By CPA Trendlines Research
Wall Street’s buying spree for accounting firms is cooling going into the fourth quarter of 2026, according to the CPA Trendlines CPA PE Deal Tracker™, as platform firms digest a two-year surge of acquisitions and the earliest investors, from three to five years ago, begin to cash out.
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The October 2026 edition of the CPA PE Deal Tracker™ shows accounting’s private-equity deal flow easing in the third quarter, with 37 acquisitions in the U.S. and Canada, down from 42 a year earlier and a far cry from this year’s first-quarter surge of 58. The Tracker now counts 400 such deals in the U.S. and Canada since its records began in December 2016, plus 87 it has found elsewhere, for 487 worldwide, although its coverage outside North America is not systematic.
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