Carlos Rodriguez
President and Chief Executive Officer at Automatic Data Processing
Thank you, Danny, and thank you, everyone, for joining our call. We reported very strong fourth quarter results, including 11% revenue growth and 5% adjusted diluted EPS growth, capping a year in which revenue and margin outperformed our expectations in every quarter. For the full year, we delivered 3% revenue growth, the high end of our guidance range. And I'm happy to say we reached $15 billion in revenue, a big milestone for the company. As we've discussed all year, we took a consistent approach to investing this year while also prudently managing expenses. As a result, our adjusted EBIT margin was down only slightly, and we were able to deliver 2% adjusted diluted EPS growth for the year, ahead of our guidance and well ahead of our expectations at the start of the year. I'll first cover some highlights from the quarter.
Our new business bookings results were very strong, and our momentum in the market continues to build. Compared to last year's fourth quarter, we grew our Employer Services new business bookings by 174%, which was slightly ahead of our expectations. And for the full year, we delivered 23% growth in ES bookings, towards the higher end of our guidance. We are very pleased with this outcome from our sales team, which booked $1.5 billion in new business in a year with a high degree of economic uncertainty. This full year ES bookings performance represented an average quota carrier productivity level of roughly 90% of our fiscal 2019 pre-pandemic levels when we delivered $1.6 billion in ES bookings. And our sales productivity continued to trend favorably in Q4. At this point, most of our U.S. PEO quota carriers have conducted some in-person meetings, and we expect that to keep trending positively as our clients and prospects show increasing preference for doing so.
We also reopened additional sales offices in this quarter, and our current plan is to have most of our major U.S. sales offices back open by the end of September. Our retention was likewise an area of very strong performance with better-than-expected fourth quarter results. Our ES segment experienced a full year increase of 170 basis points to a record 92.2% retention. Our PEO segment also experienced record retention for the year. And as we've seen all year long, client satisfaction remained incredibly high. Kathleen will share how we have approached our assumptions for next year's retention, but in Q4, the trends remained strong. In addition to impressive retention performance, our PEO continued to benefit from the overall resilience of our client base. And in the quarter, we had 12% revenue growth, driving us to 7% full year growth, which was ahead of our expectations and guidance.
This was a result of record retention as well as stronger hiring and payroll trends within our PEO, which we believe reflects the very high quality of our client base. And our ES pays-per-control turned positive in the quarter with 8% growth. This was in line with our expectations, and we continue to see some gradual rehiring amid what seems like a supply-constrained labor market. For the full year, we ended up rounding to negative 3% pays-per-control growth, right in the middle of our guidance range and the assumption that we held all year long. During the quarter, we also continued to advance our market-leading solutions and achieved some new milestones I'd like to highlight. I'm excited to announce that this quarter, we launched and began rolling out a new user experience for RUN, representing the most comprehensive refresh we've done since its launch. RUN is already the leading solution in the market with 750,000 clients that use it to help with payroll, time, HR, insurance, retirement and other means.
It's a powerful HCM product, and we look forward to maintaining its positive momentum. We're also looking forward to rolling out similar UX refreshes on our other major platforms in the near future. This year, we also made a number of enhancements to our workforce management solutions. Workforce management, which includes time, attendance and scheduling offerings, represents one of the most critical parts of our HCM suite. This year, we launched timekeeping plus scheduling, an entirely new native solution for the RUN platform. And for our Workforce Now platform, we rolled out advanced scheduling, enabling clients to perform more complex workforce management tasks such as skills-based scheduling.
I'm also proud to share that this quarter, we reached 100,000 workforce management clients for the first time as the pandemic reinforced the need for robust workforce management solutions for our clients while they navigate the new norm of increasingly flexible schedules and work arrangements. Our suite of HRO solutions also continued to deliver steady growth for us this year. I already mentioned the strength in our PEO business, which had its average worksite employee count grow to 616,000, up 12% from last year's count and which now serves 14,500 businesses. And in addition to these employees covered by our PEO, we have over two million client employees on our other HRO solutions within our Employer Services segment where we've seen robust demand all year long as clients look for ways to outsource parts of their HR function to a best-in-class provider like ADP.
Also, this quarter, we enhanced our return to Workplace suite by adding a vaccination status tracker, allowing our clients to easily assess and track vaccinations within their workforces to facilitate planning decisions. Our clients continue to appreciate the efforts we've made to help them navigate the pandemic. And our Next Gen agenda continued to progress nicely. Our Next Gen HCM platform continues to deliver competitive takeaways in the market. During the quarter, we also expanded our global footprint by going live in Ireland. And in the U.S., we are quickly adding to our implementation capacity for our pipeline of sold clients. For Next Gen Payroll, we've now sold over 1,000 Next Gen Payroll clients on Workforce Now. And Roll by ADP, which also utilizes our Next Gen Payroll engine, is off to a great start where we are running ahead of our expectations so far as we drive micro businesses to this mobile-first solution.
And as a final highlight, we ended the year with over 920,000 clients, up 7% from the 860,000 we had a year ago and no doubt supported by these continuous improvements we've been making to our product portfolio. I have to say that fiscal 2021 stood out as one of the most challenging years in ADP's history, and I'm very proud of how we executed. It's hard to overstate the amount of effort took across the organization to quickly adopt and manage through the pandemic while providing excellent service to our clients. And in the end, our organization and financial results both demonstrated the extraordinary resilience that is expected from us. As we look ahead to fiscal 2022 and beyond, our focus is on reaccelerating our growth through an intense focus on market-leading innovation, further simplification of our product portfolio, continued digital transformation and an unwavering commitment to best-in-class service.
And with that, I'll now turn the call over to Kathleen for more detail on the quarter and outlook.