Ameresco, Inc. (AMRC): what the price assumes

In the published model solve dated 2026-Q2, anchored at $23.20, Ameresco, Inc. (AMRC) is priced for +11.9% growth. boothcheck publishes no house fair value, target price, or buy/sell rating; individual model outputs and user-controlled scenarios are analytical inputs, not Boothcheck targets. Narrative composed 2026-07-25.

Generated: 2026-09-07 · Exported: 2026-09-09 · Source: https://boothcheck.com/report/AMRC

Headline

FieldValue
TickerAMRC
CompanyAmeresco, Inc.
Sector / IndustryIndustrials
Current price$23.20/sh
CompositionProject revenue 77% / O&M revenue 6% / Energy assets 13% / Other 5%

What The Price Assumes (Inversion)

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

FieldValue
Inversion basiswhole-company
Operating margin (value-band context)1.1%
Operating margin today5.4%
Margin compression (value-band)-4.3pp
Implied growth11.9%
Multiple paid32x operating income

The operating-margin figure is value-band context at year 9: derived from the framework's value band, a separate calculation — not part of the priced-in solve.

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 6.7% sits below it).

How unusual the bet is: elevated (limited comparison data)

ReferenceValue
vs own history-0.24σ
cohort percentile (of 225 peers)83

Valuation X-Ray

Asset, earnings-power and peer-multiple models all land far below the price; ONLY the growth-DCF reaches it. The bet is durable compounding the static frames structurally cannot price (a moat/durability premium).

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
Asset14.23x3expensive
Earnings8.41x2expensive
Relative0
Growth1.10x1expensive

Families that justify the price: Growth Families that call it expensive: Asset, Earnings

The models below discount at their own flat-beta convention rates (cost of equity 9.3%, WACC 8.4%); the inversion above states its own rate.

Per-Model Detail (n=6)

ModelFamilyFVPrice/FVApplicableMethodology
DCF Perpetual GrowthGrowth$0.00noNegative/zero FCF — equity value floored at $0
DCF Exit MultipleGrowth$0.00noNegative/zero FCF or EBITDA — equity value floored at $0
Relative ValuationRelativenoP/E 39.6x (blended: static sector reference 18x + trailing (TTM) 161x), scenarios: 32.7x / 39.6x / 46.5x (bear / base = reference held flat / bull), EV/EBITDA 12x
Simple DDMGrowthno
Two-Stage DDMGrowthno
Simple Excess ReturnAsset$1.5614.87xyesBV/sh $20.13, ROE (TTM) 0.7%, ke 9.3%
Two-Stage Excess ReturnAsset$0.8128.64xyes5yr excess ROE then converge to ke=9.3% (excluded from median)
Discounted Future Market CapGrowth$21.021.10xyesRev $1.8B, growth 11% (input: historical growth; tapered), Terminal P/S: 0.6x / 0.7x / 0.8x (bear / base = today's held flat / bull, cap 8x)
Growth-Adjusted P/ERelativeno
Margin TrajectoryGrowthno
Earnings Power ValueEarnings$15.981.45xyesNormalized EBIT (5y avg op income, one-time charges added back) $0.10B × (1−21%) / WACC 8.4% → EPV (no growth)
Residual IncomeAsset$0.5740.70xyesBV $20.13 + 5yr PV of (ROE (TTM) 0.7% − Kₑ 9.3%) × BV; BV grows 0.5%/yr (excluded from median)
Graham NumberAsset$7.962.91xyes√(22.5 × EPS $0.14 × BVPS $20.13) — Graham's conservative floor
EV/EBITDA RelativeRelativenoEBITDA $0.20B × sector EV/EBITDA 12.0x
FCF YieldEarningsno
SBC-Adj FCF YieldEarningsno
Ben Graham FormulaEarnings$0.12193.33xyesEPS $0.14 × (8.5 + 2×-5.0%) × (4.4 / 5.3%) (excluded from median)
ROIC-Justified P/BAsset$1.6314.23xyesBV $20.13 × (ROIC 0.7% / WACC 8.4%)
P/Sales SectorRelativenoRevenue $1.75B × sector P/S 2.5x
PEG Fair ValueRelativeno
Earnings YieldEarnings$1.5115.36xyesEPS $0.14 / required return 9.3% (Rf 4.3% + ERP 5.0%)
Funds From Operations MultipleRelativeno
Clinical Phase NPVGrowthno
MertonAssetno
V5 Mechanicalno

Economic-Unit Decomposition (Sum Of The Parts)

One or more material disclosed units has unresolved economics. Unknown/general is not evidence of homogeneity: segment SOTP is primary but incomplete, consolidated cash flow may remain only a secondary cross-check when every unit shares an enterprise basis, and one sector multiple or target margin is withheld.

UnitRoleValuation basisRevenueReported profitValue evidenceStatus
North America Regionsoperatingenterprise884.8B reported-currencywithheldunresolved no unit value
U.S. Federaloperatingenterprise292.7B reported-currencywithheldunresolved no unit value
Renewable Fuelsoperatingenterprise158.5B reported-currencywithheldunresolved no unit value

No total common-equity value is stated. One or more material units lack a supported unit value. The displayed values are an indicative subtotal; consolidated debt and cash cannot be applied to a fraction of the company.

Solvency

FieldValue
Net debt$1.7b
Net debt / NOPAT (after-tax)23.15x
Net debt / operating income (pre-tax)18.29x
Share count CAGR (buyback)-0.4%
Burning cashyes

Interest expense is not separately reported in the latest filings, so interest coverage cannot be computed.

Bullet Takeaways

Bull Case

Follow the money and the thesis explains itself. Ameresco pays no dividend, buys back essentially nothing, and has kept its share count flat over the last four years. Every dollar the business generates, and a great many it borrows, goes into the same place: building energy plants and keeping them. That is an unusual choice for a contractor, and it is the choice the entire investment case turns on.

The reason it can be made is that the projects come with customers attached before construction starts. Ameresco designs and installs energy systems mostly for government and institutional buyers, and the 10-K describes the position that creates: the company is a pre-qualified energy service provider for state, county, and local agencies within the state. For example, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the states of Colorado and Washington pre-qualify energy service providers and provide contract documents that serve as the starting point for negotiations with potential governmental customers. Getting on those lists takes years. The sales cycle itself recently has been averaging 18 to 42 months, which is a barrier disguised as an inconvenience: a competitor cannot decide this quarter to be in the business next quarter.

What that slow cycle produces is visibility, and the visibility has been improving. At the end of 2025 the fully-contracted backlog of $3,945,078 thousand stood against $2.5 billion a year earlier, with a further $2.6 billion of work awarded but not yet under signed contract. Contracted backlog is revenue with a customer signature on it. For a business whose revenue arrives in lumps as projects reach construction milestones, an order book that grew by more than half in a year is the single most informative operating fact available.

The energy assets are where the model gets interesting. A conventional contractor finishes a job, collects, and starts looking for the next one. Ameresco finishes some jobs and then owns the output: 838 megawatts of operating energy assets, with a further 570 megawatts in development, and 87 megawatts placed into service in the most recent quarter. Those plants sell power or renewable fuel under long-term contracts, which converts one-time project margin into a decades-long annuity. The company structures the financing to match: We have entered into a number of construction and term loan agreements for the purpose of constructing and owning certain renewable energy plants. The physical assets and the operating agreements related to the renewable energy plants are generally owned by wholly owned subsidiaries. The debt sits with the assets it built and is serviced by the contracts those assets carry.

The corporate borrowings, as distinct from the project borrowings, are modest and termed out. The 10-K reports Senior Credit Facilities with a $100 million term loan that mature December 28, 2028 and a $100 million second lien term loan that matures June 2029, with the Senior Credit Facilities balance at $245 million at the end of 2025. That is the debt an investor should think of as the company's own. The rest is attached to specific plants with specific contracted revenue behind them, and telling the two apart is most of the work in reading this balance sheet correctly.

The operating results should follow the assets rather than the other way round. Trailing operating margin is 5.4%, which sits in the middle of the engineering and construction cohort: MYR Group runs 5.2%, Quanta Services 5.7%, and Primoris 4.9%, while the strongest, Comfort Systems and Sterling Infrastructure, reach 15.7% and 16.9%. Ameresco's blend is different from all of them, because a growing share of its income comes from plants it owns rather than from labor it bills. Guidance for 2026 calls for $161 million to $189 million of operating income against $94.1 million on the trailing twelve months. If the asset base delivers that step, the arithmetic looks entirely different than it does today.

Bear Case

Consider who gets to decide whether the strategy continues. Ameresco has two classes of stock, and the 10-K is explicit about what that means: Class A common stock, which is listed on the NYSE, and which is entitled to one vote per share, and Class B common stock, which is not listed on any security exchange and is entitled to five votes per share. The difference in the voting power of our Class A and Class B common stock could diminish the market value of our Class A common stock. Public shareholders are funding a capital-intensive build-out whose pace, financing and eventual retreat, if one is needed, are not theirs to vote on in any meaningful sense.

That would be tolerable if the returns on the capital were good. So far they are not. Trailing net income is $7.6 million against stated book value of $20.13 a share, a return on stated equity under 1%. The company has spent a decade converting project profits and borrowed money into owned plants, and the accounting return on the resulting equity base is currently a rounding error. Every dollar of that spending is capitalized rather than expensed, which is correct accounting and also means the growth story and the earnings story have been pointing in different directions for some time.

The borrowing that funded it has reached a level that changes the character of the equity. Net debt stands at $1.72 billion, which is more than the entire market value of the equity it supports. Against trailing operating income of $94.1 million that is roughly 18.3 times operating income before tax, or about 23 times on an after-tax basis. Debt of that size relative to the earnings servicing it means the equity is a residual claim on a leveraged asset portfolio, not a claim on an engineering firm. Small changes in the value of the plants, or in the rates at which their debt is refinanced, move the equity a great deal.

Rates are the specific pressure, and the company names it directly: increases in interest rates as compared to historical rates, have in the past and c ould in the future impact the profitability of our projects. In addition, any inability by us or our customers to raise the funds necessary to finance our projects or construction costs could materially harm our business. Energy assets are valued by discounting contracted cash flows. Higher discount rates lower those values and simultaneously raise the cost of the construction loans that create them, which is a squeeze from both ends. The equity is where the squeeze lands.

Backlog is not the shield it appears to be, either. The 10-K notes that our customers have the right, under some circumstances, to terminate contracts or defer the timing of our services and their payments to us, and that a substantial part of the order book, the awarded portion, has no signed customer contract behind it at all. Layer on the customer base: We derive a significant amount of our revenue from ESPCs with our government customers, and changes in the rules governing public procurement of those contracts, or in the tax credits that make renewable projects pencil, are decided by legislatures rather than by management.

Finally, the assumption embedded in the price. At about 31 times company-wide operating income, the market is paying for operating profit to compound near 11.2% a year over the next five years. The company has grown at that kind of pace before, so the rate itself is credible. Less credible is the discount rate holding the calculation together. The return investors are assumed to demand of this company sits at the low end of anything defensible for a leveraged infrastructure owner, and each additional percentage point of it raises the growth needed by about 9.4 points. That is not a small sensitivity. It means the difference between a demanding assumption and an impossible one is a modest revision in what investors demand from a leveraged infrastructure owner, and the second half of 2026, which is expected to carry roughly 60% of the year's revenue, will do most of the deciding.

Valuation

Thirty-one times company-wide operating income is what the enterprise costs today, and the first thing to say about that figure is which year produced it. Trailing operating income is $94.1 million. Management's own guidance for 2026 runs $161 million to $189 million. A multiple built on the trailing number is describing a business the company does not expect to be next year, which is the usual situation for an owner of assets that were under construction for most of the period being measured.

Run today's price backwards against that trailing base and it embeds operating profit compounding around 11.2% a year over five years. Ameresco has delivered growth at that pace before, so the assumption is not exotic. The fragility sits somewhere less obvious. The calculation runs on a 7% required return, a conservative floor rather than a market-derived figure, since the risk-based rate for a company with this profile computes lower still. Each additional percentage point of required return raises the growth the price needs by roughly 9.4 points. For a business whose value is a stream of contracted cash flows financed with borrowed money, that sensitivity is the number worth remembering.

The methods split along a line that is really about the balance sheet. Comparisons against sector multiples and the forward-growth projection land at or above where the shares trade. The asset-value and earnings-power approaches land far below, and their reasoning is not obscure: stated book equity is $20.13 a share earning a trailing return under 1%, and a five-year average of operating profit capitalized with no growth credited produces a figure well under the current quote. Both approaches are describing a period in which capital went into the ground and had not yet come back out. Both would look different measured on the guided year. The spread between the two groups is the price of believing that the assets built over the last several years are about to start earning.

Leverage decides how much room there is to be wrong. Net debt of $1.72 billion works out to about 18.3 times operating income before tax, or roughly 23 times the same figure after tax. The structure matters as much as the level. Corporate borrowings are relatively contained, with the Senior Credit Facilities balance reported as $245 million for year-end 2025, alongside a second lien term loan of $100 million maturing in 2029. The bulk sits at the project level, in construction and term loans where The physical assets and the operating agreements related to the renewable energy plants are generally owned by wholly owned subsidiaries, matched against the contracts those plants serve. That structure limits how far a single troubled project can reach, but it does not change the consolidated arithmetic an equity holder faces.

Ameresco's trailing operating margin of 5.4% sits mid-pack among the engineering and construction names it is grouped with. Within that cohort Quanta Services runs 5.7% and MYR Group 5.2%, while Comfort Systems reaches 15.7% and Sterling Infrastructure 16.9%. The comparison is only partly fair, because those companies bill labor and go home while Ameresco keeps the plant. Owning the plant is what produces both the higher multiple and the borrowings; they are the same decision seen from two sides. Whether the second-half revenue concentration this year converts backlog into the guided operating income is the near-term test of whether that decision is paying.

Catalysts

The next report lands after the close on August 3, 2026, with a call the same afternoon. It matters more than a typical second quarter because of how the year is shaped. Management guided 2026 revenue to $2.0 billion to $2.2 billion and operating income to $161 million to $189 million, and flagged that roughly 60% of the year's revenue is expected in the second half. A back-loaded year is normal for project construction, and it also means the August print is less a report card than a status check on whether the work is on schedule to be recognized.

The energy asset build is the other thing to watch, and it is measurable in units rather than dollars. The operating portfolio stood at 838 megawatts with a further 570 megawatts in development, and 87 megawatts were placed into service in the most recent quarter. Megawatts moving from development into operation is the moment a construction cost stops consuming cash and starts producing contracted revenue. The pace of that transition, more than the quarterly revenue line, determines when the earnings arrive.

Policy is the variable nobody at the company controls. Ameresco's projects depend on the economics created by energy-related tax credits and on the rules governing how public bodies procure energy savings performance contracts, and the 10-K flags that Changes in the laws and regulations governing the public procurement of ESPCs could have a material impact on our business. Changes there would not show up as a bad quarter. They would show up two years later in an awarded backlog that stopped converting, which is why the awarded-versus-contracted split in each report is worth reading before the headline numbers.

Peer Cohorts (Per Segment, With Filing Citations)

North America Regions (reported)

U.S. Federal (reported)

Renewable Fuels (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

Ameresco FY2026 guidance, February 2026 · Ameresco Q1 2026 results, May 2026 · Ameresco Q2 2026 earnings-date announcement, July 2026

View the full interactive AMRC report on boothcheck