OUTLOOK & ANALYSIS

PE Wars: The CPA Platform Economy Is Concentrating Fast

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After hundreds of deals, the data show a gravitational pull toward a handful of buyers now driving the profession’s future.

CPA Trendlines PE Deal Tracker: Mega-aggregators dominate the money flow as the race tightens between Ascend, Aprio, Crete, Eisner and Ryan.

By CPA Trendlines Research

The frantic pace of deal-making this past March marks a turning point. What had been described as a consolidation phase has matured into something more defined and more consequential: a platform-driven market in which a relatively small number of repeat acquirers are shaping the profession’s future.

MORE in Private Equity | Alan Whitman Plants a Flag in the Private Equity Landscape | The PE Takeover: Audit Problem? What Audit Problem? | The 7.6x Machine: How Grassroots Firms Are Taking Private Equity for a Ride | Why the Next Big CPA Firms Won’t Look Like CPA Firms

As the first quarter of 2026 closes, the story is no longer simply about transactions. It is about structure. The question has shifted from who is buying whom to which investment models, operating systems, and capital strategies will define the next decade of accounting.

For years, the prevailing narrative held that private equity would democratize the profession. Capital, it was said, would spread broadly across hundreds of firms, opening access to institutional funding that had never before been available. But the data tells a different story.

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Tax Prep Wages and Salaries Hit 4-Year High

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Even as DIY returns cut into pros’ market share.

By CPA Trendlines

Wages for accountants and tax preparers are rising far faster than hiring as the 2026 filing season begins, even as early filing volumes trail last year’s pace.

Average hourly earnings in the accounting and tax preparation sector rose roughly 4 percent to 6 percent year over year, pushing pay for many accountants above $45 per hour, while employment across the tax and accounting sector is increasing only a few tenths of a percent.

MORE Busy Season

If current trends hold, the accounting industry will process about 150 million individual tax returns in 2026 — roughly 0.4 percent more than last year — with nearly the same number of workers..

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The 7.6x Machine: How Grassroots Firms Are Taking Private Equity for a Ride

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Fewer than 200 investors triggered almost 900 acquisitions.

Global issues: 1,052 total firms impacted, 177 direct PE investments, 875 roll-up acquisitions, 7.6× 2025 roll-up multiplier, 4× multiplier growth since 2021.

 

By CPA Trendlines Research

A multiplier that has grown fourfold since 2021 reveals a transformation driven not by new private equity entrants, but by platform firms consuming the mid-market at speed.

It belies the notion that PE is taking over the accounting profession. In fact, new global research argues that local and mid-size firms worldwide are taking control of their own futures and using institutional capital to pick up the tab.

MORE Private Equity | Deal Tracker: PE Platforms Accelerate the Grab for CPA Firms | With Apax Sale, CohnReznick Starts Building a National Platform | Unicorns and Funerals: From the Demise of Botkeeper to the Rise of Basis.ai | Jeremy Dubow: Raising the Bar for Talent | Big 4 Transparency | Twelve Great Reasons to Merge In a Smaller Accounting Firm

The numbers that define private equity’s advance into accounting do not look the way most people expect. The headlines feature the big firms and the brand-name investors — TowerBrook Capital and EisnerAmper, New Mountain Capital and Grant Thornton, Ares Management and Baker Tilly. But the actual architecture of the transformation is being built one level below: in the relentless, largely unnoticed roll-up of smaller practices into PE-backed platforms.

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Unicorns and Funerals: From Botkeeper’s Demise to Basis AI’s Rise

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How AI Accounting Went From Pioneering to Inevitable in 1 Month and 11 Years.

By CPA Trendlines Research

The $90 Million Education: Botkeeper spent 11 years and nearly $90 million teaching the accounting profession that AI could do real work. Basis, Fieldguide, and Accrual raised $250 million in a single month to finish what Botkeeper started.

In a matter of days, AI in accounting produced its most celebrated funding round and its most instructive collapse. Both developments were years in the making. Neither was a surprise to anyone paying close attention.

The leap from Botkeeper’s machine learning to Basis’s agentic AI didn’t just change the technology. It changed which companies survive.

MORE AI | Outlook 2026: Agentic AI Reaches the Tipping Point in Tax and Accounting Firms | Gen AI in Accounting: Epic Transformation, or Overheated Hype? | AI Tax App Crashes Financial Stocks on Wall Street | The $125 Billion Challenge: Intuit’s AI Platform Redraws the Accounting Map | Bot Wars: Wolters Kluwer, Intuit, Thomson Reuters Battle for AI Dominance in CPA Firms | How TaxDome and Juno Just Changed the Tax Tech Game | Meet Basis, the New AI Bookkeeper on the Block

The juxtaposition is not just ironic. It is clarifying.

What happened in February 2026 was not a story about whether AI works in accounting. The research says it does.

It was a story about which business models survive the moment when AI actually arrives — and which ones get caught between the old world and the new one, having spent years and tens of millions of dollars building toward a future that materialized faster, and harder, than anyone expected.

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Deal Tracker: PE Platforms Accelerate the Grab for CPA Firms

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Dealflow this year is running three times hotter than year-ago.

By CPA Trendlines Research

The CPA Trendlines PE-CPA Deal Tracker™ logged 31 transactions in January 2026 and 21 in February — a combined 52 deals in the first two months of the year. The comparable figure for January–February 2025 was 16. Year over year, the pace has more than tripled.

MORE Private Equity | PE Deal Tracker Update: Alan Whitman Plants a Flag in the Private Equity Landscape | Jody Padar: The New Playbook Is AI-Powered and Human-Centered | Big 4 Transparency | Jeremy Dubow: Raising the Bar for Talent | Big 4 Transparency | Poe: What P.E. Really Wants from Firms | The Disruptors |

January’s 31-deal total is the highest single-month figure in the tracker’s history, spanning more than 340 transactions dating back to 2016. The prior five Januarys combined — 2021 through 2025 — produced 24 transactions. January 2026 exceeded that five-year total on its own.

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