Booz Allen pursues complex work that sits at the center of our client’s mission and at the top of the technical stack. This requires us to invest ahead of the market. The quality of our work, coupled with our ability to get scale out of the business even as we ramp up investment, allows us to consistently deliver superior financial results. Third quarter net income was $146 million. The year-over-year increase of 374.6% in net income is primarily a result of the legal reserve of $124 million recorded in the third quarter of last fiscal year. This is partially offset by an increase in our provision for income taxes associated with the reversal of an uncertain tax position related to Section 174. Adjusted net income increased 29.4% year-over-year to $184 million.
This excludes the impact of the legal reserve and the increase in our provision for income taxes. Due to the same factors, diluted earnings per share grew 382.6% year-over-year to $1.11, and adjusted diluted earnings per share increased 31.8% year-over-year to $1.41. Moving now to the balance sheet. We entered the third quarter with $602 million of cash on hand. Free cash flow for the quarter was $211 million, the result of $234 million of cash from operating activities plus $23 million of CapEx. Collections were strong for the quarter and included some payments we expected to receive in the fourth quarter. Cash outflows remained consistent with our outsized growth and sizable investments in our people and capabilities. Our net debt at the end of the third quarter was approximately $2.8 billion, and our net leverage ratio was approximately 2.5 times adjusted EBITDA for the trailing 12 months.
Turning to capital deployment on slide eight. We returned close to $156 million of capital to shareholders in the third quarter. This included approximately $94 million in share of purchases at an average price of $123.52 per share and $62 million in quarterly cash dividends. Today I am pleased to announce that our Board has approved a $0.04 increase to our quarterly cash dividend. This dividend of $0.51 per share will be payable on March 1st to stockholders of record as of February 12th. Now for a look ahead. On our last call, we updated our full year guidance to incorporate both the momentum we had built and the strong possibility of a two to 4-week government shutdown. Our revised guidance reflects the strength of our third quarter and the continued momentum of the business.
While there is still uncertainty about government funding, we now believe that a multi-week government shutdown is significantly less likely to occur in our current fiscal year. Thus, we are no longer including a material shutdown related contingency in our guidance. Let me now take you through our updated fiscal year 2024 guidance. Please turn to slide nine. At the top line, we now expect revenue growth of 14% to 15%, 13% to 14% of which will be organic. We are raising our adjusted EBITDA guidance to between $1.155 billion and $1.175 billion, which equates to approximately 14% to 16% growth year-over-year. This implies an adjusted EBITDA margin of around 11%. We are also increasing our ADEPS guidance to a range of $5.25 to $5.40 per share.
This is driven by the increase in EBITDA and a modest decrease in our ADEPS tax rate, which we now expect to be between 22% to 23%. We are raising our guidance for net cash provided by operating activities to be between $200 million and $275 million. This range includes a roughly $25 million increase in our estimated fiscal year 2024 cash taxes related to Section 174. And finally, we still expect CapEx of roughly $85 million, and we now expect free cash flow to be in the range of $115 million to $190 million. In closing, our business is performing exceptionally well. We have just delivered the best three quarters since Booz Allen’s IPO, with remarkably consistent performance, even in the midst of geopolitical and macroeconomic uncertainties.
This is a real testament to the quality of our leadership and the power of our VoLT strategy. Our firm is on a sustainable, quality growth path. The energy at Booz Allen is palpable. Our people are excited about the work they do, the impact they have, the strong performance we have delivered, and the many opportunities that lie ahead. With that, operator, let’s open the line for questions.
Operator: Thank you. [Operator Instructions] It comes from the line of Sheila Kahyaoglu with Jefferies. Please proceed.
Sheila Kahyaoglu: Good morning. Good morning, Horacio and Matt. Phenomenal quarter.
Horacio Rozanski: Good morning, Sheila. Thank you.
Sheila Kahyaoglu: Really amazing. Just wanted to maybe think about the growth trajectory in terms of my question, starting with civil. Double-digit growth for eight quarters now. Can you give us a little bit more detail about what’s driving that? And then how much of that is related to public health and the T4NG program, and what Booz is doing in the next phase of that program?
Horacio Rozanski: Sheila, I’ll take that one. And great headline, by the way. But let me start by maybe framing the whole performance, and then I’ll be happy to go down into civil. At the firm-wide level, these have been the best three quarters, and we’re on track for the best fiscal year since going public in 2010. And frankly, I go back further than that, and this is as good as I’ve ever seen. And the performance has been remarkably consistent. And if anything, we’ve been positively surprised by the strength of our talent acquisition and retention program, which really, as you know, fuels our revenue expillables [ph], which is the most important part. It does feel like, as an organic growth leader, we’re in this virtual circle of excellent work allowing us to capture exceptional talent, which deliver great results for our clients, which deliver great results for our shareholders, which allow us to invest in the next wave of technologies, and so on and so forth.
