Partner Pay Off 3% on 1.4% Revenue Rise

Strong showing from midsized accounting firms through recession.

The soon-to-be-released Rosenberg MAP Survey of over 400 mid-market CPA firms is expected to show average net income per partner of $354,000, down 3% from the year before.

Marc Rosenberg

Marc Rosenberg, the creator and author of the survey for the last 12 years, said many partners are grateful it wasn’t worse.

Meanwhile firm revenues inched up a bare 1.4%. But the disparities between the high performing firms and the rest was pronounced, with 38% of firms reporting growth of 5% or more and 41% reporting a decline.

For 2010, firms are projecting revenue gains of 2.6%, with few expecting any declines, a considerable improvement over the latest year.

Will the profession get another Golden Age, like the period from 2002 to 2007 as the result of Sarbanes-Oxley? It’s possible.

“Whenever legislation changes,” Rosenberg said, “accounting firms clean up.” Even in recession, accounting firms have already been out-performing most of the rest of the economy.

Visit www.rosenbergsurvey.com to purchase a copy of the full report.

3 Responses to “Partner Pay Off 3% on 1.4% Revenue Rise”

  1. John R Ezell, CPA

    This does not surprise me. The accounting and tax profession is a stable industry. A 3% decline during the worst economy in 80 years is nothing compared to other industries.

  2. CPA Review

    I’m hearing a lot of these same results around the industry. The ‘clean up’ as you put it seems to happen every 3-5 years in the bigger firms. Just announced were the mass layoffs at PwC and similar news happened around 2007.

  3. mentioned on Twitter by Holben Hay Balzer

    mentioned on Twitter by Holben Hay Balzer