Summary

  • Remaining performance obligations at Palantir Technologies were $4.9 billion at 30 September 2026, with roughly 44% expected inside twelve months and 37% in months 13 to 36. It is the only one of the company's three contract aggregates that an accounting standard defines.
  • Total contract value and remaining deal value are company constructs, defined on the assumption that every customer option is exercised and no contract terminates — while the same quarter's filing says many multi-year arrangements can be terminated for convenience on under twelve months' notice.

The two sentences sit about a page apart in the same quarter's paperwork, and they do not agree.

The first comes from Palantir's Q3 2026 earnings release, in the definitions: total contract value and remaining deal value both assume every customer option is exercised and that no contract terminates, and the company adds, in the same breath, that most contracts permit termination, including for convenience.

The second comes from the Form 10-Q filed the next day: many multi-year customer arrangements permit termination for convenience with less than twelve months' notice.

Neither sentence is dishonest, and neither is a surprise to anyone who reads filings for a living. Together they draw the perimeter of the number the growth story leans on. Palantir Technologies, which BTW tracks as PALANTIR TECHNOLOGIES INC., publishes three contract aggregates. Only one of them is governed by a standard that says what may go in.

What the standard fixes

Remaining performance obligations were $4.9 billion at 30 September 2026, according to Note 3 of the Q3 2026 Form 10-Q. The company expects to recognise approximately 44% of that within twelve months and approximately 37% in months 13 to 36, with the remainder after that. My arithmetic, not the company's: 81% lands inside three years, leaving roughly 19% beyond.

The note is unusually blunt about what it refuses to count. "Cancelable contracted revenue, which includes customer deposits, is not considered a remaining performance obligation." The balance is noncancelable revenue awaiting recognition — deferred revenue, and in some cases future invoices. Contracts originally lasting twelve months or less are left out entirely under an elected disclosure expedient.

So $4.9 billion is a floor built out of a definition. It excludes the cancellable, excludes the short-dated, and counts only what has already been sold on terms the customer cannot walk away from cheaply.

What the company invented

Total contract value is defined in the Q3 2026 release as "the total potential lifetime value of contracts entered into with, or awarded by, our customers at the time of contract execution." Remaining deal value is the remaining value of those same contracts as of the period end.

Potential lifetime value is a different species of number from revenue awaiting recognition. A contract signed in September on a five-year term with three option years contributes its whole potential to total contract value on day one. If the customer exercises everything, the company gets paid. If it does not, the measure was never a promise in the first place.

What makes the construct worth the reader's attention is that it moves in both directions at once. Remaining deal value may omit some or all of a contract's value after assessments of the customer's finances, its ability and intention to pay, and revenue-recognition eligibility. So the aggregate assumes non-termination on one side and reserves the right to strike value on the other. That is not a scandal. It is simply a management estimate wearing the clothes of a measurement, and it is why the number cannot be read as a backlog.

The company already does the subtraction

The most useful evidence that Palantir understands the distinction is that it has already applied it. The 2025 Form 10-K states that government remaining deal value excluded $12.3 billion of awarded IDIQ contracts at 31 December 2025, because their funding had not been determined or guaranteed.

That is exactly the right instinct, and it carries a date: twelve point three billion dollars is a 31 December 2025 figure, and nothing in the documents I read updates it to 30 September 2026. But the principle is established in the company's own words. Awarded is not funded. When the money is not there, Palantir takes the value out.

The bridge nobody published

Here is what the documents I read do not contain. There is no sentence in the 10-Q, the release, the investor deck or the 10-K that reconciles total contract value or remaining deal value to remaining performance obligations. There is no stated rule for work not yet commenced. The Q3 2026 Business Update reports total remaining performance obligations of $4.88 billion, split $2.14 billion short-term and $2.74 billion long-term — consistent with the 10-Q's $4.9 billion once both are rounded — and its deals-closed footnote says the measure includes existing contractual obligations and unexercised contract options available to those customers.

That footnote is the closest thing to a bridge in the set, and it describes a different measure. The shareholder letter body did not load, so I make no claim about what it says.

Who carries the gap

For a procurement officer, the practical question is not which number is bigger. It is which number survives a change of mind. A multi-year commitment priced against a headline that assumes the customer does everything it is permitted to do is a commitment priced against an option the customer has not yet exercised and may never exercise.

For a creditor or a lender, the discipline is the same one applied to any contracted-revenue claim: ask for the standard-defined balance, then ask separately what portion of the rest is terminable and on what notice. The first number is published. The second is described as an assumption rather than quantified, which is the honest way to say it is not available.

For a board asked to approve pricing premised on deal value, the gap between the two aggregates is the most informative item on the page — not because the larger number is false, but because the difference between them is the part of the story that depends on customers choosing to stay.

And for a competitor benchmarking its own pipeline against Palantir's, the comparison is only as good as the definitions on both sides. Total contract value is not a standardised unit. Two companies can both report one and mean different things by it, and neither is obliged to say how different.

What the record actually settles

Palantir's own filing gives the answer to the question the headline raises. Many of its multi-year arrangements can be cancelled for convenience on less than twelve months' notice. That single sentence does more analytical work than any ratio I could compute, because it tells the reader that the RPO balance is the conservative measure and the deal-value aggregate is the optimistic one, and that the company knows precisely why.

The remaining performance obligation is the number that answers to a standard. The other two answer to management. Both are published, which is more than most software companies manage. Only one of them is a measurement, and the difference between $4.9 billion and whatever the deal-value aggregate prints is the size of the option book.