PAY & COMPENSATION

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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