WSP just bought its way to the top of the U.S. market. The Canadian engineering giant completed a $3.3 billion acquisition of TRC in late February, folding in roughly 8,000 staff and, by its own count, becoming the largest engineering and design firm in the country by revenue.
The all-cash deal values the Connecticut-based TRC at 14.5 times adjusted earnings, financed with committed debt from CIBC and JPMorgan plus an equity raise of about $850 million. WSP didn’t pay that premium for scale alone. It paid for a sector.
Why TRC, and why now
TRC’s book is concentrated where the money is moving: power and energy, utilities, environmental services, and program management. That’s the through-line of the current construction cycle, where grid interconnection queues, data center load, and electrification are the binding constraints on a lot of work. Buying TRC makes WSP the No. 1 power and energy design platform in the U.S. overnight, with about 27,000 American employees once the teams combine.
Consolidation keeps climbing
This is the biggest move in a busy stretch for engineering and construction M&A. Firms are using acquisitions to lock in scarce technical labor and broaden into faster-growing end markets, and the power sector is the prize everyone’s chasing. The revenue reshuffle also reorders the pecking order tracked in the ENR Top 500, where AI and energy work have been pulling design-firm revenue up even as broad billings stay soft.
Scale has a downside, and integration is where deals like this get won or lost. Merging 8,000 people and their project pipelines into a 27,000-person U.S. operation is its own engineering problem. But on paper, WSP just made itself the firm to beat in the one market with a guaranteed decade of work. ENR has the deal terms.