Inside the Top 100 Firms for 2024

April 5, 2024 3:04 PM

The biggest firms in the accounting profession are emerging from the pandemic in strong position, having recorded double-digit growth in 2023 and found ways to continue boosting their staff and partner numbers.

Their rates of growth weren't quite as strong as those they recorded in 2022, but they remain among the highest of this century, and overall paint a picture of a group of firms that are successfully adapting to a rapidly changing environment — finding ways to manage the staff shortage, exploring new service lines (particularly client advisory services), leveraging technology to the hilt, making the most of private equity's entry into the field, and placing more and more of a focus on advisory services.

Overall, this year's collection of Top 100 Firms and Regional Leaders see plenty of opportunities head — even if they are often embedded directly in the many challenges they face.

We've served up a selection of key statistics about the Top 100 and the Regional Leaders below, and you can see the full report (including our Regional Leaders rankings) here.

While the average growth rate for the Top 100 Firms in 2023 was down by almost a third from 2022, it was still well above average for the past 20 years.

Lower — but still strong — growth rates for the billion-dollar firms on the list pulled down the average; firms with between $100 million and $1 billion in revenue posted an average rate closer to 20%.

In fact, three of the fastest-growing firms in the Top 100 were in that $100 million-$1 billion cohort — Cherry Bekaert, Citrin Cooperman and Eisner Advisory Group — all of which are also pursuing aggressive M&A strategies fueled by private equity money.

Overall, a large number of firms continued to post very strong growth rates, often — though not always — buoyed by M&A. Among the approximately 270 firms that are included in this year's Top 100 Firms and Regional Leaders, approximately one-seventh reported growing their revenues by over 20%.

Over the past five years, the number of firms with more than a billion dollars in annual revenue has more than doubled, thanks in large part to aggressive M&A — and it looks set to continue to grow, with several firms within striking distance of the billion-dollar mark. (To see an animation of the growth of the largest firms over the past 25 years, see "

Rise of the billion-dollar firms

.")

Client advisory services was the service line that most of the Top 100 reported seeing growth in, coming in at No. 1 after being No. 2 last year — dethroning attest services, which had held the top spot for decades.

Even more interesting is the fact that almost a quarter of Top 100 Firms reported CAS as their fastest-growing service line, and when you add in the Regional Leaders, the proportion rises to over a third — an absolutely unprecedent convergence on a single practice area.

Consulting accounts for a plurality of the Top 100's revenue, but that's largely because that's the case among the billion-dollar firms, where it accounts for 46%; the smaller cohorts are much less interested, with consulting representing only 23% of revenue at firms with between $100 million and $1 billion in revenue, and a mere 15% at firms with less than $100 million; they much prefer tax, which accounts for 37-38% of the revenue, versus only 24% among the billion-dollar firms.

The revenue-per-employee ratio shows something of a gap between the largest and the smallest of the Top 100 — one that has been relatively consistent from year to year.

The gap between different cohorts of firms gets much wider when you measure revenue per partner, with the figure for the billion-dollar firms coming in at at least twice those of the smaller firms, suggesting that they're able to leverage much large staffs.

That theory is borne out by the difference in the staff-to-partner ratios, with the Big Four and other billion-dollar firms have almost double the number of employees per partner.

The overall growth rate in employee numbers was smaller in 2023 than in 2022, particularly for larger firms, but it's worth noting that 2022's rates were exceptionally high, and represented a bounceback from COVID-era lows.

Partner growth rates were down as well, though by no means as much as overall staff rates — and again, were coming off a four-year high.

Non-equity partners continue to be far more common among firms under $1 billion, averaging almost a third of the total partner count at firms between $100 million and $1 billion in revenue, and over two-fifths of the partner count at firms below $100 million.