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Acadia Healthcare Company

ACHC on Nasdaq. Acadia Healthcare sells mental health and addiction treatment to patients, insurers, and government payers. Market value $2.7bn.

Watch this stockFree. We tell you when something changes.

Price checks use the past 12 months to June 2026. Quality checks use five annual reports, the latest for the year to December 2025.

The company doesn't report operating profit, so we work it out from pre-tax profit and interest.

Recent profit includes a big one-time charge, so we price the company excluding that charge.

Should I look at this?

Good business, but not cheap right now

Why it could be worth it

What to watch out for

See cheaper Health care stocks on the list

This is not advice. Check the numbers below.

Compare with another stock

Cash yield
past 12 months to June 2026
-5.0%low

For every $100 of what the whole company costs, it produced $-4.96 of spare cash in the past 12 months. A savings account pays about $4.

Price to profit
past 12 months to June 2026, without the one-off
76.3×full

You pay 76.3 years of operating profit for the business. The average large US company costs around 18.

Return on capital
five annual reports to December 2025
7.2%five-year median

Each dollar kept in the business earns 7 cents a year. Above 10 is good.

Quality score: 78 of 100. Price score: 0 of 100. Our list needs 70 on quality and 60 on price.

$29.04 a share, 154% above its 1-year low

Over the past year the price has ranged from $11.43 to $35.83.

Prices from Tuesday’s close (6 October).

Five years of cash, in billions

0.1
0.1
0.0
-0.6
-0.4
-0.1
2021202220232024202512 monthsto Jun '26

Spare cash swings from quarter to quarter here: a shortfall of $134 million in the past 12 months, a shortfall of $440 million in the year to December 2025.

Revenue
$2.3bn$2.6bn$2.9bn$3.2bn$3.3bn
Operating margin
15.2%17.0%1.9%14.5%-28.0%
Debt to equity
0.600.500.500.641.29
Shares outstanding
0.09bn0.09bn0.09bn0.09bn0.09bn

Health checks

  • Free cash flow positive3 of 5 years
  • Accounting looks honest (Beneish)Not enough data
  • Financial strength (Piotroski)5 of 8 checks we could run
  • Profit backed by cash (accruals)No
  • Debt1.29× equity
  • Revenue growth, five yearsSlow, 9.7% a year
  • Buying back its own sharesRoughly flat

The quarter to June 2026

How the business did, compared with the same quarter a year earlier.

  • Sales: $866 million last quarter, about the same as a year ago.
  • Profit: $11 million, down 64% on a year ago.
  • Over the past 12 months it spent $134 million more cash than it brought in, compared with $311 million a year earlier.
  • 1% more shares than a year ago. Each share owns a bit less of the company.
  • Debt is $2.2 billion more than cash, up from $2.1 billion a year ago.
  • Sales grew on a year ago in 3 of the last 4 quarters.
Sales by quarter
Sales by quarter
Quarter toAmount
September 2024$816m
December 2024$774m
March 2025$771m
June 2025$869m
September 2025$852m
December 2025$821m
March 2026$829m
June 2026$866m
Profit by quarter
Profit by quarter
Quarter toAmount
September 2024$68m
December 2024$33m
March 2025$8m
June 2025$30m
September 2025$36m
December 2025-$1.2bn
March 2026$4m
June 2026$11m

From the company's quarterly reports to the SEC.

Dates

Next results (estimated)
n/a
Last annual report (10-K)
27 February 2026
Next quarterly (estimated, 10-Q)
27 October 2026

Who owns it

3 long-term investors we follow own it, down from 5 last quarter. 313 funds in all.

Jun '25
Dec '25
Jun '26

Sold out this quarter

Largest holders overall

From 13F filings for the quarter ended 30 June 2026.

Big holders and activists

6 investors own more than 5%.

From Schedule 13D and 13G filings: anyone owning more than 5% must file one.

What insiders did

No insider bought or sold on the open market in the last 12 months.

From Form 4 filings: insiders must report trades in their own company's shares within two days.

Warning signs in its filings

Problems the company itself reported to the SEC, in its own words.

None of the warning signs we check for were found.

We look for five warning signs: doubt it can keep going, weak checks on its own accounts, a notice that its past accounts can't be relied on, a change of auditor, and one customer bringing in a big share of sales. We don't check lawsuits, investigations or debt yet.

We checked the auditor's report, internal controls, restatement notices, auditor changes and big customers in the 10-K filed 27 Feb 2026, plus the 10-Q filed 28 Jul 2026 and 7 later 8-Ks.

A 10-K is the yearly report every US company files with the SEC. An 8-K is a short notice of a big event.

What could go wrong

  • It isn't cheap on profits: 76.3× operating profit.

Whether the price already reflects the risks is what the deep dive is for.

The deep dive

Everything above is arithmetic on public filings. The deep dive reads the last ten years of annual reports, the proxy statements, and the earnings calls, then argues the case the way Buffett, Klarman, and Hohn would, and checks every claim against the source.

  • What the business is worth, as a range, and the margin of safety at today’s price
  • Prices to start buying, buy, and buy hard
  • The three things that would make this a mistake
  • Every number footnoted to the filing it came from
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What a finished deep dive looks like

Not advice. Numbers on this page come from SEC filings and are updated each night; prices are updated again after the US market closes. The five-year figures are rounded.