salary

Outlook 2026: The Painful Paradigm Shift in Staff Pay and Hiring

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Pivoting with the Paradigm: Staff salaries are rising sharply even as job growth plateaus.

New jobs data signal fundamental pivot for accounting firms.

By CPA Trendlines Research

The year 2026 may be long remembered as the paradigm-shifting moment when accounting firms were forced to pivot everything from their business models to their budgets.

MORE Outlook 2026, Pay, Hiring

The reason: Salary and pay increases are accelerating even as hiring momentum stalls.

Going into 2026, labor costs have been cleaved from labor supply. The new, structurally higher staffing line is forcing firms to rewrite their budgets as well as business models.

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Jin Chang: Why Repeat Last Year’s Questions? | The Disruptors

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Jin Chang: SALY isn’t useless—but it shouldn’t be lazy.

This is a preview. The complete 1-hour video episode, with commentary and transcript, is first available exclusively to PRO Members | Go PRO here
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The Disruptors
With Liz Farr

Audit has spent decades digitizing the past—paper binders moved to the cloud, workflows wrapped in prettier software, and manual testing dressed up as “innovation.” According to Jin Chang, that’s not transformation. It’s inertia.

Chang knows because he lived it.

Early in his career as an auditor, he found himself doing exactly what generations before him had done: matching evidence to samples, racing against the clock, and wondering why a four-year degree was being spent on work that machines should have mastered long ago.

MORE STREAMING: Cannon: Busy Season is Self-Inflicted | Carroll: When One Person Can Break the Firm |  Rampe: Build a Roadmap Even When the Road’s Not There | Chang: Killing SALY, One Agent at a Time | Vanover: 5-Star Firms Don’t Bill by the Hour | Kless: Profit Is a Result. Flourishing Is the Purpose | Whitman: Build Culture on ‘Progress,’ Not Change | Shein: No PE? No M&A? No Problem | Hood and Weber: Time to RISE | Proctor: Turn Dumb Ideas into Brilliant Solutions | Carter-Gray: How 1 Poor Review Strengthened the Firm | Hartman: Upwork to “40 Under 40” in 3 Years |

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“Why aren’t computers doing this better and faster?” he remembers thinking.

That question became the seed for Fieldguide—the audit platform Chang says he wished he’d had, powered by AI agents designed to work alongside auditors rather than replace them.

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The Details of Due Diligence

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Do you have everyone you need on your team?

By Ed Mendlowitz
77 Ways to Wow!

In 2012, Hewlett-Packard announced an $8.8 billion deduction claiming that they overpaid for an acquisition because of the failure of many other people who were responsible for due diligence. I don’t know many of the details, but it seems that someone screwed up big-time.

MORE by Ed Mendlowitz
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Due diligence is an essential activity in an acquisition that involves confirming the representations made by the seller, evaluating the strategic fit and terms and conditions of the deal and validating financial, legal, operational and technological aspects of the transaction. Keen due diligence can even help determine the final price.
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Starting Salaries in Accounting Must Rise

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Every year, the 2025 Rosenberg MAP Survey asks the industry’s top consultants to share their observations from CPA firms across the country: How do you think the next 12 months will unfold? Trends? Predictions? Other thoughts? Also, how would you assess the last 12 months? Trends? Observations? Struggles?

Plans for succession and capital are critical.

By Kristen Rampe
 The Rosenberg Survey

Over the next year, more firms will feel comfortable with their position in the marketplace. Either because they have completed or are in the process of a transaction, or because they determined their best option was to continue as they have been (with ongoing improvements, of course). This is unlikely to reduce the hourly calls from private equity investors just yet but will make the decision on what to do with all those calls easier.

MORE: The 2025 Rosenberg MAP Survey is available from CPA Trendlines here.

I am hopeful that, as an industry, we will continue to increase staff starting salaries. Looking at today’s economics of adult life, which many young accounting professionals are interested in, such as buying a home or starting a family, the current pay rates are insufficient. We can make the changes necessary here to continue to support communities, employees and the profession of accounting.
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Pinkus: Scaling a Remote Powerhouse | Big 4 Transparency

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“We didn’t plan to build a 100-person firm. We just wanted to work for ourselves.” 

This is a preview. The complete video episode, with commentary and transcript, is first available exclusively to PRO Members | Go PRO here
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Is your firm truly ready for tax season—or just hoping to survive it? Join this 90-minute webinar featuring an Accounting ARC Live panel with thought leaders who know what it takes to optimize performance under pressure. 

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Big 4 Transparency
By Dominic Piscopo, CPA
For CPA Trendlines

What does it take to build one of Canada’s fastest-growing cloud accounting firms? In this episode of the Big 4 Transparency, host Dominic Piscopo sits down with Mike Pinkus, co-founder of ConnectCPA and host of the Growth Tales podcast, to unpack the bootstrapped, contrarian story behind ConnectCPA’s rise to over 100 staff and a fully remote, recurring revenue model long before it was trendy. 

MORE Dominic Piscopo | MORE Private Equity | MORE Pay & Compensation

Founded in 2014 by Pinkus and co-founder Lior Zehtser, ConnectCPA was born from a desire for more autonomy – both personally and professionally. “We just wanted to work for ourselves,” Pinkus says. “Everything else was a byproduct.” Yet within a few years, they found themselves leading a national, cloud-native firm with a deep bench of accounting, tax, and finance professionals serving scaling businesses across North America. READ MORE →