various claims, lawsuits, governmental investigations and regulatory actions", and the picture is a leveraged operator running a regulated, litigation-exposed business into a softer reimbursement cycle. The price sits near book value for a reason: only the asset and revenue-multiple lenses support it, the earnings-based methods do not reach it at all, and that pattern is the market saying it will pay for the assets but not yet for the earnings power.

Valuation

Start with what the price is willing to pay for. At $24.88 (June 27, 2026) the market is valuing Acadia at roughly 8 times company-wide operating income, a multiple so compressed it sits below what even a 5%-a-year decline in operating profit would warrant. Read plainly, the price is not asking the business to grow. It is asking it not to fall apart.

The methods split cleanly on whether that is the right read. The asset-value lens carries the price: book value per share is about $21.55, so the stock trades just above the accounting net worth of the business, the kind of pricing reserved for operators the market thinks are stuck. The peer-multiple lens points the other way, with a revenue-multiple read against the sector landing far above today's price, because Acadia generates $3,312.8 million of revenue and the market is applying a thin sales multiple to it. The earnings-power methods do not reach the price at all, but for a specific reason worth naming: the company reports a net loss and negative retained earnings, so the earnings-based models floor out and the model that uses them carries no weight here. That is why the supportable read leans on assets and revenue, not on a price-to-earnings story that does not exist yet.

Solvency is where the bet is decided. Net debt of $2.38 billion is about 4.1 times operating income, the company is profitable at the operating line and not burning cash, but interest coverage is not separately disclosed in the latest filings, which removes one of the usual comfort checks. With $574.4 million of trailing operating income against that debt, the equity is a thin slice that responds violently to reimbursement and volume. The reason the price hugs book value is that the downside is bounded by the assets while the upside is gated by a turnaround in denials and a reacceleration of bed-fill, neither of which the static methods can credit until they show up in the prints.

Catalysts

The clearest near-term swing factor is the 2026 guide and the analyst response to it. Acadia raised its full-year 2026 Adjusted EBITDA guidance to $580 to $615 million and Adjusted EPS guidance to $1.35 to $1.60, on revenue guidance of $3.37 to $3.45 billion. The market took the higher outlook well, and sentiment has been turning: Raymond James upgraded the stock after a strong first-quarter report, and Jefferies moved off a hold rating and raised its price target to $30 on June 3, 2026. Wall Street coverage now skews positive, with a consensus that leans Buy and a median target clustered in the low-to-mid $20s.

The offsetting catalysts run through reimbursement and collections. The expiration of the enhanced premium tax credits at the end of 2025 is a real headwind to the insured population, and the company is working through elevated denials and bad-debt pressure that, if they persist, would undercut the EBITDA build the guidance assumes. Underperforming locations remain a drag management has flagged. The next two earnings prints are the events that matter, because they will show whether the denial trend is stabilizing and whether the bed-addition pipeline is still converting to patient days at the pace the same-facility numbers have shown.

Peer Cohorts (Per Segment, With Filing Citations)

Core business (reported)

Methodology Note

Fundamentals sourced from SEC EDGAR filings. Current price from Databento. The priced-in inversion and valuation x-ray are computed by the boothcheck engine; narrative composed by AI from the structured data.

Sources

company FY2026 guidance, June 2026 · Jefferies note, June 3, 2026 · analyst consensus, 2026

View the full interactive ACHC report on boothcheck