Accounting firm salaries have jumped in 2025, with particularly significant gains for entry-level staff — but it's still not clear skies ahead for the profession when it comes to recruiting and retention, with competitive pay being only one part of the equation.
Experts highlighted the numerous variables affecting the compensation conversation, including the softening economy, the disparity between external hires' salaries and those of internal hires, private equity, and the need for well-informed decision-making.
Accounting promises stable careers with great partner salaries, as long as employees put in the time to earn those big paychecks. But the apprenticeship business model is no longer cutting it for young workers who are in high demand — particularly when starting salaries in business, finance and technology careers outpace those in accounting.
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In the middle of a professionwide labor shortage — in which fewer people are studying accounting, fewer are earning the CPA license, and even fewer are remaining in the profession until they make partner — increasing starting compensation is an important lever for firms to pull to attract talent.
Accounting Today conducted our second annual salary survey in May 2025, collecting 768 responses from accountants from firms of all sizes regarding their salaries, benefits, and career trajectories. The survey found that entry-level compensation increased year over year, with salaries at every other level not far behind. The median base salary for staff accountants was $75,000 in 2025, $93,000 for seniors, and $127,000 for managers, up 15%, 6% and 6% from 2024, respectively. Simultaneously, partners at firms of all sizes saw a 9% year-over-year increase to a median base salary of $200,000.
But Dominic Piscopo, founder of Big 4 Transparency, an anonymous, crowdsourced database of accounting compensation, noted the strategic flaw in raising salaries across the board. By implementing blanket increases, "You've actually moved it more than the market at the senior manager level, and way less than the market at all the other levels," he said.
Jennifer Wilson, partner and co-founder at ConvergenceCoaching, confirmed, saying that many firms think that if starting salaries go up, then everyone's salary has to go up, too. "That's baloney," she said, "because there's these huge jumps between senior and supervisor, between supervisor and manager, manager and senior manager."
The solution is to make the largest adjustment in the lowest salary band (staff), and make smaller adjustments in the subsequent bands (senior, manager, etc.) to flatten the steep climb to partner salaries. "You can't have less than CPI, you can't," she said. "Then people are losing money to work for you, and that's not OK."
Piscopo also worries that when it comes to the compensation conversation, many firms are stuck in an echo chamber and, thus, are making siloed decisions. "I think a lot of firms are not taking in as much market feedback as they should be when it comes to setting internal salaries," he said. "They're not doing the work or investing the resources to properly evaluate what is actually happening with market salaries, and so that is a decision that's making them drift away from what is actually happening in the market."
Not enough change
Sandra Wiley, shareholder and president at Boomer Consulting, still doesn't see enough change happening with enough urgency.
"I still think there's a talent shortage, I still think that there are a lot less people, but I don't think that's driving the salaries up like I thought it would," Wiley said.
Firms are undoubtedly talking more about raising starting salaries, she said, but there's been hesitancy to actually do so. Why? She thinks it is because raising salaries has to come out of the partners' pockets.
"Where's the money going to come from? You only have so much money in a budget. So if we take 50 employees, or 100 employees, and we have to raise all of them by $10,000, that's a lot of money," she said. "It's going to come from profit. That profit is what's feeding the partners their compensation."
Accounting Today's survey data shows that the median base partner salary is $155,000 for those at firms with fewer than 10 employees, and $210,000 for firms with more than 10 employees. These numbers likely skew low, as more than half (52%) of respondents reported working at firms with less than $5 million in net revenue. For this reason, partner data for midsized and large firms could not be broken out in detail with a high enough level of statistical significance. However, the data shows that the top 5% of partners at firms with fewer than 10 employees earned $350,000, and the top 5% at firms with more than 10 employees earned $932,000. Of course, partners at the Big Four and other billion-dollar firms can make far more, but relatively few participated in the survey and were thus treated as outliers.
Softening economy
Wilson sees a new problem on the horizon at large firms that is a result of the macroeconomic outlook under the Trump administration. The will-they, won't-they quality of the imposed tariffs, as well as other policies, have created a "spongy, softened economy." In fact, over one-third (35%) of financial executives say mitigating economic uncertainty and global market volatility is their top challenge for planning in 2025, according to a survey by the Financial Education and Research Foundation.
"This uncertainty — not only does it create a conservative way of looking at expenses by CPA firms, but it also creates this, 'Hey, our people aren't really moving like they were two years ago. We added a bunch of interns and we're hiring a class of first-years like we always have, but we're not seeing the turnover that we've seen in the past. So now we might be at capacity,' which is a foreign idea," Wilson said.
"We're cautioning folks because we're trying to remind them of the big picture," she continued. "Because this is a small picture called 'the second half of 2025 is funny and uncertain.'"
The big picture she refers to is the shrinking working age population and an aging cohort of partners nearing retirement. According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute, the prime working age population, 25 to 64 years old, has significantly shrunk since the mid-1990s, and the gap is being filled by older workers.
"Because of the economy and because we might be misreading the short, small-picture signals, I'm concerned that firms are going to make sure that, at a minimum, they're retaining their best and brightest with the right sort of compensation increases, bonuses," Wilson said.
Meanwhile, Catherine Moy, chief people officer at Top 10 Firm BDO USA, emphasized that employment capacity is a "multivariable equation."
"We have an alignment of the stars right now. They're keeping good people where they are," said Moy. In 2023, BDO transitioned to an employee stock ownership plan, or ESOP. "It is a financial and values play all in one," she said. "But that's not instead of anything we had before — it's not instead of market-based comp, it's not instead of discretionary bonuses, it's not instead of any benefit — it's in addition to."
"The market tends to evolve, but not in dramatic swings," she continued. "If it becomes more of an employer market, that's a little easier for many employers to retain people. We don't cut our salaries back because we don't have to pay that much. We never do that. … If the market moves, we move with the market so that it tends to not be in dramatic increments."
Moy added that firms like BDO are quite resilient to macroeconomic and administration changes such as this.
"I think it's a stressful time because humans don't like uncertainty. We like to know what is and what isn't," she said. "But in real-world terms, when it comes down to affecting compensation today for the average employee of a large public accounting firm, we set ourselves up for resilience. That's why we're in many geographies and many disciplines and very diversified. So we are a portfolio of professional opportunities that doesn't have us vulnerable to any particular moment in time or policy change."
Loyalty tax
Piscopo also highlighted another issue: a trend he calls the "loyalty tax." He defined the loyalty tax as "the premium that's paid to an externally hired employee who is doing the same job as another internally promoted employee." The problem forms when firms look to hire someone external and that prospective employee negotiates up. "They end up stuck paying this person disproportionately more than what they're paying their internal people," Piscopo said.
This weakens retention by sending the signal to internal employees that they need to leave their firm if they want to be paid competitively. According to Accounting Today's survey, one-third of respondents — overwhelmingly managers, seniors and staff — reported feeling that they would need to job hop in order to make a meaningful salary increase, while 54% disagreed.
Nearly seven in 10 respondents (68%) said that they received a raise at their firm within the last year. Meanwhile, 7% said they received a raise within the last 13 to 18 months, 8% within the last 19 to 24 months, 2% within 25 to 36 months, and 3% say their last raise was more than three years ago.
There are pros and cons to moving firms, Piscopo noted. Of course, the most obvious is the opportunity for a bigger paycheck. However, the cons include losing connections and relationships, and being labeled as a "job hopper," which can be a turnoff for potential employers.
Additionally, firm hopping "becomes increasingly problematic because of the increasing role technology, process and operations play in the success of an accounting practice these days," he said. "Long gone are the days when accountants were filling out paper returns. Each firm may use different tax software, different practice management software, and a unique process of how returns are handled, like when one firm outsources while the other does not."
"I think the ramp time for a fully productive employee is probably more than it was because of all of this technology, which, again, makes us way better at what we do," he continued. "But you're expected to do way more, and so you need to learn how to harness a new tech stack every time, which is not super easy."
He added, "I think it paints a picture of a very reactive industry [that's] not staying ahead of the curve and taking care of their people, but rather who find themselves on the wrong end of that and then have to scramble to get resources right to get people in the door."
Boomer Consulting's Wiley says private equity's entrance into the accounting space is another factor that might impact salaries down the road. While partners reap massive payouts from PE firms — double, triple or even quadruple what they could take home on their own — Wiley has yet to see how that money trickles down to the rest of the firm members.
"If our younger people that are in the firms, if they're seeing partners get big payouts and big money, but yet, when they look at their paycheck, it's exactly the same as it was, or just a 3% or 4% raise from a year ago, I think they're going to start getting pretty disillusioned pretty fast," she said. "But we just don't know yet. We're still in the waiting game."
Wilson added, "I think that the real opportunity is for independent firms who are not going to go that route to cherry-pick talent."
Bonuses
Wilson advocates for performance-based incentives. In other words: bonuses.
"You can keep from accelerating fixed costs by not getting so much of an increase on the base, but providing financial incentives, performance-based incentives, bonus money," she said.
Accounting Today's survey found that 71% of respondents say that they were eligible for bonuses as part of their compensation at their firm, while 24% said they were not eligible (5% weren't sure). Eight in 10 accountants (82%) say that they are aware of what makes them eligible for these bonuses.
The most common types of bonuses were individualized performance bonuses (56%), followed by profit sharing (39%) and regular tax season bonuses (28%). However, when looking at actual bonuses received compared to potential bonuses, most accountants across all levels received a lower bonus than their potential.
However, those financial incentives must be results-based. "What's cool about results-based compensation is that it calls people to the mission," Wilson explained. "It calls people to the purpose, and people love to work in a place where they believe in the purpose of the mission, and they can see the results of that. They're producing results that they can see. And so if that's where the disconnect is, that's why people don't like hours or effort, because they're like, 'How does this apply to what we're doing?'"
"I'm not trying to be negative, but I don't want us to think we're there now," she said. "If it was an increase off of something crummy, comparatively — we're not there yet. And I do hear people trying to say, 'Good news, salaries are jumping up.' Yes, they are, but so are everyone else's."
