Tyler Technologies, Inc. (TYL) Q1 2026 Earnings Report, Transcript and Summary

Hello, and welcome to today's Tyler Technologies First Quarter 2026 Conference Call. Your host for today's call is Lynn Moore, President and CEO of Tyler Technologies. [Operator Instructions] And as a reminder, this conference is being recorded today, April 30, 2026. I would like to turn the call over to Hala Elsherbini, Tyler's Senior Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, John, and welcome to our call. With me today is Lynn Moore, our President and CEO; and Brian Miller, our CFO. In an effort to streamline our earnings communications and provide timely context around our quarterly earnings results, we published our prepared remarks yesterday, shortly after posting our full quarterly results release to the news section of our Investor Relations website. This go-forward practice allows for more timely understanding of our earnings results release before our earnings call this morning. Additionally, beginning next quarter, we plan to hold our earnings call earlier in the day before the market opens. After I get the safe harbor statement, Lynn will provide a summary of our key quarter highlights, and we'll move to our Q&A session. During this conference call, management may make statements that provide information other than historical information and may include projections concerning the company's future prospects, revenues, expenses and profits. Such statements are considered forward-looking statements under the safe harbor provision of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and are subject to certain risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ materially from these projections. We refer you to our Form 10-K and other SEC filings for more information on those risks. We have also posted on the financial section of our Investor Relations website a schedule with supplemental information. During the past year, we've discussed our intent to simplify the supplemental information we present to focus on our key performance indicators. Annualized recurring revenue, ARR, and free cash flow, along with other metrics we consider meaningful, including quarterly recurring revenues and bookings. We believe this will enable investors and others to focus on relevant metrics that best reflect the performance and trajectory of our business. Also on the Events & Presentations tab, we posted an earnings summary slide deck to supplement our prepared remarks. Lynn?

Thanks, Hala. Our first quarter results provided a strong start to 2026 with better-than-expected recurring revenue growth and free cash flow generation. Total revenues and recurring revenues both reached new record highs and free cash flow more than doubled last year's first quarter. Public sector demand remains robust with an active pipeline and growing momentum across our cloud solutions, AI-enabled applications and our unified transaction strategy. Operating margins continue to improve, benefiting from our cloud model transition. During the quarter, we repaid our convertible debt at maturity and executed meaningful opportunistic share repurchases under our new authorization. And earlier this month, we completed the acquisition of For The Record, representing the third largest acquisition in Tyler's history. We are well positioned for 2026 with durable demand drivers, accelerating cloud momentum and a trust-based approach to leading the public sector's AI evolution, supporting our confidence in delivering on our strategic initiatives and 2030 targets. We'll now take your questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Terrell Tillman with Truist.

I will absolutely look forward to getting back in the queue as well. And I will keep it to one right now. We had the benefit of going to your conference. That was helpful. A lot about enablement for customers moving to cloud and just building confidence that they're ready to move to cloud. But I don't know, maybe this is for you, Lynn. In terms of just confidence level, 90 days since your last update on SaaS flips, the volume and velocity as we look through the year. I know you had ACV growth, I think, on the flip side of 10% year-over-year in 1Q. But just any more color you can share about the confidence level? Has it increased? Is it where it was in terms of SaaS flips for the rest of the year? And kind of related to that, is AI and agentic kind of becoming an incremental stimulus or not necessarily?

Yes. Thanks, Terry. I'd say my confidence level in our cloud transition, both in terms of customers flipping to the cloud and what we're doing from an operational perspective are really high. We showcased this at Connect, as you mentioned, we had a client advisory board where we talked about the future direction of Tyler's cloud movement. And clients now are -- they're just really receptive to it. I think hesitation in the past is really in the past. Now it's a matter of execution going forward. One anecdote, I would say, is public safety. We used to talk about how that was something that was a little bit slower to move to the cloud. We're seeing now the public safety market is pretty much all 100% going to the cloud. So I think those -- I think all those points lead me to feel just as confident as ever. Our 2030 plan hasn't changed as it relates to that right now. As it relates to AI, I think it's a tailwind. I wouldn't say it's a big tailwind at this point. We have a lot of AI initiatives going. We've got AI in a lot of our products. It's embedded in our workflows. We spend a lot of time showcasing it at Connect. There was a lot of buzz around what we're doing and really the trust we have with our clients. And they trust us to move forward with AI. And so I like where we're positioned. We're making the right investments. Our clients are partnering with us on it, and I like where it's going.

Our next question comes from the line of Matthew VanVliet with Cantor.

You mentioned in the prepared remarks you put up that RFP activity continues to improve and you're seeing a lot of momentum there. Curious in terms of what you're seeing coming out of that in terms of deal execution win, like win percentage? And then also, are customers looking to land a little bit bigger now that they're going to be moving into the cloud and bolting things on is maybe a little bit more palatable upfront. So just curious on how deal sizes are and how win rates are looking.

Yes. I think, Matt, the market dynamic is, I think, pretty steady. RFPs continue to be steady. Our win rates are steady. I think the market right now is just good. As it relates to deal size, every time we flip to the cloud, it's an opportunity for us to upsell and that continues. We're also seeing some increasing deal sizes by adding on things like AI and things like that. So I'd say, overall, the market is good and steady.

Our next question comes from the line of Ken Wong with Oppenheimer.

Fantastic. Brian, a question on the guidance. Nice to see the strong quarter and the raise. Any way to help us dissect some of the drivers of that increased raise, whether it's For The Record, the increased demand, timing of SaaS deals? Any color you can give would be fantastic.

Yes. This early in the year, not any major changes to the guidance other than the biggest factor is the addition of FTR, which is now included in our guidance for the year. So that accounted for a meaningful amount of revenue raise, along with the outperformance in the first quarter, particularly around transactions. FTR adds somewhere in the neighborhood of $30 million of revenues to the full year and a modest amount to EPS. So it's kind of a combination of the outperformance in the first quarter as well as the addition of FTR.

Our next question comes from the line of Joshua Reilly with Needham & Company.

Great. After seeing some of the Tyler Foundry use cases at Tyler Connect and the packed room for the customer overview of the agentic capabilities, clearly, the demand is there for the AI products. How quickly can you ramp to market the roughly 40 to 50 use cases that you plan to release for the initial kind of agentic use cases at the conference? And how is the sales and implementation process going to work for those kind of initial use cases on the agentic side?

Yes, Josh, you're right. The buzz at Connect was strong. I think our message generally around AI really resonated with our clients. And I can't overemphasize how much our clients put their trust in us to deliver the AI solutions for them in the future. Buzz doesn't always translate to deals immediately. We are getting deals. As you mentioned, these use cases, we have some of those already in the hands of clients and in the market. But I would generally say it's going to be a slower ramp. Our sector generally moves a little slower than the private sector. A lot of receptiveness, a lot of excitement. I think still TBD to see how much it's going to impact near-term financials.

Our next question comes from the line of Saket Kalia with Barclays.

Okay. Great. And I appreciate the new format as well. Brian, maybe for you. I'd love to dig into maybe some of the moving parts within the higher SaaS revenue guide. I think that part -- the $30 million from FTR is adding to that a little bit. But maybe you could just talk us through how that SaaS revenue guide is changing both organically and inorganically, just so that we're all on the same page.

Yes. Somewhere around 30% of FTR's revenues are -- I'm sorry, around 70% of FTR's revenues are software revenues, so a combination of SaaS and maintenance and the rest is in the hardware. So they are the biggest piece of that increase. The other thing is really driving the increased SaaS is just a little bit around the timing of our -- how some of the bookings come online. So it's really sort of some fine-tuning. There's no fundamental change from the outlook we entered the year with. Obviously, strong bookings in the first quarter give us more confidence around that. And there's a modest contribution from the acquisitions last year, but those have been built into our guidance for the year from the start. So really some modest tweaking around timing combined with the FTR acquisition.

And I think I would just add on the FTR acquisition, we noted this in our prepared remarks. They are in the midst of their own SaaS transition themselves. And as we look out over the next few years, we expect that SaaS to accelerate in their business at a rate faster than Tyler's overall rate or comparable or above as hardware and maintenance will continue to decline over the next few years.

Our next question comes from the line of Alex Zukin with Wolfe Research.

I guess maybe on the -- a couple of really nice wins and a really seemingly strong bookings quarter for you guys and it feels like even some of those wins aren't fully reflected in the bookings number. So maybe what's driving the strength competitively here? Were there any onetime items? Or is kind of there's -- are we pulling forward bookings from later in the year? Just help us gauge kind of how that ebb and flow should come in this year.

Yes. I don't think there's anything pulled forward, anything unusual. It actually was a quarter in which there weren't really any large deals, a handful of deals with ARR of -- SaaS deals with ARR of more than $0.5 million a year. So no kind of multi-million dollar SaaS deals. As you know, bookings can be kind of lumpy with respect to big deals. We've talked about the pipeline still containing a normal amount of large deals. But this quarter, there really weren't those. What was one of the biggest software deals is a transaction-based deal, a statewide digital motor vehicle titling solution. And so it does not appear in SaaS bookings. It's one of those deals where we're providing software as well as payment processing and other services under a transaction-funded arrangement. So it doesn't hit SaaS bookings, doesn't hit, well, bookings at all this year. Revenues really won't start for that until next year, but that's a deal that would -- that we estimate will generate in excess of $20 million a year in transaction revenues when it's at full ramp. So it's one of those software under a transaction arrangement that will -- that doesn't really impact the current bookings. And that would have had a significant impact on what was already a really strong reported bookings number. Otherwise, as we talked about going into the year, we expected to see a good rebound in bookings. There were certainly some unusual events that impacted last year's first quarter. So made the comp a little bit easier. But notwithstanding that, it was a very strong bookings quarter without any major onetime events, just a good solid volume quarter.

Our next question comes from the line of Jonathan Ho with William Blair.

One thing I wanted to understand a little bit better is how do we think about the cadence of your on-premises flips this quarter? And how do we think about that maybe progressing over the course of the year? Especially as you start to implement some of these cloud-first changes?

I mean, we don't focus too much on the short-term cadence of flips. We've talked about our expectation over the next several years of getting to by 2030, a point where 80% or more of our on-premise customers have moved to the cloud. We've said we're still on track for that. We expect the peak of that flip activity to be in the '27 through '29 time frame. So at a high level, we expect the volume of flips and focused on dollars rather than number of flips for that to be higher this year than last year. But the quarterly cadence is a bit hard to pin down. And as long as we're making appropriate progress towards those longer-term goals, we don't worry about the quarter-to-quarter as much. So we expect that volume to be up this year. It's in line with our expectations, and we have a high degree of confidence, as Lynn mentioned earlier, from conversations with clients that it's a matter of when and not if, and we're on the right track to achieve our goals.

Our next question comes from the line of Rob Oliver with Baird.

Lynn, my question is for you. Coming out of Tyler Connect, I'd be curious to get your view on kind of the product per customer motion for you guys. I guess, another way to ask the cross-sell question that Matt had earlier. I think, your prepared remarks mentioned that you saw some really good progress internally. I know you guys have driven a lot of those initiatives. I think you said that average customer has around 3 products, and that could go to 7 to 8. Just if you could help us put some color around what you saw out of Connect and how that appears to be trending now as customers move to the cloud.

Yes, Rob, I'd actually say we're looking for 3 products -- average of 3 to go to 10 to 12, not 7 to 8, but I'm not going to quibble. Yes, I think the momentum is there. We're also seeing a lot more momentum coming out of our state and federal group, getting more of our local products into the state hands. We're seeing it with things like with our document automation product and our priority-based budgeting product. I think the initiatives that we've been talking about for the last 1.5 years or so around improved client set, improved efficiencies and optimization in the cloud, making the cloud experience better for our clients is only going to help grease the wheels and help us make that cross-sell motion go faster. So it's a lot of things that we're doing, not only the competitiveness of our products, putting AI in our products, but it's the whole basket of our strategic initiatives that will help drive those cross-sells and upsells as we head towards our 2030 goals.

Our next question comes from the line of Allan Verkhovski with BTIG.

Can you just share how you're thinking about potentially including AI capabilities for your on-premise customers? And just really quick on the strong free cash flow in the quarter. What drove that? Any onetime items we should be aware of and kind of the level of prudence in the updated guide considering the strength you saw in the quarter?

Yes. Allan, as it relates to AI, I think as we look out over time, there's been a few questions around flips and getting clients in the cloud. And over the years, we've talked about carrots and sticks. I wouldn't be surprised if we look out in the future that AI will be something that will become more and more available only in the cloud, but we're not quite there yet. But that is something that we're looking at really hard.

And Allan, on the free cash flow side, it was mostly around working capital improvement. So we had strong AR collections. We had -- and some of that is around timing. There's not really any onetime thing in there, but the timing of working capital changes, particularly around collections. CapEx was a little bit lower. And then improved operating margin as well flowed through to cash. But mostly timing events. Our expectation for the full year around free cash flow margin hasn't changed at all. So nothing particularly unusual to point out there, but just good execution.

Our next question comes from the line of Clarke Jeffries with Piper Sandler.

Just a clarifying one for me. You did raise the midpoint of maintenance revenue by about 2 points. I just want to confirm that, that was entirely driven by For The Record. And you've made reference to the time line being a few years for the SaaS transition. Is that at all impacted by the contract length or just the comfortable pace that you want to go through that model transition?

Yes. Most of the maintenance increases For The Record, our expectation around flips and that impact on maintenance changes hasn't changed. So that would be the primary thing there. On the longer-term pace of flips and the impact there, there's not really a contract length factor that's impacting that. It's really around a lot of complex issues that vary from client-to-client about when they're ready to move internally, things like their -- how hard their replacement cycles for hardware in their own data centers, their concerns about cybersecurity, their overall IT road maps and how they can pace moving multiple products to the cloud. All of those things kind of drive that long-term trajectory or cadence around flips and it's a pace we're comfortable with. We can accommodate that. We'd love it to be faster, but we can certainly accommodate it while also serving our new customers and new implementations as well.

Our next question comes from the line of Charles Strauzer with CJS Securities.

Can we talk just a little bit more on FTR and just your thoughts on the addressable market for that product line and client overlap with current plans?

Yes, sure, Charlie. FTR, they've already made a big splash in their space. 45% of the U.S. courtrooms are using it. We look at it as the combination is something that we're able to create something powerful, we call judicial intelligence, something that doesn't exist today, something that can sort of bring together what's right now disparate manual systems between the judge, the clerk, the court reporter. Right now, as we look at the market, we look at Tyler's current SAM using our client base, we think it's about a $200 million market. But then when you sort of expand that and beyond, just again with their core offerings, that goes up to about $500 million. One of the things we also are excited about it is it opens up the door for some other revenue opportunities. I don't want to get too carried away with these because we got to bring it in. We got to execute on our own SAM and then execute on the TAM. But there's a lot of things that we think we can do in terms of monetizing the audio and transcript data that actually will increase that overall TAM well north of $1 billion, maybe $1.5 billion. And I'm talking about things like attorney remote access and third-party data sharing, online transcript certifications, attorney insights, even going international. So there's a lot of other layers that we see playing out in the future, which really fits in well with our overall M&A strategy around trying to expand in new markets, things that can grow faster than we can, avoid gaps in our offerings that are adjacent to our core fundamentals. It's something that I'm really excited about this acquisition. It's going to take time, like all our acquisitions do, but the runway is out there and being able to leverage our strong position in courts, coupled with their offering makes it pretty exciting.

Our next question comes from the line of Adam Hotchkiss with Goldman Sachs.

I wanted to ask Rob's question on cross-sell in a little bit of a different way. I know you mentioned the success and execution on the dedicated state sales team side of things. Could you just maybe help us understand what's happening on the ground with the state and federal initiatives and how that sort of differs from the strategy and the resource allocation you've had historically on that front?

Yes, Adam, we talked about it going back about this time last year. We've really created a whole new state sales team that's just dedicated to the space, something that was different than what was there before. And part of that is new strategic account plans, new strategic account managers, actually targeting states where formerly NIC didn't have state enterprise contracts. So expanding our footprint there. We're also doing things within the states to try to transform sort of the way historic NIC's business model was. Historically, a lot of their state contracts were funded through DHRs, and we're moving to more of a funded solution type contract. And we've already seen that take -- get some traction with Oklahoma and Kansas. So there's a lot of exciting things going on there. We continue to look at sales all the time and how we can tweak and make it better, and those are just some of the things we're doing in the state space.

Our next question comes from the line of Mark Schappel with Loop Capital Markets.

Lynn, in your prepared remarks, you discussed the goal of getting every client on a single code stream for each product. I was wondering if you could talk about how far along you are in that journey. I suspect it's still early, but also which business segments such as maybe courts or ERP are furthest along there?

You're right, Mark. This is what we call sort of Phase 2 of our cloud transition and what we call as cloud moving. We're going to get a lot more detail on that at the Investor Day in June. And it is trying to get all of our core portfolio of products down to that single release stream, continuous improvement, continuous delivery, coordinated releases across all of our product portfolio. We've been working behind the scenes towards that. And again, we'll give you more details at Investor Day. Obviously, part of that process is getting everybody to a single version, getting to the cloud version. And each of our divisions is at different stages of that, but they're all making solid progress. It's something to me that's really exciting. It's where we're really going to start seeing some leverage in the gross margins of our cloud delivery.

Our next question comes from the line of Alexei Gogolev with JPMorgan.

Brian, I wanted to ask about the R&D step-up. Obviously, remember how you're migrating some of the costs from COGS to R&D. But where is the investment concentrated in? Is it the agentic AI versus core ERP, courts or some implementation tooling? And what are the clearest milestones to watch out this year?

I think the R&D investment is pretty balanced across the things you mentioned. There is increased -- as you noted, there is an ongoing migration or movement of R&D resources or development resources from the cost of sales line to the R&D line as we continue to evolve along that cloud transition. So that's just a geography change. We also have reduced the amount of R&D that's being capitalized as some of those capitalizable projects have wound down. And so more of the same resources are being expensed now that we're formally being capitalized, so that's not really a change. But when we look about the true increase in development spend, it's kind of balanced across investments in innovation across our entire portfolio, those things that improve our competitiveness, drive higher win rates and add more value to our existing customers, which has always been a hallmark of Tyler as well as the newer investments and growing investments in AI. We are continuing to move resources that are already on board to the AI side as we do things like execute on version consolidation and free up more internal resources. So it's not a huge hiring push on the AI side, but we are dedicating more of our development resources to those efforts.

Our next question comes from the line of Bill McNamara with Evercore ISI.

This is Bill on for Kirk. On the $20 million state digital motor vehicle titling and electronic lien win, can you provide more detail what differentiated you on that deal? And how should we think about the implementation time line and revenue ramp as we look out to 2027?

Yes. That's an area where we have had a fair amount of success in the last couple of years in providing those solutions. We have a partner in that space that we work with. And we have deployed that solution in a handful of states already as those states move from paper titles to digital titles, create a lot of efficiency in how they manage motor vehicle titling. And those have been typically funded by transaction revenues. So it's been a nice growth area for us. We continue to see a number of opportunities in our statewide client base. And I'd say the solution we're deploying is certainly a leader in that space. That implementation will take place over this year. We expect revenues to start in the first half of next year. Again, there'll be transaction-based revenues, and we expect those as they ramp up to reach north of $20 million a year of transaction revenues.

Our next question comes from Parker Lane with Stifel.

As you partner with your clients on their own AI journey, I'm wondering if you could provide some of the main points of feedback they're giving to you on the current feature set, the road map and the pricing model around that.

Yes, Parker. I think the most important feedback we've gotten is really the point we've emphasized a lot over the last year is trust. And our clients really trust us to be their partner more so than anybody else. They're really concerned about their data and the fact that while -- and the protection of that data, which is something that we do. We talked a lot about the AI Foundry. We mentioned it in our notes. And that really includes all that security we have around it around their data, around their processes, being embedded in their workflows and really helping them do their business and make their jobs more efficient and free up their time from sort of more manual tasks so that they can accomplish other things. That's the message that I think gives me the most confidence going forward. Our clients have high switching costs, and that plays to our advantage as well. So we do have client focus groups. We had a client advisory board when we spent time talking about AI. Our ERP solutions has their own client AI working focus groups. And the feedback and working with our partners and making sure that we're doing the things that are most meaningful to them is something that really resonates with our clients. As it relates to the pricing model, it's going to be priced differently. Some of these are going to be priced SaaS. Some AI features will be just part of our competitiveness added into our features and some will be priced as separate modules. Right now, I think we're still early, but we're getting wins in deals that are validating our models. For example, this past quarter, we won a couple of document automation deals, one in Miami-Dade. I think we mentioned that in our prepared remarks. That's a client where their existing maintenance and support agreement was a little over $0.25 million, and we sold a document automation SaaS deal for upwards of $800,000. So that product is getting a lot of traction in the market. So right now, all the feedback we're getting is positive, and I like where we're sitting and I like our trajectory.

And just to add one thought to that example that Lynn mentioned with Miami-Dade. It's really a value-based approach because with that uplift from the AI-driven document automation, they will generate really significant labor savings. So there's a very strong ROI to that purchase from Tyler.

Our next question comes from the line of Austin Williams with Wells Fargo.

This is Austin Williams on for Michael Turrin. I just wanted to follow up on the AI efficiencies internally that you're seeing. Any color on how you're leveraging AI and any cost savings that you're able to drive there? And as a follow-up, any thoughts on the pace of the buyback going forward?

Yes. On internal AI efficiencies, I would say we're seeing them, but it's still anecdotal at this point. Brian answered a question before about R&D. And the way we really think about internal resources is we really focus on capacity. And so what we're seeing, for example, in the R&D world, it's increasing the capacity of our developers, which allows them to do more, which is great. We are seeing some anecdotal efficiencies in the service delivery area. For example, one of our clients in our appraisal and tax is doing a data conversion. In the past, this was a conversion that would have taken many months that was down to a couple of weeks. Still early to say that we can apply that across all of Tyler Solutions, but the things that we're seeing are positive and something that we're continuing to focus on. I don't remember what the second part of the question.

The share repurchase.

The share repurchase. Yes. So we've -- obviously, we've repurchased 2.5% of our stock this year. The average price has been around $315. We still have another $650-ish million under our authorization. When I look at our share repurchases and generally our capital allocation, I've made a lot of comments about our Tyler 2030 path and our goals and the increasing confidence we have in that and the increasing confidence we have in our free cash flow generation that will go -- exceed $1 billion in 2030, and we believe we will continue to extend far out in the future. And when I look at that and have the confidence in our 88% recurring going to plus 90-plus percent, it makes me think that today is a good value. And so, we're going to continue to buy our shares when we think it's a good value.

Our next question comes from the line of Terry Tillman with Truist.

Yes. The part of my thunder was stolen here with my follow-up on the AI-driven deals. I was going to focus on document automation. And I think both Lynn and Brian shared some perspective on that, but there was a lot of deals mentioned here. Did something happen or inflect in terms of maybe just go-to-market and kind of the sales playbook? And with these kind of deals on document automation, does this go beyond kind of where maybe the sphere of influence you had, whether it was courts or back-office ERP and it's like a broader document automation kind of use case that could go well beyond what you typically were doing?

Yes, Terry, I don't know that there was anything more specific. It was just more the timing of these deals. We had 2 big document automation deals. I mentioned one was about $800,000 deal. Another one was Harris County that was pushing $1 million. Brian mentioned the ROI selling point, which I think is something that we focus on, and it's a message that resonates with our clients. As it relates generally to that acquisition of CSI and document automation, absolutely, we think it's applicable across more parts of our portfolio. Our initial focus has been in the court space. That's where their bread and butter was, and that's where we have a really strong presence. But it is something that I expect to be rolling out across other Tyler portfolio products.

Our next question comes from the line of Matt VanVliet with Cantor.

I guess, I wanted to drill in a little bit more on the raise of the revenue guide for 2026. I presume it now includes For The Record, curious on what the contribution was there. And if there was anything else that were sort of puts and takes in terms of raising the guidance?

Yes. For The Record is the biggest contributor to the revenue gain, and that added in the neighborhood of $30 million of total revenues. In addition, we continue to see a little bit higher volumes around our transaction-based business. Some of that reflected this quarter in the actual results. And so to the extent our expectations have changed at least modestly around that, we factored that into the guide for the year. But again, the vast majority of that would be the result of the FTR acquisition.

At this point, that concludes our Q&A session. I will now turn the call back over to Lynn Moore for closing remarks.

Thanks, John, and thanks, everybody, for joining our call today. If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact Brian Miller or myself. We look forward to welcoming many of you to our June Investor Day in person or on the webcast. Thanks again, and have a great day.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call, and we would like to thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines.