PAY & COMPENSATION

Show Us the Money! Accountants Are Making More

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young woman holding giant dollar sign in modern office

Want to retain employees? Here’s one way.

By Beth Bellor

More money. That’s what the latest data show for the accounting profession.

The final jobs report of 2024 saw the accounting profession’s numbers slip a bit, but the bodies in those seats were pulling down record earnings. Employees in the profession overall, at CPA firms and non-staff in payroll services saw their highest hourly wages ever.

MORE: Survey Says 57% of Firms Are Raising Prices Next Year | How Accounting Firms Are Handling the Staff Shortage | More Big Firms Shut Their Doors to New College Grads | Seven Enticements to Keep Talent On Board | Despite Staffing Crunch, Firms Freeze Pay Raises
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And about time! We heard the call for better compensation in the most recent Rosenberg National Survey of CPA Firm Statistics.
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Battling the Staffing Crisis: Is a Little-Known, But Controversial, Visa Program the Answer for 2025 Hiring?

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Cornerstone Report: H-1B Hiring and Salary Trends in Tax, Accounting and Finance

  • The Jobs Outlook, Salary Trends, and Election Year Politics.

    • Plus: Comprehensive Guides for Accountants and CPA Firms

CPA Trendlines Research estimates and illustration

What it is. How it works. And what CPA firms are doing.

By CPA Trendlines Research

The H-1B visa program is vital for U.S. companies to hire highly skilled foreign workers in specialty occupations, including tax, finance, and accounting.

CPA Trendlines Research estimates that as many as 46,000 tax, accounting and finance professionals work at U.S. firms under the H-1B program. This figure has received scant attention in the profession but is critical to its infrastructure. To the extent that it has received attention, critics say the program holds down salaries for U.S. workers.

In 2024, the Biden administration eased restrictions on the H-1B visa program while clamping down on abuses. By 2025, with the Trump Administration, it had become a lightning rod of controversy.

The nation’s tech industry has a huge stake in the outcome. Despite fluctuations in the number of H-1B workers requested and approved, the demand for H-1B workers in computer-related occupations remains strong, and H-1B workers play a critical role in the workforce.

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Twelve Years and Out: Seasoned Accountants Join the Exodus.

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No longer a problem confined to just new talent or middle managers.

Where they go: The biggest slice, 19 percent, goes into finance, followed by business and operations. (via Live Data)

By CPA Trendlines Research

In a startling shift, thousands of highly experienced top-level accountants are leaving the field mid-career, challenging the long-held view that the staffing crisis is limited to new graduates or middle managers.

RELATED: Middle Managers Getting Squeezed | Explaining the Talent Shortage in One Big Chart | Salary and Compensation Outlook for Small CPA Firms | Gen AI in Accounting: Epic Transformation, or Overheated Hype? | MORE: The Talent Crisis | DOWNLOAD The National Pipeline Advisory Group Report

For many accountants on the edge of transition, the coming years will determine whether the profession can reinvent itself to retain the trust of its workforce or continue to lose ground as one of America’s fundamental professions.

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Salary Guides for Accountants Vary Widely: Whom Do You Believe?

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three people in office disagreeing

Recruiters Atrium, LHH and Randstad don’t agree.

By CPA Trendlines Research

So, how much does, say, a tax manager pull down these days?

Well, it depends whom you ask.

MORE: Are You Earning What You Deserve? | The Slow, Painful Death of the 150-Hour Rule | Partner Comp Earnings Gap: What’s the Right Spread? | Main Street Accountants See Turbulence Ahead for Small Business | Partners: Your Middle Managers Are Getting Squeezed | The Joys of Firing Bad Clients | Gear Up For Growth | How Future-Proof Is the Accounting Profession? | Accounting Influencers | In-Person Conferences Still Essential | Accounting ARC | Risky Business: The Art and Science of Startup Company Valuation | Innovation through Wellness: You Can’t Grow without a “Well” Firm | Non-Accountants in Accounting: A Game-Changer for the Profession
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The recruiting firm Atrium says the average tax manager takes home between $100,000 and $142,000.

But another recruiter, LHH, says the same person typically earns $158,750 to $172,850, depending on the size of the company.

Another firm, Randstad, gives tax managers an average of $104,424 to $170,767, depending on experience.
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Are You Earning What You Deserve?

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young woman seated at laptop counting money

Plus some predictions about where the job market is headed.

By CPA Trendlines Research

Here’s a statistic you can probably sympathize with. According to new salary data, 99 percent of finance professionals report experiencing some level of burnout in the past year.

RESEARCH: Partners: Your Middle Managers Are Getting Burnout

MORE: The Slow, Painful Death of the 150-Hour Rule | Partner Comp Earnings Gap: What’s the Right Spread? | Main Street Accountants See Turbulence Ahead for Small Business | Partners: Your Middle Managers Are Getting Squeezed | Gear Up For Growth |
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Unless you’re in that other 1 percent, you know how it feels. And who could blame you for feeling that feeling and then looking at your paycheck?

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Partner Comp Earnings Gap: What’s the Right Spread?

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people standing on stacks of coins, representing income gaps

How do you get it right at your firm?

By Kristen Rampe
Partner Comp: Art & Science

There are many reasons for a sizeable spread in partner income at a CPA firm. For example, at a firm with both a founder nearing retirement and a first-year partner, the spread would be wide. Some firms are the opposite, with two to four founding partners agreeing to share all profits equally. There is no spread there.

MORE ON PARTNERS: Thirteen Traits of Partners You’ll Want to Keep | Six Rules for Keeping Partners Happy and Productive | Five Keys in Compensating New Managing Partners | Top 20 Tough Choices for the Partner Comp Committee | Voting on Ownership Basis? Three Better Methods | What Partners Do and Don’t Deserve | Tell Potentials What Partnership Takes | Five Steps to Transition to Partnership
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For most multipartner and multigeneration accounting firms, the situation gets more complicated. You’ll have some high performers and some who are on cruise control. You’ll have ones contributing notably more dollars to the bottom line and more to future leaders’ development.

But what about two partners who contribute relatively the same? Should their income allocation be similar? How similar?
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Three Ways to Thrive with Limited Capacity

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smiling man working at laptop in office with glass walls

Turn the staffing shortage into a new opportunity.

By Frank Stiteley
The Relentless CPA

Charles Dickens had to be writing about the accounting profession when he wrote, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

Clients are plentiful. I met a new client coming out of the restroom at our office complex. We get four to five inquiries a day – out of tax season. During tax season, we turned down four out of five prospective clients.

MORE ON STAFFING: Tax and Accounting Jobs and Salaries Show Strength | Olympics of Outsourcing and Offshoring for Accountants | New Study: Strong and Steady Growth for Accountant Jobs and Salaries | Can’t Recruit? Retain! | Is Tech Causing Both CPA Shortage and Low Salaries? | Staffing Tops List of Woes at CPA Firms | To Replenish the Talent Pipeline, Go Back to the Classroom | Whole Person Retention: When It’s Not Just the Money | More Big Firms Shut Their Doors to New College Grads | Seven Enticements to Keep Talent On Board | Employee Retention Is Easier Than Attraction | Let Interns Fix the Staffing Shortage? | Disruptors: Talent Crisis? What Talent Crisis? | Firms Culling Clients as Staffing Woes Persist
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Staff are not plentiful – at least not good ones. I’m getting two or three resumes a day, but they’re the warm body sort most of us learned the hard way not to hire during the pandemic. You’ve seen these resumes too. They are people with six employers in eight years. You are certain to be number seven in nine years. They claim eight years of experience, but you can see from their job history that it’s really two years of experience repeated four times. And – they want $100K for those two years of real experience.

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Tax and Accounting Jobs and Salaries Show Strength

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line chart
Overall accounting profession employment hits a glitch.

Hourly earnings fluctuate.

By Beth Bellor
CPA Trendlines Research

Despite a slowing increase in employment for the U.S. economy in general, the nation’s tax and accounting sector is improving on most fronts, marking more than four years of solid year-over-year gains.

MORE: New Study: Strong and Steady Growth for Accountant Jobs and Salaries | More Big Firms Shut Their Doors to New College Grads | Seven Enticements to Keep Talent On Board | Payroll Leads Job Gains in Tax & Accounting Sector
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To be sure, tax and accounting employment nudged slightly down in July, according to the latest data available to CPA Trendlines Research. But it remains ahead of last year’s figures. And record highs are popping in key hiring segments, including staff, CPA firms and payroll services. Is talk of staffing shortages overblown, or would growth be even stronger if more qualified candidates were available? READ MORE →

Is Tech Causing Both CPA Shortage and Low Salaries?

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dot chart
The number of accounting degree completions from bachelor’s programs from 1994-2021. Source: 2023 AICPA Trends Report

 

There’s a paradox going on.

By CPA Trendlines Research

A working paper by three academics presents a paradoxical contradiction in the accounting industry. Somehow, technology, which is starting to replace some accounting functions, is causing a shortage of accounting professionals. And despite the high demand for the few graduates who major in accounting, starting salaries are lower than in related professions.

MORE: Audit Firms Nervous about New Tech | What Accountants Can Learn from T-Ball | Staffing Tops List of Woes at CPA Firms | To Replenish the Talent Pipeline, Go Back to the Classroom | Beware the Work-Life/Workload Doom Spiral | Why the Dry Pipeline? It’s About Time | Business Model Transformation: Do It or Die | Misperceptions, Corrections, Accountancy and Lemonade | Whole Person Retention: When It’s Not Just the Money | Global Trends Show Many Dissatisfied CPAs | More Big Firms Shut Their Doors to New College Grads
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And in a related paradox, technology’s most powerful tools may be augmenting the accountant’s workload.

How can all this be concurrent?
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How Firms Are Compensating Their COOs

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bar chart

Real-life examples. About 29% are owners.

By Kristen Rampe
Rosenberg Associates

More and more firms are exploring the benefits of adding a chief operating officer (COO) to their leadership ranks. The COO role often encompasses strategic CPA firm leadership, holding partners accountable, making decisions in line with the firm’s strategy and overseeing all administrative functions.

MORE: Help! A Partner Wants to Retire Really Early
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This position can significantly reduce the time client service partners spend attending to these duties. And often the COO can do them better, as they aren’t distracted by the next fire drill from a high-profile accounting client. Their only client is the firm.
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More Big Firms Shut Their Doors to New College Grads

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Some 88.7% of top firms rate problem-solving skills among the most important criteria in hiring new college grads. Technical skills rank fifth, at 67%. (NACE)

Firms that overhired in the COVID-19 boom are now trimming their ranks.

By CPA Trendlines Research

Despite widespread concerns in the profession about a talent shortage, the largest accounting firms in a new survey are cutting back on their hiring of new college accounting graduates by 16.1 percent this year.

MORE in STAFFING & RECRUITING: Employee Retention Is Easier Than Attraction | Payroll Leads Job Gains in Tax & Accounting Sector |  Disruptors: Talent Crisis? What Talent Crisis? |  Letting Staff Go After Tax Season? Bad Idea |  Firms Culling Clients as Staffing Woes Persist | Compensation’s Up, but Up Enough to Retain Staff?

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Reflecting broader economic uncertainties and budgetary constraints, half of all the biggest firms surveyed are gearing down for a recession, marking a sharp turnaround from the hiring spree sparked by a global pandemic that forced industries across the globe into transformational change, often staffed and driven by the biggest accounting and consulting firms.

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Payroll Leads Job Gains in Tax & Accounting Sector

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line chart
Overall accounting profession employment

 

Everyone is earning more this month, and most downs are slight.

By Beth Bellor
CPA Trendlines Research

The tax and accounting profession is not a bad place for job seekers, it seems. A new analysis by CPA Trendlines shows a lot of up notes, including some in the double digits.

MORE ON JOBS: Let Interns Fix the Staffing Shortage? | Accountants Bullish Locally, Bearish Nationally | Accounting Hiring Hits Another High | Compensation’s Up, but Up Enough to Retain Staff? | Staff Wages Hit Record High | Despite Staffing Crunch, Firms Freeze Pay Raises | Tax & Accounting Firms Grow for 9th Straight Month | Tax & Accounting Profession Grows, but Wages Don’t
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New highs are coming in:

  • The accounting profession overall
  • Staff earnings
  • Payroll staff
  • Payroll staff earnings
  • Women overall and in CPA firms

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