The person who's most likely to leave your firm is probably a generalist middle manager less than a decade into their career, who works in accounting or auditing, and who isn't allowed to work from home.
That's according to the preliminary results from the Second Annual Accountants Professional Satisfaction Survey, which were shared yesterday during the 2025 Bridging the Gap Conference, being held in Denver this week.
"A lot of the middle areas — seniors and managers — are where the problems are," explained Dominic Piscopo, the founder of Big 4 Transparency.com and host of the Big 4 Transparency Podcast, who worked with the founders of the survey this year. "Based on our data, the satisfaction curve forms a smile — interns are so happy to be there, and partners are more satisfied, but it dips down for managers and senior. The average response across all levels is a seven out of 10, but it's worst in the middle levels."
While job dissatisfaction isn't limited to any single group or types of accountants, the survey found that it was highest among respondents with these characteristics:
- Middle manager (manager, senior manager director);
- Mid-career (6-10 years);
- Works at a firm with 10-20 employees;
- No flexibility to work from home as needed;
- Spends the bulk of their time in accounting and auditing;
- Has no variety in their assignments or client mix;
- Is a generalist, not serving a niche;
- Their time boundaries are not respected by their clients and co-workers; and,
- They get no firm support with difficult clients.
The types of firms where staff are most likely to leave the profession are:
- Firms that bill by the hour;
- Firms that require staff to track and report time;
- Firms that are not collaborative or nurturing;
- Firms where knowledge is siloed/closely guarded; and,
- Firms that have minimal opportunities for those not on the partner track.
"These are all things that eat at your employees, day in and day out, week in and week out," said Seth Fineberg, founder of consultancy Accountants Forward, and one of the co-founders of the survey.
Moving forward — but not enough
The other preliminary results suggest a generally positive direction for many of the factors of job satisfaction that it tracks.
"We have seen the needle move from 50% highly satisfied overall to 53%," explained Hank Berkowitz of HB Publishing & Marketing, who co-founded the survey last year, "but there's still room for improvement."
"We've seen an unbelievable jump in asking for assistance with burnout issues, but it's still nowhere near good enough," said Randy Crabtree, the host of Bridging the Gap, cofounder of Tri-Merit Specialty Tax, and the originator of the satisfaction survey.
The percentages of those who felt comfortable asking for mental health resources at work, for instance, more than doubled, from 21% in
That's still much less than half, however.
"There's definitely lots of room for improvement," agreed Fineberg. "When only two in five respondents say mental health resources are readily available, that's a bit concerning."
The preliminary survey results also suggested that the types of work accountants do correlate strongly to higher job satisfaction, with more high-value-added services like business advisory and consulting have the most highly satisfied respondents, and those in audit being least likely to report high levels of job satisfaction.
"In audit and tax, very specifically, job satisfaction has increased steadily since 2023," said Piscopo. "Audit had the lowest starting point, but those two have shown the most steady improvement."
The survey is still open; it is confidential and only takes about five minutes to complete. To participate,
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