Industry Insights
The revenue growth is hard to miss as total gross revenue across the 2026 MEP Giants rose from roughly $73.79 billion to $98 billion year over year, while total MEP design revenue climbed from $15.02 billion to $19.18 billion, a 27.7% increase.
Jacobs held onto the top spot, a position it has owned since 2013, with Burns & McDonnell steady at No. 2. The more interesting movement is just beneath them: Harris entered the list at No. 3, and AECOM landed at No. 5, while Mott MacDonald slipped from No. 4 to No. 6.
What I think matters more than the ranking shuffle is which industry the revenue is coming from. This report found that data center work now accounts for 59% of design revenue, highlighting the gravity of work in this sector for MEP specialists.
That shift lines up with the broader energy picture Eaton laid out in its contribution to the report. Eaton stated that global electricity demand is projected to rise roughly 50% by 2050, with data center energy use alone expected to climb more than 160% in the next decade.
The role of consulting engineering is expanding alongside the energy demand in areas such as designing systems, strategic advisory, grid interconnection, and resilience. With the constraint on grid capacity, clients are being pushed toward on-site generation and storage just to keep projects on schedule.
This shift is worth remembering next time a client’s timeline gets tangled up in a utility interconnection queue, as the friction in energy demand is becoming the norm.
Workforce Challenges
From a recruitment perspective, a statistic that stood out to me is that 22% of MEP Giants cite “staffing: quality of young engineers” as their single biggest corporate challenge. This challenge is due to the sheer demand for hires in this space. MEP Giants noted they had increased their total workforce from 186,660 to 242,989, and total engineers employed from 61,374 to 70,896 in the last year. However, the hiring need is likely to outpace mentoring and onboarding structures in place for young engineering talent. Industry giants need to remember that growth and quality aren’t the same thing, and firms scaling this fast are likely to feel that gap most acutely.
It’s also worth noting where there hasn’t been as much growth, as commissioning agents and professionals stayed essentially flat at around nine professionals per firm. Even as commissioning demand is climbing elsewhere in this report, this is a specific skills gap where a targeted search matters more than simply hiring faster.
At Metric, our DCX team works this exact niche daily, which means we’re often the first to see commissioning talent move between built environment and data center infrastructure projects. If your firm is feeling the squeeze on commissioning capacity, get in touch to have a conversation that spans the whole commissioning market rather than searching in isolation.
Market Moves
The 2026 MEP Giants completed 64 acquisitions in 2025, a 7% dip from 2024’s near-record 69. But despite the overall decline, the share of firms making at least one acquisition rose to 30%, the highest level ever recorded. Fifteen firms completed more than one deal, up from 12 the year before. So, while overall deal activity has dipped, acquisition activity is spreading across more firms.
This was backed up by MEP Giants’ internal data, which showed that the share of private equity-backed buyers had fallen from 29% to 22%, while employee-owned businesses accounted for 45% of transactions. It will be interesting to see whether this shift continues through the rest of 2026.
Salas O’Brien was, once again, the most active buyer in the group, closing 10 acquisitions that added more than 430 employees across nine states and Canada. NV5, IMEG, and Bowman Consulting tied for second with five deals apiece. The current trend in the acquisition space is that the same firms are doing most of the heavy lifting, which says something about how consolidation capacity is concentrating even as more firms dip a toe into the market.
Project Showcase
The new W.W. Hastings Hospital in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, recently earned IMEG’s ENR Texas & Southeast 2026 Best Project Award of Merit.
IMEG provided MEP services for the new 400,000-sf, six-story hospital, which includes 127 beds and replaces the existing W.W. Hastings Hospital. The facility brings together emergency care, surgery, intensive care, imaging, laboratory, pharmacy and other specialist services, making it a significant piece of healthcare infrastructure for the Cherokee Nation.
From an MEP perspective, this project brings significant regulatory complexity, as modern hospitals must support a wide range of highly specialized clinical environments while maintaining reliability and continuity across critical systems around the clock.
While data center facilities are drawing a lot of MEP talent right now, healthcare infrastructure continues to demand equally complex engineering with a direct impact on the communities it serves.
