Participants

Hala Elsherbini; Senior Director, Investor Relations; Tyler Technologies Inc

H. Lynn Moore; President, Chief Executive Officer, Director; Tyler Technologies Inc

Brian Miller; Chief Financial Officer, Executive Vice President, Treasurer; Tyler Technologies Inc

Alexei Gogolev; Analyst; JPMorgan

Joshua Reilly; Analyst; Needham & Company

Ken Wong; Analyst; Oppenheimer

Saket Kalia; Analyst; Barclays

Alex Zukin; Analyst; Wolfe Research

Michael Turrin; Wells Fargo; Wells Fargo

Charles S. Strauzer; Senior Managing Director; CJS Securities Inc.

Clarke Jeffries; Analyst; Piper Sandler

Robert Oliver; Analyst; Baird

Jonathan Ho; Analyst; William Blair & Company

Terrell Tillman; Analyst; Truist Securities

Mark Schappel; Analyst; Loop Capital Markets

Gabriela Borges; Analyst; Goldman Sachs

Presentation

Operator

Hello, and welcome to today's Tyler Technologies' fourth-quuarter 2024 conference call. Your host for today's call is Lynn Moore, President and CEO of Tyler Technologies. (Operator Instructions).
And as a reminder, this conference is being recorded today, February 13, 2025. I would now like to turn the call over to Hala Elsherbini, Tyler's Senior Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Hala Elsherbini

Thank you, Kevin, and welcome to our call. With me today is Lynn Moore, our President and Chief Executive Officer; and Brian Miller, our Chief Financial Officer. After (inaudible) Safe Harbor statement, Lynn will have some initial comments on our quarter, and then Brian will review the details of our results and provide our annual guidance for 2025. Lynn will end with some additional comments, and then we'll take your questions.
During this call, management may make statements that provide information other than historical information and may include projections concerning the company's future results, future prospects, revenues, expenses and profits. Such statements are considered forward-looking statements under the safe harbor provision of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and are subject to certain risks and uncertainties and -- which could cause actual results to differ materially from those projections. We refer you to our Form 10-K and other SEC filings for more information on those risks.
Also, in our earnings release, we have included non-GAAP measures that we believe facilitate understanding of our results and comparisons with peers in the software industry. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures is provided in our earnings release. We have also posted on the Investor Relations section of our website under the Financials tab a schedule with supplemental information, including information about quarterly recurring revenues and bookings.
On the Events and Presentations task, we posted an earnings summary slide deck to supplement our prepared remarks. Please note that all those comparisons we make on the call today will relate to the corresponding period of last year unless we specify otherwise. Lynn?

H. Lynn Moore

Thanks, Hala. Our fourth quarter results provided a solid finish to an excellent year of growth and profitability as we executed on our key objectives across financial, operational and strategic initiatives. We exceeded our expectations across our key financial metrics, with recurring revenue growth of nearly 15%, driven by SaaS revenue growth of 23% and our 16th consecutive quarter of SaaS revenue growth of 20% or more.
SaaS adoption continued to accelerate with both new and existing clients with 97% of our new software contract value in the cloud. Transaction revenue set a new quarterly high and grew nearly 21%. Our non-GAAP operating margin expanded to 24.4%, benefiting from the mix shift to higher SaaS revenues.
In addition, free cash flow of $216 million significantly exceeded our expectations, reaching a new high for a fourth quarter. In 2023, we passed a cloud revenue inflection point, where long-term recurring SaaS revenues surpassed on-premise license and maintenance revenues. At our 2023 Investor Day, we unveiled our Tyler 2030 vision and multiyear strategic direction, including drivers of revenue growth and margin expansion. We also laid out our 2025 and 2030 targets for key metrics around revenues, margins and cash flow. We're pleased with our progress in 2024 toward those goals.
As planned, we closed our Dallas data center midyear and are on track to close our main data center at the end of 2025. We -- we delivered SaaS revenue growth that exceeded our 20% growth target and transaction revenues were well above plan. We made significant progress with our cloud operations initiatives, delivering better-than-expected operating margin expansion through version consolidation and releasing cloud optimized products.
These proof points give us confidence in achieving our 2025 targets as well as our long-range goals of organic recurring revenue CAGR of 10% to 12%, and -- sustainable margin expansion with non-GAAP operating margins of 30% or more, and expanded free cash flow of $1 billion with free cash flow margins in the high 20s. The public sector market remains strong with robust demand supported by healthy budgets, especially at the state and local levels, which comprise approximately 95% of our total revenue. The public sector's drive towards digital modernization continues to accelerate as aging mission-critical systems reach end of life, cybersecurity threats continue to increase and governments at all levels face a growing demand for an improved citizen experience and seek operational efficiencies to enable them to do more with limited resources.
While the new Federal Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE, is still in its early days, we don't envision its effort having a significant impact on funding or demand for our software and services, which power would are generally essential functions. In fact, we view an increased focus on government efficiency at any level as an opportunity rather than a risk for Tyler, and we believe that technology is ultimately the greatest driver of improved efficiency.
The elevated market activity we've discussed for the past few quarters, along with excellent execution by our sales teams, is reflected in our new software bookings this quarter, with new SaaS contract value of approximately $141 million, up 37% over last year.
Our market-leading position and competitive strengths, including our deep domain expertise, broad portfolio of solutions and most importantly, our client base, serve as the foundation for our long-term strategic focus on 4 key growth pillars: executing on our cloud-first strategy, leveraging our unmatched installed base, expanding into new markets and growing our differentiated payments business.
Our cloud transition is anchored by our unifying principles toward a single release stream to better scale, innovate and deliver an enhanced client experience. We've made significant progress with our cloud optimization efforts, with cloud optimized releases launched across many of our flagship products, driving an accelerated pace of on-premise client migrations to the cloud with more flips of larger clients taking place. For the quarter, we inked a total of 106 flips of on-premises clients. The total contract value from Flip signed this quarter grew 58% over last year's fourth quarter, and the average ARR of flip signed in the quarter rose nearly 32%.
As we previously discussed, we are executing multiple cloud transitions across our product solutions, each with its own nuanced road map and time line. We're pleased with the current trajectory of flips from on-premises to cloud deployments and currently envision flips peaking in 2027 and 2028 as we work towards migrating more than 80% of our on-premises clients to Tyler's next-generation cloud by 2030.
We continue to lead with cloud across all product solutions. And during the quarter, we saw increased momentum from clients selecting multiple integrated solutions from Tyler. Our largest SaaS deal this quarter with an $11.4 million multi-suite contract with the City of Kenosha, Wisconsin, for enterprise ERP, enterprise permitting licensing, enterprise asset management, municipal justice and enterprise assessment and tax solutions, a win, which adds $1.3 million in ARR, leveraged our expanding footprint and strong client references in Wisconsin, combined with our unique ability to offer multiple integrated solutions from a single platform. This is what we refer to as a total Tyler client engagement.
Notable multiproduct SaaS contracts included Hernando County, Florida and the City of Warner Robins, Georgia, for enterprise ERP, enterprise permitting licensing and enterprise asset management solutions has added almost $1.3 million in ARR. We're also pleased to see growing adoption of our AI-driven priority-based budgeting solution, which we acquired with Resource X in the fall of 2023.
Priority-based budgeting enables informed decision-making and efficiencies and -- by linking financial resources to strategic funding priorities and goals. There were 3 key wins for the solution in Q4 with large clients, including L.A. County, California, Kansas City, Missouri, and Johnson County, Kansas, adding a total of nearly $1.8 million in ARR. We're excited to partner with these clients as they implement their data-driven budgeting applications, leveraging our deep domain expertise and industry-leading best practices.
We continue to drive higher cloud adoption for our public safety solutions with both new competitive wins and a growing number of flips. Notable SaaS wins included the Southwest Regional Communications Center, a Texas 911 consortium in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and Peoria, Illinois, which dispatches for 10 different agencies, each contracting for our full enterprise public safety suite. We also continue to build momentum at the state level with our public safety solutions. We signed 3 enterprise public safety deals with state agencies in the quarter, including SaaS contracts with The Iowa Department of Public Safety, which was a competitive effort leveraging our Digital Solutions division state enterprise relationship and contract vehicle and also The Michigan State Police. We also signed a license deal with a Nebraska State Patrol. We now count 9 state police agencies as enterprise public safety clients.
In our state and federal business, we signed an 8-year contract with the State of Maine for our resident engagement portal, adding $2.2 million in ARR. This competitive win leveraged our strong state relationship as a trusted partner, offering deep public sector domain expertise and strong references from other successful implementations of our resident engagement platform.
At the core of our growth strategy, is leveraging our unmatched installed base through cross-sell and upsell initiatives. We added to our growing footprint in outdoor recreation, signing a multiyear SaaS arrangement with the South Carolina State Parks, under our state enterprise master agreement.
Additionally, we signed a contract with the Colorado Department of Corrections for inventory warehouse management solution, leveraging our Colorado State Enterprise relationship to add $612,000 in ARR.
Driving transaction revenue growth through our integrated payments business is another key element of our growth strategy. Our payment strategy is centered on a high-value unified platform that seamlessly integrates with our software solutions and proprietary back office services, creating opportunities for higher margins.
Demand for our differentiated payment solutions continues to be strong. And in the fourth quarter, we signed 244 new payment deals across Tyler software clients, representing approximately $8.1 million in projected ARR. For the year, we signed 995 new payments deals.
In our state enterprise business, we secured a 2-year extension for our digital government and payment processing services with the state of Utah, representing approximately $11.5 million in ARR. Now I'd like Brian to provide more detail on the results for the quarter and our annual guidance for 2025.

Brian Miller

Thanks, Lynn. Total revenues for the quarter were $541.1 million, up 12.5% and organically grew 12.4%. Subscriptions revenue increased 21.9% and organically rose 21.8%. The -- within subscription, SaaS revenues grew 23% to $173.4 million and grew organically 22.8%.
The -- Keep in mind that there is often a lag from the signing of a new SaaS dealer flip to the start of revenue recognition that can vary from 1 to several quarters. Because of this, as well as the timing of SaaS renewals and related price increases, SaaS revenue growth both year-over-year and sequentially may fluctuate from quarter-to-quarter.
Transaction revenues grew 20.9% to $175.4 million, driven by new transaction services, higher transaction volumes from both new and existing clients, including the August go-live of the California Department of Parks and Recreation and e-filing growth.
While Q4 is historically a seasonally lighter quarter for transaction-based revenues, we are seeing slightly less seasonality than in previous years as we continue to diversify our mix of revenue including digital titling services that are less seasonal and outdoor recreation services that have different peak periods from state to state.
As Lynn noted, we had a very good quarter for bookings in Q4 we -- with a marginal benefit from field timing associated with the year-end deadline for allocating ARPA funds. SaaS deals comprised approximately 97% of our new software contract value compared to 89% last year.
During the quarter, we added 150 new SaaS arrangements and signed 106 best flips of existing on-premises clients, with a total contract value of approximately $194 million, up 42%. And -- in Q4 of last year, we added 156 new SaaS arrangements and had 92 flips with a total contract value of approximately $137 million. The average ARR from new SaaS contracts increased 63% over last year. The average ARR associated with our Q4 flips increased 32% over last year as we continue to see larger clients flip to the cloud. Our total annualized recurring revenue was approximately $1.86 billion, up 14.9%.
We entered 2024 expecting margin -- operating margin expansion after experiencing the margin trough from our cloud transition in 2023, and we have exceeded our expectations. Our non-GAAP operating margin in the fourth quarter was 24.4%, up 210 basis points from last year. The margin expansion reflects the impact of our cloud efficiency initiatives, along with effective operating expense management.
As we discussed on previous calls, merchant and interchange fees from our payments business under the gross revenue model have a meaningful impact on our overall margins as they are included in both revenues and cost of revenues. We incurred merchant fees of approximately $41 million in Q4 compared to $35 million last year.
Because of strong earnings and effective working capital management, both cash flows from operations and free cash flow reached new highs for a fourth quarter at $224.8 million and $216 million, respectively, with free cash flow up 60.7%.
Cash flow in the quarter was positively impacted by 2 significant items. The first was a $29 million prepayment in October of 6 years of SaaS fees related to our new enterprise justice contract with the State of Kentucky. The second was the timing of funds that we routinely collect and dispersed through the Tyler disbursement platform, formerly Rapid. At year-end, approximately $25 million of cash was held by Tyler that would subsequently disbursed under these contracts. We ended the quarter with $600 million of convertible debt outstanding and cash and investments of approximately $779 million and net leverage is 0.
Now I'd like to turn to our annual guidance for 2025. We expect total revenues will be between $2.30 billion and $2.34 billion. The midpoint of our guidance implies organic growth of approximately 8.5%. We expect GAAP diluted EPS will be between $7.31 and $7.56 and -- and may vary significantly due to the impact of discrete tax items on the GAAP effective tax rate. We expect non-GAAP diluted EPS will be between $10.90 and $11.15.
And -- our estimated non-GAAP tax rate for 2025 is expected to be 22.5%.
We expect our free cash flow margin will be between 24% and 26%, and -- including an estimated impact of approximately $27 million of incremental cash taxes related to Section 174. We expect research and development expense will be in the range of $177 million to $182 million. Other details of our guidance are included in our earnings release and in the Q4 earnings deck posted on our website.
I'd like to add some additional color around our guidance. Subscription revenues in total are expected to grow between 15% and 18%. And within subscription, SaaS revenue is expected to grow between 21% and 24%. The -- Transaction revenues are expected to grow between 10% and 12%, with merchant fees down 7% to 9%. Our expected transactions growth is below the 2024 growth rate and will be impacted by the wind down of our payments processing contract with the state of Texas, which currently expires at the end of August 2025 and -- and was awarded to another payment vendor after a competitive procurement process by the state.
The Texas contract is a stand-alone somewhat commoditized payments arrangement and differs in a number of respects from our core payment strategy which is centered on providing differentiated payment solutions integrated with our software solutions, enterprise portals and proprietary back office services that add value to our clients and provide opportunities for premium pricing.
For background, the payment relationship with Texas was not an organically developed relationship but was part of a state enterprise agreement that NIC purchased from BearingPoint following their bankruptcy in 2009. That contract was split in 2017 with NIC retaining the payment services and it was subsequently extended through August of 2025. We knew that the rebid would be highly competitive and price-sensitive and margins under the existing contract were already very low.
There were no issues with the quality of our services, and we believe that price was a significant factor in the award. The Texas Payments contract is a gross contract with 2024 revenues of approximately $44 million, merchant fees of approximately $39 million and a gross margin of approximately 10%. We currently expect that 2025 revenues from Texas payments will be approximately $29 million, at a similar gross margin. While we expect to continue to provide payment services to Texas through August, it is possible that some services may transition prior to them.
Excluding merchant fees that are absorbed under the gross revenue model, expected transactions growth in 2025 would be approximately 17% and total growth would be approximately 10%. The -- given the narrow margins of the gross model Texas contract, we will see a positive impact on margins as these services end.
Maintenance revenue is expected to decline 4% to 6%, reflecting the ongoing shift in our new software business mix to SaaS as well as the acceleration of flips in 2024 and 2025. Professional services revenue is expected to be flat to down 3% as our cloud transition drives efficiencies and implementations and allows us to limit the growth of these lower-margin revenues.
License revenues are expected to decline 18% to 20% with very few license sales to new clients. Hardware and other is also expected to decline 18% to 20%, and -- as 2024 benefited from elevated hardware sales tied to the use of ARPA funds.
Research and development expense is expected to grow more than 50% due to 3 main factors: the first, representing approximately 30 percentage points of the growth is a redeployment to R&D of development resources previously focused on support activities and expensed in cost of revenues, as we continue to transition to a SaaS-only model. This redeployment will continue over the next few years as product lines complete their transition to SaaS only.
Secondly, certain capitalized software development projects either concluded in 2024 or will conclude in 2025, resulting in more development costs being expensed and accounting for approximately 8 percentage points of the R&D growth. The remaining growth represents our incremental funding of R&D initiatives, including investments in AI. Now I'd like to turn the call back over to Lynn.

H. Lynn Moore

Thanks, Brian. 2024 was another successful year in advancing our cloud-first strategy as we delivered growth and consistent operating margin improvement tracking towards our 2030 objectives. Our sales organization continues to execute at a very high level, which was reflected in our bookings growth.
Our unified go-to-market strategy is creating substantial expansion opportunities with both new and existing clients. Our inside sales team has performed exceptionally well, representing a high-growth sales channel. We're investing across our sales channels and adding additional sales resources, including a new dedicated state sales team that will be in place this year. We have also aligned incentive compensation and commissions across Tyler in a way that has reduced barriers and facilitated more cross-selling.
We take very seriously our responsibility to be good stewards of the capital that our shareholders entrust us, which we have exhibited through our long history of disciplined financial management and prudent capital allocation. That continued to be the case in 2024. In a high interest rate environment, we fortified our balance sheet by paying off the remaining term debt associated with the NIC acquisition, reducing our net leverage to 0 at year-end. Additionally, we enhanced our financial flexibility by replacing our $500 million unsecured revolving credit facility with a new facility, extending maturity to 2029, increasing the size to $700 million with improving terms.
Our disciplined acquisition strategy focuses on opportunities that complement our existing portfolio, expand our addressable market and add technologies that can be leveraged across our product portfolio. We remain patient acquirers and are well positioned to continue to make tuck-in acquisitions while maintaining the flexibility to pursue compelling larger opportunities.
While we did not make any acquisitions in '24, I want to highlight our recent acquisition of MyGov, which closed January 31. MyGov is a leading provider of integrated community development and asset management solutions to small and midsized municipalities and currently serves approximately 150 clients with a high concentration in Texas. MyGov strengthens our public administration offering and expands our local market footprint. -- with an integrated platform that complements our extensive enterprise portfolio. We're thrilled to welcome the MyGov team and clients to Tyler.
AI continues to garner significant attention in the software space, and interest in AI from the public sector is growing. Building on our momentum and commitment to innovation, we are taking a deliberate and strategic approach to our AI strategy. centered on 3 core pillars: productivity, decision-making and service delivery.
We're separating the hype from reality by leveraging our unmatched strengths of decades of public sector experience, 13,000 clients producing critical data every day and deep collaboration with leading AI vendors like AWS, Microsoft and Google. We expect that by the end of this year, every flagship product road map will have clear AI-driven features, and we plan to preview our AI strategy to clients at our Tyler Connect user conference in May, demonstrating our commitment to innovation and empowering clients with dramatically enhanced productivity and performance.
I'd like to highlight some recently announced additions and changes to our senior leadership team that support our commitment to long-term growth and leadership development. As we enter the next phase of our cloud-first transition, we took a significant strategic step towards further enhancing our client experience. with the creation at the end of 2024 of a new Chief Client Officer role.
Our appointment of industry leader, Andrew Kahl to that position is critical to strengthening our long-term client relationships maximizing the value of our installed base and driving expansion through cross-sell and upsell opportunities. Andrew will oversee our client-centric approach across Tyler's vast public sector client base. He brings extensive technology leadership experience, having served as CEO of BackBox Software, a global category leader in the network security automation market, where he led cloud transformation and business model evolution.
In his previous positions, he held multiple client success roles and served as Chief Customer Officer at SailPoint, overseeing global customer success and partner enablement. Andrew's deep technology background and track record of driving innovation and client engagement positions us well for success as we scale our cloud initiatives and create a single, unified experience for clients who have multiple Tyler products.
Our Chief Marketing Officer, Samantha Crosby, has announced her intent to retire this June. In her 16 years with Tyler, Samantha's visionary leadership in developing our unified brand strategy and her contributions across marketing and communications have been instrumental in our growth and success. Until June, we will continue to tap at Samantha's immense experience during her transitional senior marketing adviser role and we extend our heartfelt appreciation to Samantha for her dedicated service.
In January, we named Arik Flanders as Chief Marketing Officer, succeeding Samantha. Since joining Tyler's marketing team in 2023, Arik has significantly enhanced our digital marketing operations, technology and data practices and demand generation strategies. Prior to joining Tyler, Arik gained extensive experience as an innovative leader in progressively responsible global marketing management roles with Texas Instruments.
Abby Diaz, previously our Chief Legal Officer, has been elevated to the newly created position of Chief Administrative Officer. In this expanded role, she will continue to oversee our legal team while adding responsibilities for internal audit data privacy, corporate governance and responsibility and corporate communication. This transition strengthens alignment across these critical functions and fosters an integrated approach to governance, compliance and communications.
Associate General Counsel, Bill Van Asselt, has been promoted to Chief Legal Officer and assumes direct leadership of legal team. Bill joined Tyler in 2021 through the acquisition of NIC where he served as General Counsel.
Lastly, I'm pleased to highlight that Tyler has recently been recognized by multiple leading publications for our commitment to excellence, innovation and workplace culture, including Forbes American Stream employers and Best Large Employers 2025 lists. In December, we were named AWS state or local government Partner of the Year and most recently, we were named the 2025 GovTech 100 list for the ninth consecutive year.
As we enter 2025, I'd like to repeat what I said to our Tyler team in our recent town hall. But I'm not just excited about Tyler's future, but I've never been more confident in our future. we're experiencing success in growing our high-value SaaS and differentiated transaction revenues while reducing the mix of lower margin revenues like professional services and commodity payments.
As our 2025 guidance illustrates, we're well on track to meet or exceed the 2025 targets we communicated at our 2023 Investor Day, and we remain confident in realizing our Tyler 2030 vision. I look forward to reporting on our progress during the coming year.
Now I'd like to open up the line for Q&A.

Question and Answer Session

Operator

(Operator Instructions). Alexei Gogolev, JPMorgan.

Alexei Gogolev

Congratulations with the meeting results. Lynn, could I first start with your payment comments and the comments that Brian made, it clearly appears that you are prioritizing profitability within payments. Your -- as you mentioned, you're moving away from commoditized products. Could you perhaps elaborate on the announcement made by Fiserv at their recent earnings call around the expansion of their payments partnership with Tyler.
Would does that imply longer term for your partnerships with other third parties? And do you think that expansion of the Fiserv partnership could benefit your margin outlook?

H. Lynn Moore

Yes. Thanks, Alex. That was -- there's a lot in there. I'll try to hit all the points. If not, I'm sure Brian or someone else will catch up.
I think our strategy at Tyler has always been to not really pursue commodity payments. And I think when you look back, pre Tyler's acquisition of NIC, I think the viewpoint there was more sort of any payments deal was a good deal. And that's not really what we're pursuing. We don't really want to pursue those pure payment contracts it's commoditized pricing, it's low margin, it's not sticky. They come up for rebid.
It's a race to the bottom.
We want to be there where we have a differentiated offering that we connect to our back-office systems, that we do reporting that we can drive higher margins and drive higher revenue. So I think that's sort of been where we've been the last couple of years. And I don't think that's changed.
As Brian mentioned in the comments, we inherited the Texas contract. We were happy to have the Texas contract. It showed our relationship with Texas, it showed our ability to do payment processing. But again, there was no additional add-on or stickiness that we were bringing with that.
As it relates to Fiserv, Fiserve is one of our larger payment processors. They were -- had a long-standing relationship with NIC prior to our acquisition. They primarily or exclusively right now serve our payment processing in the state market with NIC. What Fiserv does is they provide a lot of technology and I think that's really what you're seeing from that relationship is it's an opportunity for us to really tap into some of the technology that they deliver.
As right now, it does not impact our other payment processing vendors. We use a handful of other ones. But it's sort of -- when I look at payment processing, I almost think back about how we were when we made our decision to go to the cloud and AWS and really to exit our data centers.
When you think about the things we used to talk about, Tyler running its own data sets, we're not in the data center business. And we're not really in the payment processing business. And we're not going to invest in some of the technology around there the way that some of the core payment processors do. I mean we have some of that, and we do invest. But I think going forward, being able to leverage broader technology and capabilities that can help our client base around things like enhanced fraud protection and crypto currency and things like that.
So we're looking to deepen our relationships with payment processing providers so that we can leverage the things that they're really good at, and we can leverage the things that we're good at. and it's I think part of your question was, which will ultimately drive higher margins for Tyler.

Alexei Gogolev

Appreciate it, Lynn. And speaking about increases in investments based on what Brian suggested, and what you said, you're clearly investing in AI. So of that portion that is incremental this year and looking forward to seeing those products at the May conference. How much of that is coming from AWS, which I'm assuming is from your main partner that you're collaborating with? And are there any joint investments that you're doing or joint products that you're hoping to introduce?

H. Lynn Moore

Well, that's a good question. We obviously partner with AWS on a lot of things. Yes, they are helping us with road maps on not just AI, but just even other things with respect to our cloud initiative. We do have a number of investments in our 2025 plan around AI. Those are both new head count, but also repurposing some of our existing head count.
Again, as I mentioned in my remarks, we're going to have all of our major applications will have some sort of AI component and feature, and we're going to unveil some of those or a lot of those that connect this spring.

Operator

Joshua Reilly, Needham & Company.

Joshua Reilly

If we look at the guidance of down 4% to 6% on maintenance revenue, clearly, you have some line of sight around migrations to kind of provide this revenue guidance that's down a little bit more this year. Can you help us understand the level of visibility you have right now on migrations for the year to provide that guidance? And are these migrations broad-based? Or is there a particular product line that's accelerating the migrations?

Brian Miller

Yes. I think the migrations are generally pretty broad-based. Each product has a different sort of road map and time line for its customer base. And as we get further down the road, we generally have more visibility over that. I'd say public safety is certainly an area where we've seen a pretty rapid increase in the desire to be in the cloud, both from new customers and existing on-premises customers.
So I guess on a percentage basis, you're probably seeing more of an increase in the public safety flips, but it's really across all customers and all product lines. And we've said that right now, we still sort of envision a bell shaped curve over the next several years as we move towards those long-term targets. We think '27 and '28 will probably be those peak years, but we'll continue to see a higher level of flips in '25 than we did in '24, and that continue on through '26, '27, '28.
So we have decent visibility. Sometimes the -- we're engaged with a large number of our customers around the process of flipping. We've talked in the past about some of the things like cybersecurity attack, ransomware attacks. Their challenges in running their own internal networks and data centers, the replacement of hardware, all those things as factors that drive them to want to flip to the cloud as well as our continued move to the cloud and focus there, the release of new features that are sometimes only available in the cloud.
So all those things are contributing to that increased momentum towards slips. We have a range. So sometimes the timing of when those flips actually sign and then that lag from when they sign to when they're actually live is a factor in where we perform in that range. But I'd say we have pretty decent visibility over that.

Operator

Ken Wong, Oppenheimer.

Ken Wong

Brian, I wanted to ask about cash flows, recognizing that this was a particularly strong cash flow year, which kind of creates the tougher comp into '25. But as we kind of map out our models going forward, should we assume that some of the strength this year is going to be a drag into future out years? Or just trying to get a sense for kind of how we should kind of when we should start to kind of ramp up the cash flow growth again.

Brian Miller

Yes. We called out the 2 items that totaled around $55 million of incremental cash flow in the fourth quarter, the Kentucky prepayment, which we talked about last quarter. that's a very unusual sort of an item where with the 6-year prepayment.
And then the timing of the float around some of the client money that flows through us for disbursements. That is a recurring item, but it was unusually high from some new customers at the end of -- right at the end of December, so that incremental $25 million or so kind of gave us a boost. But if it happens 2 days later, it would have been in next year's cash flow.
So sort of if you take those 2 items and sort of set them aside, our normalized -- what I sort of call a normalized cash flow margin would have been 24.3% for 2024, which is still above what we had targeted and what our guidance was at the beginning of the year. And so that would imply -- say, at the midpoint of our guidance for 2025, that would imply another 100 basis points of margin expansion, free cash flow margin expansion in 2025.
So -- so some of the stuff has been pulled forward. We're seeing certainly some of the margin benefits sooner. But I think we'll continue to progress towards those 2030 targets that we talked about, high 20s, 30% sort of range of free cash flow margins. So we're getting there a little faster, but I think we still have an upward trajectory and sort of normalize that still implies some expansion next year.

Operator

Kirk Materne, Evercore ISI.

This is Bill on for Kirk. The prepared commentary mentioned strong cross-sell momentum. Are there specific areas experiencing heightened cross-sell activity?

H. Lynn Moore

Yes, Bill, I think -- I don't know that I would say anything specific. It's really across all of our product lines. Some of the things that we've done in the last couple of years around -- I mentioned in the prepared remarks around sales comp and incentives. Other things we -- internal 1 pile initiative we've done have really been fueling this.
But look, our sales teams were just really knocking it out of the park. Last year was a really great sales year. Generally speaking, if you look across Tyler as a whole, we generally were either at or exceeded our quotas for the year, which is really encouraging.
What's exciting about me, I mentioned in my remarks about being excited for the future, not only is it how we're performing against the metrics that we set out at Investor Day. But we're also now able to make some more investments into Tyler that are going to keep fueling that growth without sacrificing margins, we are making some additional investments in R&D, although that's not the primary portion of the change there.
But we're making some investments in our sales teams. We're making investments across our inside sales teams. I mentioned the creation of a new state sales team. We've done things and looked at territories and quotas. So there's a lot of stuff going on right now that's exciting, but it's really across the board at Tyler.

Operator

Saket Kalia, Barclays.

Saket Kalia

Okay. Great. Lynn, maybe for you, I just wanted to flush out the question on DOGE, just a little bit more. Federal is clearly a small part of Tyler's business. I mean I think you said it's probably 5% or less, right?
But I was wondering if you could speak to just roughly how much of an average state or local government budget comes from federal funding versus other sources like real estate taxes. And I know you spend a lot of time with customers. As you speak to customers, what are they saying about DOGE, if anything, as they think about investing in tools like Tyler?

H. Lynn Moore

Yes, it's a good question. I don't know that I have the -- Brian, you have that number.

Brian Miller

Yes, I've got some sort of high-level averages on where government revenues come from. And at the local level, there's very, very little federal funding. There can be some grants around specific things. And generally, on national average, at a local level, about 14% of their revenues come from state funding, which can include some trickle down from federal. But almost half of their revenues are from local taxes and another 17% from general charges like licensing and those sorts of things.
So very, very little funding at the local level from federal revenues.
And at the county level, there's roughly 1/4 of their budgets tend to come from state funding, which, again, can include some trickle down from federal. But again, at the county level, mostly 40% or more from local taxes. So not a whole lot that gets down to the local level, which is the vast majority of our revenues.

H. Lynn Moore

Yes. I'd just echo the comments I made in the opening remarks, which I view it, and I think Tyler views it as really an opportunity, not a risk. Yes, there's a big splash going on out there right now, but the crux of that is how do we make government more efficient, how do we make sure we're not wasting dollars.
You look at -- I mentioned this priority-based budgeting deals we did in Q4 with the City of L.A. That's what that solution is all about. We signed a $1.2 million ARR deal with the City of L.A. for that offering. So to me, I'm not hearing from our clients that that's going to create a pause in spending.
What I believe it's going to do is create more partnership opportunities and then looking for us to help -- to continue to help them finds ways to be more efficient, which is really our -- been our business model for -- since I've been at Tyler 26.5 years. So I don't see that as a headwind. I see it as opportunity going forward.

Operator

Alex Zukin, Wolfe.

Alex Zukin

Congrats on another great quarter. Maybe Lynn, just first for you. Can you just maybe -- you touched on this in the prepared remarks, but maybe go a little bit deeper on just the quality of the demand environment, the pipeline going into this year? Because it seems like, again, specifically on the SaaS line, it continues to outperform your expectation. I think you're even now guiding to an acceleration for next year.
So what's been driving this like faster than expected or faster than you anticipated conversion story? And how does AI play into this mix of maybe in addition to the cyber threats that have accelerated some of these migrations, actually, also layering on top of that as a driver for the increased velocity of those conversions.

H. Lynn Moore

Yes, Alex, there's a lot there. I just say generally, and we've been saying this for some time, which is really budgets are healthy and stable. Leading indicators are all steady. Our competitiveness remains strong. I just touched on it a couple of questions ago.
Our sales team continues to execute at a really, really high level. And the more that we are getting better at our story of 1 Tyler and cross-selling and divisions helping other divisions sell and move product it gains its own momentum.
And then you're seeing things in the acceleration of SaaS, we've talked about public safety and the acceleration there. We often talk about how our clients, they don't compete with each other. In fact, they share information with each other. And one of the things we've always been really, really good at is getting clients up and live in how we deal with our clients, whether it's a flip or a new client. And the more that our clients see us perform that and the efficiencies that start coming to the client and the more that they talk, the more demand it creates for us and our services.
So to me, it's a bit of a mini flywheel. We just continue that we're building on our own momentum. But also, look, it starts with our people. It starts with really excellent sales execution, and its excellent execution from our implementation people, from our services, from our support often down the board. It's the stuff we don't spend enough time talking about it, but it's the stuff that really makes Tyler go and I couldn't be more proud of our people for driving that kind of success.

Brian Miller

And I'd just add that at this point, I don't think AI is really a big driver of either flips or new business. I think with most things, government doesn't want to be the first adopters, but a lot of our clients are very curious and want to know more about AI. They're looking for us in many cases to help show them the way that AI can increase productivity and make them more efficient.
And as Lynn said, we'll be talking about that at our user conference coming up in May, and we're making investments there. We have a story in each of our major products. But at this point, I don't think it's a significant factor in that cloud acceleration. But down the road, it will certainly be another area that provides us with a competitive advantage.

Alex Zukin

Excellent. And then, Brian, maybe on the R&D investment side, I mean ever since I started covering the company, I think I've been waiting for that to come out of the cost of goods line and make its way on to the R&D line. Maybe -- just maybe dive a little deeper on the trajectory that you see as the maintenance stream continues to kind of -- as those conversions pick up, how should we think about that R&D line even maybe beyond just this year taking on a different shape over the course of the next few years?

Brian Miller

Yes. There's -- talk about roughly there's $100 million of development expense that's in cost of sales, this year, about $35 million, we believe, will be redeployed to the R&D line, and that's really tied to as individual products and development teams reach certain points where they're more cloud focused and less focused on support and development around existing on-prem products. So that will take place over the next several years. The balance of that or a big part of the balance of that $100 million moving and being redeployed at the R&D line, I'm not sure exactly how that trajectory will play out, but we just -- we'll see that over the next few years, but probably more front-end loaded over the next, let's call it, 3 to 4 years.

H. Lynn Moore

And Michael, to be clear, while the bulk of this is cost of sales, we are adding R&D people. I mentioned it earlier, we were making some investments in AI. We are making some other competitive investments across some of our core applications. So it's not just a shift that we are also increasing our investment in R&D.

Operator

Michael Turrin, Wells Fargo.

Michael Turrin

The commentary throughout the call, the 4Q results show an uptick and SaaS momentum, some of the growth metrics. The initial '25 guide for overall growth, Brian, of 8.5%, doesn't at least appear to fully capture some of that momentum. So maybe just speak a bit more to the mix of what you're seeing across segments, how that impacts total growth. And is there any change to the guidance approach you're embedding for '25 here at all?

Brian Miller

There's not really a change to the approach. One thing we'd point out is -- and we did give a little bit more information around the ranges of growth expected for each of the major categories. And clearly, the growth is more on the high-value and higher-margin revenues.
So SaaS revenues, that range is up 21% to 24%, which is kind of consistent with what we've seen in terms of bookings growth this year in kind of that low 20s. And so as that turns into revenues as those deals get implemented and the customers go live, the flips take place, that kind of mirrors the kind of growth we've seen in bookings.
Transactions up 10% to 12%, that does encompass the roughly $10 million decline from the wind down of the Texas agreement. So excluding that, our -- and excluding the impact of the decline in merchant fees that goes along with that, our transaction growth would be more up than the mid- to upper teens.
Maintenance is going down as we expected with the flips and professional services, it's going down slightly as -- which is a good thing given the margins around professional services and our ability to be more efficient around implementation.
So I'd say the philosophy around our guidance is really not changed, and we give a range that encompasses what we believe are the various risks and opportunities embedded in there and we would expect to fall within that range.

H. Lynn Moore

Mike, I'd add -- and sorry, Alex, I think I called you Michael on the last question, I apologize for that. Just to echo what Brian said, look, our quality revenue lines are actually the ones that are going to drive our growth. Those are the ones we focused on Investor Day. SaaS and transactions.
There is a little bit of -- there is some noise in this year's financials from the Texas payments. That's actually going to show up a little bit like last year. If you pull out those merchant fees, we're growing at our 10% target, which is good. But again, if you look at the metrics that we shared, things to focus on at Investor Day, they're tracking either at or above where we said they'd be 2 years ago, and that's all extremely encouraging.

Michael Turrin

That's very helpful.

Operator

Charles Strauzer, CJS Securities, Inc.

Charles S. Strauzer

Brian, maybe for you, can you say shed some light on the abnormally high stock comp implied in the guidance?

Brian Miller

Yes. the stock comp. It goes up a bit next year, mostly related to expectations, the higher level, higher stock price that we're going into the year with relative to where we were last year as the stock grows through the year. But generally, the the dilution that we're going to see from the -- from new issues of stock compensation is pretty modest. There is an impact from the convert in the dilution. But stock comp should be really mostly related to just the higher stock price.

H. Lynn Moore

Yes. So Charlie, if you look at this year versus last year, I think our plan that we're going to probably experience somewhere around $0.28 to $0.30 of dilution year-over-year. That's a combination of -- we obviously had a nice run on the stock last year. number of option exercises that will now have the full weight of the year plus the full value of the convert.
If you step back and look at our compensation plans and how we do things at Tyler, you'll recall that in 2022, we stopped issuing options and want to purely share-based mostly performance-based and some RSUs. On an annual basis, the number of shares that will be approved, that were approved by the Board and that will be issued this year is less than on a net share issuance, less than 0.4% of our outstanding.
So it's something I watch carefully every year. I think from a technology company perspective, our dilution is pretty modest. and I would expect that to continue going forward.

Charles S. Strauzer

Great. Thanks for the clarification.

Operator

Clarke Jeffries, Piper Sandler.

Clarke Jeffries

Brian and Lynn, I'm reflecting on the initial free cash flow guide you had for 2025 at the Analyst Day. That was a midpoint of 18%. And I think sitting here less than 2 years later, we're over 700 basis points higher than that original estimate. And so I guess I wanted to ask the question, reflecting on that what has been the most significant outperformance?
And with some of these items that still seem like margin tailwinds that are pretty controllable here over the next few years, reduction of commodity payments, maybe scaling some of those R&D costs that might be accelerating in 2025 and then the data center closure, why aren't long-term margins going higher in your mind as we get to the later part of those long-term targets for 2030?

H. Lynn Moore

Well, Clarke, I think that's a fair question. And I would say that we're -- I'll repeat what I said earlier. I'm really confident in Tyler's future. And we set forth targets 2 years ago. We've kept our eye on the ball.
We have outperformed those targets, as you mentioned, both from, to me, SaaS growth perspective and even transactions but also from a margin perspective, and we're starting to see those. I'm not sitting here today ready to adjust our 2030 targets. I'm just -- I'm really happy with where we sit here in '25, as I told the management team, we have to hit our '25 targets and we're doing that. And again, the entire management team is focused on it.
We will -- when we look out 2 years from now, 3 years from now and maybe adjust those, we might -- I don't want to get ahead of our skis. We still have a lot of initiatives going on within Tyler. Again, I'm excited about all the the signs that we're seeing out there, some of the things that you pointed to. But I'm not ready to declare that victory on our 2030 Investor Day now is time to up the any. We just want to keep executing and moving forward.

Brian Miller

And I think cash flow, as you pointed out, we are well ahead of the target that we originally set out for 2025. I think we had some assumptions there around things like cash taxes, working capital and we've been very effective about managing those. We've had effective management of receivables that's given us an impact sooner.
And then clearly, the effect we're also ahead on margins and that flows through to cash flow. So A lot of that is a pull ahead. But as Lynn said, that makes us highly confident of those longer-term targets as well. And as we move down the road, we'll look at adjusting those if that's appropriate.

Charles S. Strauzer

Very much -- and absolutely, I mean, the last 2 years, a very encouraging result.

Operator

Rob Oliver, Baird.

Robert Oliver

Great. Brian, my question is around the cloud products. I appreciate that you guys have been very methodical about laying out milestones for the Street and hitting those milestones and a lot is going on behind the scenes.
I was wondering if you could update us -- on you mentioned you've made progress in '24. If you could update us on where we are with the cloud optimization of your products? And what sort of milestones we should be looking for as the investment community over the next couple of years to get fully cloud optimized?

H. Lynn Moore

Yes. I don't know that I'm ready to put out a specific metric. What I can tell you is sitting here today in '25, in February '25, I'm really pleased with where we are in our cloud transition, which includes the optimization of our products. There's still more room to go. I'm really pleased with where we are on version consolidation.
If you would have told me 3 years ago, that some of our core applications, for example, our enterprise ERP application, over 95%, 97% of our clients are on a single version, Enterprise Justice. I think we're north of 75% on a single version. These are things that were big moves, and I wasn't quite sure when we would get there. And to me, we're ahead of schedule. And all of that starts to feed into each other.
We're going to continue to make optimizations in the cloud, but we're also going to continue our efficiencies and how we deliver the software as we continue to evolve into a more continuous improvement, continuous delivery. That's going to take time. but that is part of our goals. And I think as you look out to later part of this decade, those are big milestones is when we really start moving down into synchronized cadence releases across our client base, across our major products, and we're making progress towards those goals.

Operator

Jonathan Ho, William Blair.

Jonathan Ho

Congrats on the strong results. Is there a way for us to think about the impact that ARPA funding has had? And going forward, is there potentially any impact to agency spending confidence if this starts to wind down?

H. Lynn Moore

We've talked about a lot over the last couple of years, Jonathan. ARPA funding has been around and in the background, it hasn't necessarily specifically driven a lot of deals, although I will say that we got a few SaaS deals signed at the end of the quarter that were on a shorter time fuse. We were going to win those deals anyway. Those were probably going to be Q1 deals that got a little bit accelerated because there was some ARPA funding.
You saw it -- we talked about it some last year in our hardware business, our school transportation business. One reason why our hardware line is going down this year, again, a low margin line. I think generally, I would more point to my comments of the general environment and the general health of the state budget -- state and local budgets, excuse me, and where we sit today and our competitiveness.
I think it's been there. I don't -- if you're I think part of your question is, is it now -- is it a headwind going forward? And I don't believe it is. And there's still -- even places where there were ARPA funds allocated, I believe there's still time for them to spend those. They had to earmark them.
But again, I don't -- I've never viewed that as a material part of Tyler's performance over the last 4 to 5 years. It's there on the edges. And so therefore, I also don't view it as a headwind going forward and -- and doesn't change my confidence in our near-term or long-term sales projections.

Operator

Terry Tillman, Truist Securities.

Terrell Tillman

It is a single question, but it's got a little bit of multiple tentacles to it. All this narrative around DOGE. What about some of that actually trickling down to some of these states that we're hearing about maybe then thinking about efficiency incrementally and digitizing things. Are you hearing about anabolism increased conversations because of maybe this trickling down?
And then the second part of this is, when you look at '25 and just based on what you're seeing in terms of the pipeline, do you see any meaningful shift between just the composition of your business from local government versus state level?

H. Lynn Moore

I would say, Max to the DOGE question, no, we're not really hearing anything yet. And it's -- I don't really expect it to do anything other than to maybe spur more conversation around technology that can help them become more efficient. DOGE is still relatively new. All that was talked about before the new administration actually took over but it's still relatively new. And our clients, at least that I know of are not talking about it.
I think as you look generally in '25 and beyond, how we look at sales, I think it's still pretty consistent across the board, but I would -- I'd go back to my comment in the prepared remarks. Look, we have -- we are in the midst of creating a new dedicated state sales team. 0It's something new to Tyler. It's going to be -- it's something I'm excited about. So I think we will start to see more product go in.
But part of the mission of that sales team is really about representing the entire Tyler portfolio, where it's our cost solutions, our payments, our application platform. it's going to be geared at not only we have state enterprise contracts, but also looking at new states, looking beyond our state enterprise contracts, look it's going to take time for that to ramp up. I don't necessarily expect significant variance, but it's just another sales avenue that we're teeing up and investing in starting in '25 that will take time to see meaningful results.

Operator

Mark Schappel, Loop Capital Markets.

Mark Schappel

Lynn, I just wanted to ask about your priority-based budgeting solution. which appears to be off to a really strong start given the wins in the quarter. I was wondering if you could just provide an example or to some public sector use cases that you're seeing the customers adopt around Resource X.

H. Lynn Moore

Yes. What it does is it's a little bit different than sort of traditional line item budgeting, and it sort of looks -- it uses AI, it looks at the cost of all the programs that are out there, kind of lines of budgets and programs and scores to those that really they look at an organization's priorities and sort of reshift dollars. It's relatively new. One of the things that we were excited about when we bought it is Chris Fabian, the founder, he's sort of known as the leader, really the leader in public sector around priority-based budgeting and he is the expert.
And it's something that I think we can take and transport across our client base. I think it's another example on our perfect tuck-in acquisitions. And when we see large organizations like L.A. County or Kansas City, taking this solution, it's pretty meaningful. We're able to do demos and fairly quickly show where organizations can achieve some real savings. There's been a lot of talk around DOGE today. I can't think of a solution that we have that would be more in line with DOGE than our priority-based budgeting solution.

Operator

Gabriela Borges, Goldman Sachs.

Gabriela Borges

I wanted to ask the Texas payments question in a slightly different way. Live and Brian, when you look at your revenue mix holistically, what percentage of business looks like the Texas payments business, meaning it's more commodity, it's low margin, it's business that either you can focus on up-leveling or perhaps at the time you might consider working away from. Give us a sense of what sort of -- what the size of that quantum of business could look like today and where that could go longer term?

H. Lynn Moore

Yes. I think it's pretty small. Brian is looking for the numbers. Again, this is -- this was something we inherited with the NIC acquisition. It's not been a strategic focus for Tyler. When we talked earlier about our relationship with other payment providers. These are opportunities where we might be able to partner with them where they can provide those types of services, and we can come on and do the types of things around that, that make our offering differentiated.
I think we talked a couple of years ago and it was something that was in the works when we acquired NIC. We talked about the IRS contract. That was another example of a pure payments, and we had won that contract, that got protested, and we subsequently lost it. We built that into our models, but it was again -- that was a north of a $50 million a year revenue with margins comparable to Texas. While we were disappointed that we lost it, really, it wasn't a strategic initiative for us. It's not a place we want to grow and I wouldn't expect that going forward, Brian, do you have --?

Brian Miller

Yes. We really -- we have 2 other enterprise states where we have separate payment contracts from the enterprise agreement, but they are states where we provide a lot of other portal services, other digital government services. It's just the payments contracts are separate. We have 1 other state, Florida, which is a payments-only contract, but it has a lot of differences from Texas. We have a lot of other value-added services that we provide there.
And it's a very different kind of an arrangement in Texas.
Other than that, we really don't have a lot of pure what we kind of call commoditized payments business. Generally, it's either at the state level where it's part of an enterprise agreement where we're providing a lot of services, many of which have payments associated with them or now with our focus on the local level, integrating it with our back-office software solutions and proprietary solutions that add that value.

H. Lynn Moore

And I think just to [imply] that, Gabriela. As you know, a year ago, I changed all of our senior executive, executive comp -- when we look at our long-term performance drivers around margin and ARR to exclude the impact of merchant fees. Because it is -- we do not want to pursue these contracts which could theoretically increase our ARR but decrease our margins.
So when I look internally at how I look at the business, I have all my presentations show me with and without merchant fees because that's really to me showing the health of the business. When I think about Texas and its impact this year. I just want to remind you that this is something that's winding down this year, but we will continue to see the same headwind next year on a top line basis. But excluding those merchant fees, like, as we said earlier, Tyler is growing at right at 10%. Our transactions are growing between 15% and 17% and -- that shows the health of the business and where we're strategically going in the future.

Operator

There are no further questions at this time. With that, I will now turn the call back over to Lynn Moore, Chief Executive Officer, for final closing remarks. Please go ahead.

H. Lynn Moore

Thanks, Gavin, and thanks, everybody, for joining us today. If you have any other questions, please feel free to contact Brian Miller or myself. Thanks again, and have a great day.

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes your conference call. We thank you for participating and ask that you please disconnect your lines.