PA Consulting 2026: What the Firm Does and Who Owns It

What PA Consulting does, and the eight industries it names

PA describes itself on its About page as "the only firm with the range of expertise" to pair strategists and consultants with "scientists, engineers, and technologists". That claim is rare in consulting because you can test it. The firm runs real labs, and its job board carries electronics and medical device engineers next to management consultants.

Its own navigation sorts the work two ways. Eight industries, and six families of service.

Three of those eight matter more than the rest if you are deciding whether to apply. Government, "defence and security" and health are where the firm says its growth came from, and the owner's filings agree.

The origin story explains the shape. PA began in England in 1943, to bring women into wartime factories, and the name is short for Personnel Administration. Its own list of what came later runs through the first private digital telephone exchange, the home pregnancy test and the breath actuated inhaler. A firm with that record behind it hires differently from one that sells slides.

Who owns PA Consulting now, and what that cost

Ownership moved in two steps, five years apart, and both are documented by the buyer.

1. March 2021. Jacobs Solutions took a controlling stake. Its 10-K records the other 35 percent as redeemable noncontrolling interests. PA people held them in preferred and common shares, and the preferred paid a compounding dividend of 12 percent a year.
2. 5 January 2026. Jacobs announced terms for the rest.
3. 20 March 2026. The deal closed. Jacobs acquired "all of the remaining issued share capital of PA Consulting" for initial consideration of about 1.21 billion pounds, paid as 997.6 million pounds in cash and 2,043,537 newly issued Jacobs shares, with a further 75 million pounds due in fiscal 2028.

The vote behind it was lopsided. Jacobs reported that "more than 97% of voting shareholders" approved, "representing over 99% of share value".

One figure worth doing yourself, because nobody publishes it. If 35 percent of the equity cost 1.21 billion pounds upfront, the whole firm was implied at roughly 3.5 billion pounds: 1.21 divided by 0.35 is 3.457, which we round up to 3.5. That is our division rather than a published valuation, and it ignores the deferred 75 million pounds.

What changes for a candidate is small and real. PA keeps its brand, its offices and its own job board. Shares in PA are no longer part of the package, because staff can no longer hold any.

What Jacobs files about PA Consulting with the SEC

Jacobs reports PA as one of its two segments, so the numbers are audited and public. From the 10-K for the year ended 26 September 2025, in millions of dollars.

Two ratios follow from that table. Segment margin was 278.5 divided by 1,265.6, or 22.0 percent in 2025. In 2024 it was 239.3 divided by 1,177.7, or 20.3 percent. And PA earned 1,265.6 of Jacobs' 12,029.8 million dollars of revenue, which is 10.5 percent. It brought in 278.5 of 1,182.0 million dollars of segment operating profit, which is 23.6 percent.

The filing also says where the growth came from: "growth in PA Consulting's public services businesses (through the defence and security, public services and health and life sciences sectors)".

The latest quarter looks worse, and the owner says so. For the three months to 26 June 2026, PA revenue was 329.5 million dollars, down about 1 percent on the year. Jacobs blames "delayed client approvals, which adversely affected the timing of revenue recognition". Across nine months the segment still grew 10 percent, to 1,042.5 million dollars.

What the UK accounts add to the picture

The British trading company, PA Consulting Services Limited, files full accounts at Companies House. The set made up to 31 December 2025 was filed on 17 July 2026 and signed by its auditors on 3 July 2026. It is a scanned PDF, so it has to be read page by page. That is probably why so little of it gets quoted.

The strategic report states that "turnover for the year increased by nine percent to £837.5 million (2024: £765.3 million)" and reports "profit for the year of £161.4 million (2024: £129.6 million) representing 24 percent growth year-on-year". Operating profit was 174.4 million pounds, so the operating margin was 174.4 divided by 837.5, or 20.8 percent.

Three details from the notes change how you read the firm.

1. It is overwhelmingly a British business. Of 837.5 million pounds of turnover, 806.98 million came from the United Kingdom. That is 96.4 percent. The Americas contributed 19.4 million pounds and Asia Pacific 2.8 million.
2. It spends real money on research. Research and development cost 49.2 million pounds in 2025, up from 42.8 million. An 11.0 million pound R&D tax credit was booked as other income.
3. Its average headcount is nil. Staff work for PA Holdings Limited, which bills their time across. So these accounts carry no UK employee number at all, and anyone quoting one from them has misread the file.

The same report confirms the deal in the subsidiary's own words. It names Jacobs UK Holdings Limited as the buyer and the result as "taking Jacobs' ownership of the PA Consulting Group to 100 percent".

The technology centre is the part that is unusual

Most consultancies describe capabilities. PA owns a building full of them. Its Global Innovation and Technology Centre has stood since 1976 in Cambridgeshire, in a Rogers and Piano building the firm measures at "13,000 square metres of design studios, scientific laboratories, and engineering workshops".

The firm puts "200+ experts" there and claims "40,000 inventions delivered across industry, government, and defence" over fifty years. Those are its own figures. No audit backs them and no outsider can count them, so read the number as a claim. The building can be checked, and so can the jobs advertised inside it.

What the centre does to the work is the part candidates miss. The published stages run from reading user behavior, through first principles science, design, prototyping and then scale up to making the thing. Advice that ends in a built object has to carry tooling, supplier checks and approval inside the answer.

That is also why the firm hires physicists and chemists next to consultants. On the day we counted, Melbourn alone was advertising a "Consumer Electronics Engineer", a "Lead RF Design Engineer", an "Experimental Physics Consultant" and a "Software Engineer - C++/Rust". Our page on cases for engineers shows how that kind of problem gets marked.

Where PA Consulting hires, read off its own job board

The firm runs its openings on its own site, so the map can be counted instead of guessed. On 7 October 2026 it listed 177 roles.

So 128 of 177 roles, which is 72 percent, sat in the UK. Inside the UK the split was London 63, Melbourn 22, Belfast 16, Bristol 14, Manchester 12, Sheffield 1. Belfast and Bristol together carried 30 roles, which is close to half of London's count, and that is the part most candidates get wrong when they assume a London firm.

By family, consulting carried 104 roles, digital 35, corporate 29, early careers 5, and design and engineering 4. Read that with care. The design and engineering family looks tiny, yet most of Melbourn's 22 roles are engineering work filed under other labels. The label undercounts the trade.

One number needs a warning. Only five early careers roles were open, and all five sat outside the UK, in Utrecht, Denver, Stockholm and Boston. UK graduate hiring runs on an autumn cycle instead of all year. Our guide to UK consulting recruiting sets that against the other firms' calendars.

How PA Consulting selects its early careers intake

The early careers FAQ opens with a commitment most firms avoid: "All our early careers roles follow the same process:". Three stages follow.

The online tests get two sentences, and both are odd: "These assessments are task-based. Whilst not timed, some of the tasks require you to respond quickly by tapping on your keyboard." Untimed and reaction based at once rules out what most candidates train for, which is an arithmetic test with a clock in the corner. No vendor is named and no length is given.

Four published rules decide more applications than case technique does.

1. One application across everything. "You can apply for one role within our early careers offering across all our programmes."
2. Six months after a rejection. An unsuccessful application at any stage means waiting six months before applying again.
3. No sponsorship. PA states it is "unable to provide sponsorship for those who do not have the right to work in the UK".
4. No AI in the room. The firm asks that no AI tools, "including AI note takers, meeting assistants, and similar tools", are used during interview sessions.

Clearance sits on top of all four: "we require all candidates to obtain security clearance". The FAQ names two triggers. One is travel abroad of 29 days or more in a row. The other is living outside the UK for more than six months in the past five years. The government vetting guidance explains why those questions exist, since it states that "UK residency may affect the checks undertaken". A Security Check reaches into spent convictions, credit history and Security Service records. Declare the gaps when you apply. PA warns that sharing them at offer stage "could result in your offer being withdrawn".

A device cost case, worked in dollars

Because the work ends in something that gets built, feasibility belongs inside the recommendation. Here is what that looks like with numbers attached.

A diagnostics company sells 42,000 units a year at $310. Cost of goods is $196, so contribution is $114 a unit. Engineering proposes a redesign for manufacturability: $3.2m of development over nine months, cutting unit cost by $28 and cutting warranty returns from 4.2% of units to 1.5%. A return costs $240 to handle.

1. Unit saving to annual saving. 42,000 units at $28 is $1.176m a year.
2. Warranty, in units before dollars. 4.2% of 42,000 is 1,764 returns, at $240 each, so $423,360 today. At 1.5% it is 630 returns, or $151,200. The saving is $272,160.
3. Total and payback. About $1.45m a year against $3.2m of development, so payback lands at roughly 2.2 years.
4. Put the constraint inside the answer. If the redesign touches the fluidic path, it triggers a fresh regulatory submission: call it $700,000 and seven months. Development plus submission is $3.9m, so payback moves to about 2.7 years, and it starts seven months later than the business case assumed.

Step four is the move this firm's work rewards. A cost model that skips the approval route plans a product that cannot ship, and in regulated work the approval route is the schedule.

Check your units in step two. Return rates are percentages of units and the cost is per return, so the chain runs units to returns to dollars. Applying 4.2% to revenue instead of to units gives a number wrong by a factor of three hundred.

No firm publishes a marking scheme, PA included. The weights below are ours, applied by our own grader, each out of a hundred and read from the code that scores. The reasoning sits on how an answer is assessed.

What PA Consulting does not publish

Any UK headcount. The operating company reports nil average employees because the staff sit in a sister entity. The global figure of about 4,000 is the firm's own, rounded, and it is not broken down by country.

Any salary. No band appears on the job board, on the graduate pages or in the accounts. The owner's filings cover directors only.

Who supplies the online assessments, how many there are, or how long they take.

What the assessment event contains, exercise by exercise, or how long the day runs.

How long clearance takes, or which level applies to which role. The government guidance sets out levels and checks without timelines.

Any threshold, pass rate, or number of places, at any stage.

Everything above about the firm was read on the page it is credited to on 7 October 2026. The ownership and money came from filings at the SEC and Companies House, and the vetting rules from the government's own guidance. The hiring material covers British early careers programs and does not carry over to PA's other markets. The scoring weights are ours, and the page says so where they appear. A wider look at the other UK firms sits on our page about UK consulting firms.