Behavioral Health Company Acadia to Cut 2026 Capex Nearly in Half
Acadia Healthcare Co. will lower its 2026 capital spending by $300 million from this year’s roughly $625 million and has decided to close a handful of its behavioral health facilities.
Speaking at the Jefferies 2025 Healthcare Services Conference on Sept. 29, CEO Chris Hunter also said Franklin, Tennessee-based Acadia will further cut its capex budget in 2027 as his team prioritizes growth in cash flows over expansion and the company’s top line.
Word of the slower growth plans comes after a period in which Acadia spent hundreds of millions of dollars to add more than 1,800 patient beds in 2024 and this year to its network, which now spans more than 12,000 beds at more than 270 facilities. It also comes just days after the leaders of New York-based investment firm Engine Capital said Acadia’s shares are greatly undervalued and publicly called on Hunter’s team and the board of directors to “temporarily halt new bed growth to refocus on [their] core operations” while also looking at selling some properties.
“By sharply reducing growth capex, the company will quickly be able to demonstrate its strong free cash flow, return capital to shareholders, and begin to regain investors’ confidence,” the principals of Engine Capital, which owns about 3 percent of Acadia’s shares, said in an open letter. “At Acadia’s current valuation, the market is not pricing in any profitable growth and is valuing the business at a significant discount to its replacement value, implying that growth is destroying value.”
Word from Hunter of the big planned 2026 spending cuts comes about eight weeks after he told analysts that his team had paused work on two projects in Acadia’s pipeline, a move that should save the company about $100 million over several years. At the time, Hunter and CFO Heather Dixon pointed to uncertainty around the One Big Beautiful Bill Act as the main reason for tapping the brakes.
Speaking at the Jefferies event, Hunter reiterated that reimbursement questions remain important to Acadia’s future capex. His team, he said, is looking to add beds in states with more favorable payment environments. At the same time, he added, Acadia will soon close five facilities to further trim costs. Two of those are not meeting the company’s financial targets, he said, and three are focused on eating disorders, which Hunter said aren’t a core business.
Still, Acadia executives said on Sept. 29 that the company’s growth in same-facility patient days this quarter looks likely to be up 1.3 percent year over year. In the second quarter, that number was 1.8 percent. Hunter acknowledged to the Jefferies audience that “it’s been a challenging year.”
“We just continue to be very focused on improving performance and enhancing shareholder value,” he said.
Shares of Acadia (Ticker: ACHC) were down nearly 1 percent to $24.32 in afternoon trading on Sept. 29. They have lost about 20 percent of their value over the past six months, which has cut the company’s market capitalization to about $2.2 billion.
About the Author
Geert De Lombaerde
A native of Belgium, Geert De Lombaerde has more than two decades of business journalism experience and writes about markets and economic trends for Endeavor Business Media publications Healthcare Innovation, IndustryWeek, FleetOwner, Oil & Gas Journal and T&D World. With a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri, he began his reporting career at the Business Courier in Cincinnati and later was managing editor and editor of the Nashville Business Journal. Most recently, he oversaw the online and print products of the Nashville Post for more than a decade and reported primarily on Middle Tennessee’s finance sector as well as many of its publicly traded companies.