Accounting in 2026: The year ahead in numbers

January 2, 2026 3:24 PM

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With the new year upon us, it's worth thinking about what 2026 will bring, and what accounting firms expect their next 12 months to look like.

With that in mind, Accounting Today conducted its annual Year Ahead survey in the late fall to find out firms' expectations for 2026, including their growth expectations, their hiring plans, how they think tax season will play out and much more. Some major themes:

Overall, they expect moderate growth over the year, with the majority seeing most of that coming from tax (though larger firms expect the most growth from advisory services).
Interestingly, relatively few firms say they have far more work than they can handle.
Tech spending is staying at roughly the same level, at just over a fifth of overall firm budgets.
Almost half say that artificial intelligence is already having a "dramatic" impact on the profession.

For more, see the data points below.

Accountants' expectations for the overall U.S. economy are pretty evenly spread from high growth to serious contraction, but just over half (54%) think the accounting profession will outperform the country.

Inflation and the impact of tariffs are the economic issues accountants think will most likely harm their business clients, but they agree that low interest rates will have a positive impact (74%), and just over half (54%) think the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will too.

The number of accountants who expect tax season will be worse in 2026 than it was in 2025 was up nine percentage points — most likely due to the changes created by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and concerns about the diminished capacities of the Internal Revenue Service, which lost about 25% of its staff last year.

Fewer firms reported expecting double-digit growth, while the number of firms expecting flat or declining growth increased by five percentage points — mostly from more firms expecting flat growth (see below).

The high percentage of accounting firms that are small or sole proprietorships skews this chart a bit, as they do a great deal of tax work; for firms with 20 or more employees, advisory services are expected to be the main source of revenue growth.

In addition, small firms are more likely to expect growth in payroll services, rather than in financial planning.

Surprisingly, relatively few firms reported having serious capacity issues (13%).

With that said, many firms that are expecting growth in their workloads are not expecting similar growth in their capacity, suggesting possible problems ahead.

Hiring of one kind or another remains the most common capacity-building strategy, but artificial intelligence-driven automation is close behind.

The public accounting workforce appears to have settled into a new post-COVID distribution, with half of staff in the office, and the other half split evenly between hybrid and fully remote. It's worth noting, though, that fully remote and hybrid employees are much more common at larger firms.

Firm technology budgets are expected to remain pretty much the same, at 21% of firms' overall budgets — roughly the same as over the previous three years.

It's hardly a surprise that AI should rank so high, but perhaps the most interesting data point from this question isn't shown on the chart: Just over a fifth (21%) of respondents chose, "Nothing will change the way I work in 2026."

Those respondents who think nothing will change the way they work may want to check in with the almost half of accountants (46%) who think that AI is already having a "dramatic" impact on the profession.

For this chart, "small firms" means those with less than $200,000 in annual revenue — predominantly sole practitioners and very small firms.

Last year, recruiting/retention was the top issue by far for midsized firms (those with $200,000 to $1 million in revenue), with 54% of firms citing it.