This is the result of intentional and focused efforts of our recruiting and business leaders to transform our talent acquisition processes. We are hiring, onboarding, and moving our talent to the missions they are passionate about faster than at any time in our history. These process improvements, combined with our increased investment in talent, create the conditions to grow our headcount at speed. This is crucial to accelerating our overall growth, which allows us to continue to invest and outpace the market. It is incredibly gratifying to see how VoLT is fully woven into our business and evident in the results we share today. We recognize that the hiring market and other macroeconomic conditions have improved in recent months. Even in a strong market, our outperformance, headcount gains, and new opportunity capture are the outcome of the purposeful empowerment of our leaders to take action in alignment with our strategy.
And with that, Matt, I’ll turn the call over to you.
Matt Calderone: Thank you, Horacio and thanks to all of you for joining our call today. I will start by saying that I am incredibly proud of the financial performance we are reporting today. Our third quarter results are further proof that our VoLT strategy is working and Booz Allen continues to build momentum. We are investing in cutting-edge technologies, hiring the right people, building critical partnerships, and winning work at scale. These strengths are the source of confidence and resilience in our business. As Horacio noted, we have now recorded the strongest first three quarters of a fiscal year since our IPO. Our performance has been remarkably consistent on the supply side, on the demand side, and in how we are operating the business.
Based on this performance, we are ahead of pace against our three-year investment thesis, and we are especially pleased to raise our fiscal year 2024 guidance again today. Now let’s dive into the details. Please turn to slide six. Total revenue for the quarter grew 12.9% year-over-year to approximately $2.6 billion. Organic revenue was up 12.8% year-over-year, and revenue excluding billable expenses increased 13% year-over-year to approximately $1.8 billion. This exceptional top-line performance was fueled by our strategic position in the market, robust demand for our services and solutions, and our ability to attract and retain elite talent. Taking it now sector by sector, our defense business continues to excel. Revenue was up roughly 17% compared to the third quarter of the last fiscal year.
And this performance is strong and broad-based. Our team remains focused on accelerating access to data and decision-making tools and providing next-generation solutions to warfighters on critical missions across the globe. Our civil business is also growing fast, up roughly 18% year-over-year with double-digit growth across the portfolio. Booz Allen is unleashing the power of data to achieve better and faster mission outcomes for our civil government clients, from health and life sciences to infrastructure and climate. As anticipated, the pace of growth in our intelligence business slowed in the third quarter. Revenue declined 2% year-over-year. Our Intel leaders are winning exciting new work in key mission areas and have had success retaining critical talent, people who can now support cyber missions across the firm.
This business is on a strong vector for the future. Finally, our global commercial business, which represented 2% of revenue in the quarter, was down about 22% year-over-year. This reflects divestitures disclosed last fiscal year and overall softness in the commercial cyber consulting market. Moving on to bookings on slide seven. The award environment is strong and our market leaders are doing an outstanding job shaping and winning work consistent with our VoLT strategy. Despite uncertainty about the near and long-term budget environment, our government clients and the people of Booz Allen remain laser-focused on meeting the country’s urgent mission needs. This quarter, net bookings totaled nearly $1.9 billion. Our third quarter book-to-bill was 0.72 times, our best third quarter book-to-bill since fiscal year 2018.
Our trailing 12-month book-to-bill was 1.41 times, well above our trailing five-year average. Total backlog as of December 31st stands at $34.3 billion, up 14.2% year-over-year. Funded backlog grew 15.4% to $5.2 billion. Unfunded backlog declined 9.2% to $9.2 billion. And priced options were up 29.3% to $19.9 billion. In sum, demand is strong. We have a solid foundation to remain the industry’s organic growth leader. Turning now to headcount. Booz Allen closed out calendar year 2023 with nearly 34,000 people. Total headcount is up 8.6% year-over-year, and client staff headcount is up 9.2%. We efficiently deploy our people on contracts and ensure they are empowered to succeed. This people-centric culture, including continuous investments in our employees, furthers their commitment to Booz Allen and in turn makes them ambassadors to future talent.
Since the start of the fiscal year, client staff has increased more than 6%, exceeding our expectations as well as the 3% to 5% target we had set for the year. This level of client staff growth, combined with our healthy bookings, positions us well for the next fiscal year. Moving now to the bottom line. We earned $291 million in adjusted EBITDA in the third quarter. This is 19.1% higher than the third quarter last fiscal year. Our adjusted EBITDA margin of 11.3% is roughly 60 basis points higher than for the same period a year ago. As you may recall, we manage the business on an annual basis. We indicated last quarter that we anticipated a somewhat flatter quarterly margin profile than in recent years. This pattern played out as we expected in the third quarter.
