Professional services EBITDA fell to a five-year low of 9.8% in 2024, and firms are still closing the gap

Professional services firms closed 2024 with an EBITDA of 9.8%, down from 15.4% just one year earlier and the lowest reading in five years, according to the 2025 SPI Professional Services Maturity Benchmark, an annual survey of thousands of services organizations sponsored by Deltek. The numbers land at a moment when enterprise operators across consulting, IT services, and managed services are under board-level pressure to restore margins without adding headcount.

The report is not a single bad quarter's story. It reflects a five-year erosion across nearly every core performance metric: revenue growth, billable utilization, project delivery, and profitability. For operations and finance leaders at professional services firms, the data provides both a diagnostic and a benchmark against which to measure their own 2026 planning.

Revenue growth at its lowest point in five years

Revenue growth for professional services firms fell to 4.6% in 2024, according to the SPI data cited by Deltek. That compares with the five-year average of 8.7% and a peak of 10.6% in 2021. The compression reflects a buyer behavior shift that operations leaders will recognize: longer sales cycles, delayed client decisions, and a more cautious enterprise spending environment following years of macro volatility.

What makes the revenue picture complicated is the gap between pipeline and conversion. Quarterly bookings forecasts reached 166% of target in 2024, suggesting client appetite is real. The constraint is execution: firms are generating demand but not converting it into delivered revenue at the pace needed to offset margin decline. That gap between backlog health and actual revenue growth is the operational problem most urgently requiring attention.

Utilization and delivery metrics are dragging down revenue per consultant

Billable utilization, arguably the single most watched metric in services operations, dropped to 68.9% in 2024, its lowest point in the five-year period tracked by SPI and well below the 75% threshold considered the floor for healthy workforce monetization. The trend has been consistent: from 73.2% in 2021, utilization has declined each year. The direct financial consequence is measurable. Revenue per consultant fell to $199K in 2024, according to Deltek's analysis of the SPI findings.

Every percentage point below 75% represents unbilled capacity sitting idle, consultants on the bench while client work either waits in backlog or goes to competitors. At scale, across a firm of several hundred billable staff, a 6-point utilization gap translates directly into millions of dollars in foregone revenue. The utilization decline points to a resourcing visibility problem: without real-time insight into who is available, when, and against which projects, staffing decisions default to conservative estimates that leave capacity underdeployed.

The visibility deficit behind the numbers

Deltek's analysis of the SPI findings identifies limited operational visibility as a root cause running beneath the utilization, revenue, and EBITDA declines. Firms that lack integrated views of resource availability, project workload, and cost data are making staffing calls on incomplete information, which drives bench time up and forecasting accuracy down. That forecasting weakness compounds: inaccurate project cost estimates erode client trust, extend delivery timelines, and shrink margins further.

The firms posting stronger results share a recognizable operational profile. They have deployed professional services automation (PSA) platforms that surface resource availability and project financials in real-time dashboards, rather than assembling that picture from spreadsheets or disconnected ERP modules. They use repeatable, standardized service delivery models that reduce per-engagement setup time and improve estimation accuracy. The consistency of those practices across the benchmark's top-performer cohort suggests that platform standardization is not a nice-to-have in the current margin environment, it is the operational lever with the most direct impact.

What this means for your team

• Audit current billable utilization against the 75% benchmark. If your firm is at or below 68.9%, quantify the revenue impact per consultant before the next planning cycle, this is a board-level number, not just an ops metric.
• Evaluate whether your resource management tooling gives real-time visibility into availability and project load. Firms relying on manual or lagging data are structurally unable to close the utilization gap identified in the SPI report.
• Map your backlog conversion rate. A strong bookings forecast with weak revenue growth signals a delivery execution problem, not a sales problem. Identify where projects stall between signature and billing.
• Benchmark your EBITDA against the 9.8% industry figure. If you are above it, identify which standardization and automation practices are driving the outperformance. If you are below it, the SPI framework's top-performer attributes, PSA deployment, standardized delivery models, real-time dashboards, are the starting checklist.