A global Fortune 500 CPG company headquartered in Europe connected to Teradata Vantage on Azure in the quarter.
And finally, we brought in a significant Vantage on Azure win when that Fortune 100 CPG company.
As an example, our customers can combine data and vantage with customer sentiment data from social media and the opportunity information in Salesforce, as well as support and call logs from ServiceNow to build a complete customer 360 profile that can help them and their customers increase sales and reduce churn.
Saudi Telecom continues to drive success with its Teradata platform and has tripled its capacity for analytics to Teradata over the last 18 months.
We were named by IDC in the FinTech top 100 Rankings as number 34, Inclusion and Netflix, recognizing our compelling value proposition, as the leading supplier of technology to the financial services industry.
We delivered $365 million in recurring revenue, which was above our guidance range, and was 6% growth year-over-year.
We generated $47 million in incremental ARR this quarter, and exited the quarter with a total ARR balance of $1.501 billion, an 8% increase over Q3 of 2019.
Perpetual revenue came in as expected at $17 million, slightly up from the prior year.
Consulting revenue declined to 28% as expected, as we continue to refocus our consulting business on higher margin engagements to drive increased software consumption within our customer base.
Turning to gross margins, recurring revenue gross margin was 70.4%, up 70 basis points from the third quarter of 2019 and up 60 basis points sequentially from Q2.
Perpetual revenue gross margins came in well ahead of our expectations at 58.8%, driven by a large US customer purchasing hardware on a perpetual basis.
Consulting margin was 13.9% versus 9% in the third quarter of 2019, as improved utilization, improved cost management, and better price realization helped drive significant improvement over last year.
Total gross margin came in at 61%, up 500 basis points year-over-year and ahead of our expectation.
We expect Q4 gross margins to sequentially decline and be approximately 400 basis points higher than Q4 of the prior year.
Total operating expenses were down 2% year-over-year, and came in lower than expectations, primarily due to certain expenses shifting to Q4, as well as our focus on expense management.
Free cash flow in the third quarter was $58 million, which contributed to year-to-date free cash flow of $171 million, well ahead of prior year, actual full year free cash flow of $89 million and our beginning of the year expectations of $150 million.
From these actions, we expect to incur restructuring charges of approximately $70 million to $80 million, of which approximately $28 million was recorded in Q3 and the remaining balance to be recognized in Q4 and 2021, with the vast majority of it in Q4 of 2020.
Cash usage for these restructuring actions is expected to be approximately $75 million, of which approximately $50 million is expected to be used in the fourth quarter of 2020.
We currently estimate these actions will reduce annual expenses by approximately $80 million to $90 million.
As a result of our strong free cash flow quarter in Q3, and our expectation for another strong cash flow generation quarter in Q4, we expect our Q4 free cash flow after including the aforementioned Q4 restructuring cash payments to be breakeven to slightly positive, resulting in our full year free cash flow to be approximately $170 million to slightly higher for the full year, which is a significant increase over the prior year free cash flow of $89 million.
For Q4, we expect recurring revenue in the range of $371 million to $373 million.
We continue to expect our full year tax rate to be approximately 23% and our full year share count of approximately 111 million weighted average shares.
Taking all this into account, we expect non-GAAP earnings per share in the $0.23 to $0.25 range.
In terms of ARR, we expect another quarter of strong incremental ARR growth and expect ARR to grow 8% or higher for the full year.

Summary:
We delivered $365 million in recurring revenue, which was above our guidance range, and was 6% growth year-over-year.
For Q4, we expect recurring revenue in the range of $371 million to $373 million.
Taking all this into account, we expect non-GAAP earnings per share in the $0.23 to $0.25 range.