We generated adjusted earnings per share of $1.16, a 47% increase over the prior-year quarter.
At a high level, adjusted operating income grew $74 million and contributed over 85% of the increase in adjusted earnings per share.
Total comparable funeral revenues grew $70 million or 14%, primarily due to improvements in the sales average as well as continued strong volumes from the Delta variant COVID impact and from excess non-COVID deaths, which tended to skew younger and more pronounced in smaller markets.
Recall that third quarter 2020 volumes were up about 19% year over year, and we grew another of 3% on top of that this third quarter, which we had not anticipated in our guidance from the second quarter call.
Core funeral revenues grew by $48 million led by an impressive 8% increase in the funeral sales average and a 3% increase in funeral volume.
The sales average continued to climb sequentially and is up about 4% over the 2019 pre-COVID third quarter.
Preneed funeral sales production for the third quarter grew $50 million or nearly 22%, which exceeded our expectations.
The higher insurance production component also generated a $7.5 million increase in general agency revenue.
On the core funeral home sales production front, we saw average revenue per contract increase by almost 8% to over $6,000 as an increasing percentage of our preneed customers are choosing some form of service.
From a profit perspective, funeral gross profit increased $40 million and the gross profit percentage grew 400 basis points to 28%.
Comparable cemetery revenue increased more than $42 million or 11% in the third quarter.
In terms of the breakdown, atneed cemetery revenue generated $20 million or 47% of the growth, driven primarily this quarter by a higher quality core average sale, an impressive increase in atneed large sales; and by a modest increase in contract velocity.
Recognized preneed revenues generated about $16 million or 37% of the revenue growth, primarily due to higher-than-expected preneed cemetery property sales production as well as higher recognized preneed merchandise and service revenue.
Additionally, we achieved a $7 million increase in perpetual care trust fund income primarily due to the timing of capital gains.
Preneed cemetery sales production grew $25 million or 8% in the third quarter, which exceeded our expectations.
Cemetery gross profits in the quarter grew by approximately $28 million, and the gross profit percentage increased 300 basis points to 38%.
Based upon better-than-expected results in the third quarter, we are again raising our guidance to an earnings per share range of $4.15 to $4.45 for the full year 2021.
This increases the midpoint by an additional $0.95 and represents a 33% increase from our 2020 results.
The midpoint of our fourth quarter guidance, $0.89 per share, would still be a decline in earnings per share as compared to the $1.13 earned in the fourth quarter of 2020.
Within our funeral segment, we are anticipating a comparable volume decrease in the high single-digit percentage range in the fourth quarter of this year versus a very strong prior-year quarter, which was up over 17%.
This is comparing against a phenomenal 2020 fourth quarter that delivered a 30% increase in 2019.
As far as preneed cemetery sales production goes, we expect a flat to low single-digit percentage increase in the fourth quarter when compared to a very robust fourth quarter 2020, which was up over 16%, culminating in back-to-back years of impressive 20-plus percent growth in 2021 -- I'm sorry, in 2020 and 2021.
To emphasize the strength of our post-COVID operating platform and capital structure, I will again give you an example utilizing the $1.90 in earnings per share we reported in 2019 as our pre-COVID base.
Even with funeral volumes down double-digit percentages and now we're thinking roughly 15,000 funeral cases less than we did in 2019, we believe at the midpoint of our model our 2022 earnings per share can reflect a 14% compounded growth rate over the three-year period, resulting in a $2.80 earnings per share for 2022.
We continue to believe that we will see 2023 earnings per share approaching $3.25, which would maintain that 14% earnings per share CAGR over the four-year period.
Adjusted operating cash flow increased $37 million to $232 million, compared to $195 million in the prior year.
In addition to the strong adjusted EBITDA growth, which amounted to about $60 million, we also benefited by a decrease in cash tax payments of about $28 million.
We had to pay approximately $50 million of federal and state income taxes that were deferred from the second quarter of 2020.
Remember, last year, they were able to defer quarterly payroll taxes under the CARES Act, which totaled approximately $42 million for SCI for the full year of 2020.
So in this current year quarter, we are required to pay half of that amount or about $21 million.
And keep in mind, the remaining half, the other $21 million, will be paid in the fourth quarter of next year of 2022.
So during the quarter, we also deployed about $280 million of capital, which is the second-highest quarterly capital deployment that we've seen really in recent history.
We invested $65 million in our businesses with $40 million of maintenance capital and $25 million of cemetery development capital.
But at this point, I still believe we'll end the year with around $100 million of capital development spend.
From a growth capital perspective, during the quarter, we invested about $20 million consisting of $10 million to funeral home new-build opportunities, $5 million on business acquisitions as well as $5 million on real estate acquisition.
And by the way, we remain confident that we'll be able to close several transactions during the fourth quarter that I believe will get us to our $50 million to $100 million annual acquisition target that we've been describing during the year.
Then, finally, we deployed just under $200 million of capital to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases.
The dividend payments in the third quarter totaled just under $40 million and this reflects the 9.5% increase to $0.23 per share per quarter that we announced in August.
So the guidance went from $775 million to a newly revised annual guidance range of $850 million to $925 million.
So when we compare back to 2020, this new midpoint of $888 million represents an increase of about 10% or $83 million over last year.
So let's talk about a little color on this $150 million increase.
It is primarily driven by an approximate $210 million increase in cash earnings, and these are associated with the $0.95 increase at the midpoint in today's revised earnings per share guidance.
The increase in cash earnings was partially offset by about $50 million increase in cash taxes and other working capital uses that are expected.
So we're now expecting closer to $260 million of cash tax payments in '21 or an additional $50 million over the $210 million that we talked about in August, again, because of these higher expected earnings.
In closing, we continue to have a solid balance sheet bolstered by a tremendous amount of liquidity, consisting of about $400 million of cash on hand plus about $1 billion available on our long-term bank credit facility.
Additionally, this transaction reduced our interest rate risk as we increased our proportion of fixed rate debt now to just over 80%.
It's actually about 2.4 times.

Summary:
We generated adjusted earnings per share of $1.16, a 47% increase over the prior-year quarter.
Based upon better-than-expected results in the third quarter, we are again raising our guidance to an earnings per share range of $4.15 to $4.45 for the full year 2021.