Parsons Corporation stock

Parsons Corporation profile

By Jonathan Teplitsky · reviewed against primary sources · updated September 4, 2026.

Parsons Corporation is a Virginia-based government services and engineering contractor. Its Federal Solutions segment handles the missile-defense systems engineering and air-base air-defense integration work that supports, but is not part of, the missiles and radars themselves.

What Parsons Corporation does

Parsons Corporation sells engineering, integration, and technical-support services to defense and civilian agencies. It does not build the missiles, radars, or aircraft those agencies operate. Parsons was founded in 1944 and is based in Chantilly, Virginia. It runs two segments. Federal Solutions covers missile defense, cybersecurity, C5ISR, space situational awareness, and intelligence work. Critical Infrastructure covers physical and digital infrastructure engineering, entirely outside defense. Parsons sells services, not hardware. Its revenue tracks staffed contract work and multi-year task orders rather than unit deliveries, so backlog and contract-ceiling figures end up far more informative than any single award headline.

The product lines that define the company for research purposes:

TEAMS-Next Missile Defense System Engineering
Air Base Air Defense (ABAD) integration
SHIELD missile-defense IDIQ
COMET missile and space intelligence support

This profile is qualitative by design. It carries no share price, no price target, no valuation multiple, and no rating — those change faster than any page can honestly track, and the filings linked below are the authoritative source for them.

Parsons Corporation drone lineup

The current public product record does not identify a complete aircraft lineup.

No complete-aircraft offering is catalogued for this company; it is tracked here as an unmanned-systems enabler.

Statuses are editorial classifications from the company’s current public catalog: active means currently presented for sale, delivery, or program work; development means publicly disclosed but not a mature production offering; legacy means retained for historical or installed-fleet coverage.

Recent contracts & awards

A dated log of the specific contracts, orders, funding, and deployments reported for Parsons Corporation, each tied to its primary source. This is a record of what was announced — a "selection", "award", or "partnership" is not the same as obligated money, so read each source before treating a figure as revenue. No figure appears here unless a source reported it.

ContractSep 3, 2026$70M
Awarded $70 million Air Base Air Defense task order for Europe and Africa
The US Air Force awarded Parsons a $70 million ceiling task order under its Air Base Air Defense contract, covering integration, testing, deployment, maintenance, and operational-transition support across US Air Forces in Europe and Africa, with a four-year base period plus three 12-month options. A ceiling value is the maximum the task order could pay out, not a guaranteed sum.
Parsons investor relations — Air Base Air Defense capabilities award
ContractAug 24, 2026$514M
Secures $514 million Missile Defense Agency contract option
The Missile Defense Agency exercised a $514 million, two-year contract option under Parsons' TEAMS-Next Missile Defense System Engineering contract, first awarded in 2021, extending Parsons' role providing systems-engineering and technical support to the agency.
GlobeNewswire — Parsons secures $514 million Missile Defense Agency contract option

Where Parsons Corporation sits in the value chain

Parsons Corporation is an enabler: it supplies inputs to the companies that build complete systems, so its demand is spread across many platforms instead of concentrated in any single program.

Its disclosed activity spans counter-UAS. That placement is the single most useful thing to fix in your head before reading any coverage, because the same headline means different things at different layers: a large platform award is transformative for a pure-play, material but diluted for a diversified contractor, and only indirectly relevant to a component supplier whose exposure arrives later as build-rate demand. Retail coverage routinely applies one story to all three layers at once. For the layer-by-layer comparison across the sector, see the drone stocks research shortlist and the list of publicly traded drone companies.

Parsons' main competitors

In missile-defense and C5ISR technical services, Parsons competes most directly with other government-services integrators: Leidos, Booz Allen Hamilton, and SAIC. It does not compete head-on with hardware primes such as Lockheed Martin or RTX, which build the interceptors and radars Parsons' engineers help integrate and test. Selection between the services competitors usually comes down to two things: cleared-staff availability, and incumbency on a specific program. The underlying technical work is often similar across bidders.

Failure mode: a services contractor without its own hardware

Parsons carries less product-concentration risk than a single-platform manufacturer. Its revenue is spread across many task orders, not tied to one system's production rate. The trade-off runs the other way, though. Parsons does not build a proprietary product. So a customer can move the same integration or engineering work to a competitor at the next re-compete. That is far easier than switching away from a manufacturer's already-fielded hardware. Watching win rates on contract re-competes, not just new-award headlines, is the more reliable signal for this kind of business.

What to watch

The signals worth tracking are structural, not price-based — they tell you whether the business is changing shape, which is what eventually shows up in the numbers.

The gap between an IDIQ contract ceiling, such as the reported $151 billion SHIELD vehicle, and the task orders actually issued under it, since a ceiling is a maximum possible value across every awardee, not money owed to Parsons.
Whether Federal Solutions or Critical Infrastructure is growing faster in a given quarter, since missile-defense and air-defense demand affects only the Federal Solutions half of the business.
Renewal outcomes on Parsons' existing multi-year contracts, such as the TEAMS-Next Missile Defense System Engineering award first made in 2021, since a services contractor's revenue depends more on retaining incumbent work than on winning new logos.
Backlog reported in Parsons' own quarterly filings against its $9.3 billion figure disclosed for the second quarter of 2026, to see whether backlog is converting to recognized revenue on the pace management has guided to.

How to research Parsons Corporation

Every question below has one authoritative source, and using the wrong source is how most retail research goes wrong.

Research question	Where the answer lives	What to look for
How much of this is really drones?	Segment tables in the annual filing	Whether unmanned systems are reported as their own segment or buried inside a larger one.
Is the revenue repeatable?	Revenue-recognition policy and backlog discussion	Recurring sustainment, services, or subscription language versus one-time hardware sales.
Is a win real money?	Official DoD contract announcements	Contract type, awarding command, and whether the amount announced is obligated or a ceiling.
Can the balance sheet fund the plan?	Liquidity discussion and share-count disclosure	Dilution history and cash runway relative to the manufacturing scale-up being promised.

Parsons' investor relations site and its SEC filings are the primary source for segment-level revenue and backlog. A single contract-award press release does not establish what share of the business it represents.
The Missile Defense Agency's own contract announcements and the Pentagon's official contract-award listings confirm award amounts and awarding commands independent of a company's own release.
An IDIQ ceiling value, like the reported $151 billion SHIELD contract, should be read against the Federal Acquisition Regulation's definition of an indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity vehicle: it is a not-to-exceed pool shared across every company holding a position on it, not a single-company award.
Compare Parsons' technical-services model with platform-building defense primes on the defense contractor stocks hub, since the two business types respond differently to the same procurement headline.

One failure mode is worth naming explicitly: a company announcement describing a "selection", "award", or "partnership" is not the same as obligated money, and the two are easy to conflate because they use the same vocabulary. Check the filing before treating either as revenue. Our full approach is documented on the methodology page.

Parsons Corporation FAQ

What does Parsons Corporation do?

Parsons Corporation sells engineering, integration, and technical-support services to defense and civilian agencies.

Is Parsons Corporation publicly traded?

Parsons Corporation trades as PSN on NYSE. Listing status is not a quality signal, and nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell it.

What should investors watch with Parsons Corporation?

The gap between an IDIQ contract ceiling, such as the reported $151 billion SHIELD vehicle, and the task orders actually issued under it, since a ceiling is a maximum possible value across every awardee, not money owed to Parsons.

Where can I research Parsons Corporation directly?

Go to the primary sources: Parsons Corporation (official site), Parsons investor relations, Parsons SEC filings. Avoid aggregator summaries when the filing itself is available.

Does Parsons Corporation build missiles or radars itself?

No. Parsons provides systems engineering, integration, and technical-support services for missile-defense and air-defense programs. The missiles, interceptors, and radars themselves are built by hardware primes such as Lockheed Martin and RTX.

What is the difference between Parsons' two business segments?

Federal Solutions covers defense and intelligence work, including missile defense, cybersecurity, and C5ISR. Critical Infrastructure covers civilian physical and digital infrastructure engineering, unrelated to defense contracts.