Surgery Partners spent $4M on deals in Q1 against a $200M-a-year pace
The ASC roll-up deployed $4.2 million on acquisitions in the first quarter — roughly 2% of its ~$200 million annual target — leaving most of a year's dealmaking still to come.
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Surgery Partners deployed roughly $4 million on acquisitions in the first quarter of 2026 — a fraction of the pace it would need to hit its own annual target. The company’s cash-flow statement in its SEC Form 8-K lists “payments for acquisitions, net of cash acquired” of $4.2 million for Q1 2026, down from $44.0 million in the same quarter a year earlier.
On the first-quarter earnings call, CEO Eric Evans said the company continues “to target deploying approximately $200 million in capital annually.” Measured against that target, the $4.2 million spent in Q1 is about 2% of a full year’s budget — leaving roughly $196 million still to deploy across the final three quarters. CFO Dave Doherty said the deals closed so far “will contribute approximately $7 million of revenue in 2026.”
Management frames any of that as additive. Evans said the company’s “full year 2026 guidance does not factor in any potential impact of M&A,” and that “anything we do on the M&A pipeline is pure upside to guidance.” That guidance was reaffirmed in the 8-K: full-year revenue of $3.35 billion to $3.45 billion and adjusted EBITDA of at least $530 million.
The math points to a back-loaded year. Evans told analysts that, given the slow first quarter, “this year looks like we’re gonna end up being a little back-end weighted.” A buyer sitting on a deployment gap of that size, with $182.3 million in cash and $666.1 million of revolver capacity per the 8-K, has every incentive to close transactions in the second half — which is the part that matters to anyone on the sell side.
The deployment slowdown sits against otherwise steady operations: Q1 revenue rose 4.5% to $810.9 million, while adjusted EBITDA edged down to $102.3 million from $103.9 million a year earlier. Net debt to EBITDA stood at about 4.3x. The operating business is doing what it did; the dealmaking is what changed quarter to quarter.
For sellers weighing whether to transact, the read-through is mechanical rather than promissory: a strategic acquirer that has told the market it intends to spend roughly $200 million this year, and has spent almost none of it, is a buyer under pressure to act later in 2026.