NASBA counted 653,408 actively licensed CPAs in the United States as of August 2025. The number of people entering the exam that leads to that license fell sharply in 2024, then turned back up in 2025.
The accountant shortage is real, and the measurable part of it sits in the route into the profession rather than in any national count of empty desks. The licensed base is large, the channel feeding it is narrow, and the reasons for that are specific enough to check.
Is There Really an Accountant Shortage?
Yes. The evidence sits in who is entering the profession and in what firms say they plan to hire, not in a vacancy figure.
Start with the stock of licensed people. There were 653,408 actively licensed CPAs as of August 28, 2025, a figure derived from the Accountancy Licensee Database, the national database of CPAs made up of official Accountancy Board regulatory data, currently aggregated from 53 of the 55 CPA licensing jurisdictions (NASBA, How Many CPAs Are There?). Hawaii and New Mexico are not in that total, so treat it as a floor rather than a census.
Now the flow into that stock. Accounting degrees awarded have fallen for three straight academic years, to 55,152 bachelor's and master's degrees in 2023 to 2024, a 6.6% decline that followed drops of 9.6% and 7.4% in the two years before it (AICPA, Accounting Firms Report Strong Hiring Outlook, AICPA Report Finds).
Demand has not fallen alongside supply. Of the public accounting firms that hired in 2024 and responded to the AICPA's survey, 75% expected to add a similar number of staff or more the following year, and only 18% anticipated lower hiring rates (AICPA, Accounting Firms Report Strong Hiring Outlook, AICPA Report Finds).
That is the shape of the shortage of accountants in the US. A licensed base built over decades sits above a narrower entry channel, and the firms drawing on that channel are not asking for fewer people.
What Caused It: The Price of the Fifth Year
The traditional route to a CPA license asks for roughly a year of school beyond a bachelor's degree, and that year is paid for before any licensed work begins.
Under the Uniform Accountancy Act, the model law the AICPA and NASBA publish for states to adopt, the traditional pathway runs a bachelor's degree in accounting plus 30 additional semester credits, for a total of 150 semester hours, then one year of professional experience and passage of the CPA Exam (NASBA, New CPA Licensure Pathways and CPA Mobility). A semester credit hour is roughly one hour of class a week for a term, so 30 extra credits is close to a full additional academic year of tuition and forgone salary. That requirement is what people mean by the 150-hour rule.
Research on the rule points the same way. Exploiting the staggered adoption of the 150-hour rule across states, an NBER working paper found that the rule decreases the number of entrants into the profession, reducing both low and high quality candidates, and that labor market proxies for quality find no difference between rule CPAs and the rest (Barrios, Occupational Licensing and Accountant Quality, NBER working paper 29318). In that setting, raising the education requirement lowered entry, and the study found no quality gain to show for it.
The shape of the recent degree decline is consistent with that, without proving it. Accounting bachelor's degrees fell 3.3% to 40,817 in the 2023 to 2024 academic year, while master's degrees in accounting or taxation fell approximately 15% to 14,335 (AICPA, Accounting Firms Report Strong Hiring Outlook, AICPA Report Finds). A master's is one of the routes to the 150 semester hours the traditional pathway requires (NASBA, New CPA Licensure Pathways and CPA Mobility), so the steeper fall in that credential is worth noticing. The AICPA's own reading is that the master's decline aligns in part with the steeper drop in bachelor's degree earners in earlier years, and that plainer explanation is likely part of the answer too.
The Exam Pipeline Is the Cleanest Read on Entry
Exam entries measure decisions people are making now, which degrees awarded cannot do, because a degree conferred this spring reflects a choice made four years ago.
New candidates, meaning people sitting for their first section of the exam, numbered 42,626 in 2023, the highest figure since 2016, followed by 28,082 entering the pipeline in 2024 (Journal of Accountancy, The accounting graduate pipeline: Where do things stand?).
Read 2023 as a spike rather than a baseline. The year before a major CPA Exam change historically sees a surge of test takers, and the exam's format changed at the start of 2024. Entries are trending back up, with 16,448 new candidates entering the pipeline through the first six months of the 2025 testing year (Journal of Accountancy, The accounting graduate pipeline: Where do things stand?).
The recovery held through the full year. Aside from the 2023 spike that typically precedes a change in exam format, 2025 saw the highest level of first-time CPA Exam candidates since 2018 and the highest level of candidates passing all four sections since 2017 (Journal of Accountancy, Student enrollment in accounting continues to rise).
What the States Changed, and What It Actually Changes
Licensure is moving at state level, and the change swaps one kind of cost for another rather than removing a requirement.
The Uniform Accountancy Act now carries three pathways. Alongside the traditional 150-hour route and a graduate degree in accounting plus one year of professional experience, it adds a bachelor's degree in accounting at 120 semester hours, two years of professional experience and passage of the CPA Exam (NASBA, New CPA Licensure Pathways and CPA Mobility). A model is not a law. Each jurisdiction has to enact it, and NASBA maintains the list of jurisdictions that have signed new licensure pathways into law, with the effective date for each (NASBA, Pathways).
Two enacted examples show what that looks like on the ground. Virginia's legislation took effect on January 1, 2026, giving candidates three pathways that combine education and experience differently, and it removed the total semester credit hour requirements historically associated with earning a bachelor's degree at 120 hours or a master's degree at 30 hours (Virginia Board of Accountancy, Virginia passes legislation widening pathways to CPA licensure). Oregon's bachelor's degree pathway asks for the degree rather than 120 semester hours specifically, plus passage of the exam and longer supervised experience, which its board states as a minimum of two years, that is 24 months and 4,000 hours (Oregon Board of Accountancy, Senate Bill 797 FAQs).
Notice what the new route does and does not do. It does not shorten the calendar, because a year of school is replaced by a second year of supervised work. What changes is who pays for that year: tuition becomes salary, and the candidate earns while qualifying instead of borrowing to qualify. For a firm, that second experience year lands as a supervision and verification duty on whoever confirms experience under your state's rules, which is a real cost to plan for rather than a windfall.
Is the Accountant Shortage Easing?
At the front of the pipeline, yes. For the seat you need filled this season, not yet.
Enrollment turned first. Spring enrollment in four-year undergraduate accounting programs reached 205,180 students in 2026, up 8.9% on the previous spring, following a 12.7% rise in spring 2025 and a 4.8% increase in spring 2024 (Journal of Accountancy, Student enrollment in accounting continues to rise).
The wider picture is the same, with one soft spot. Total undergraduate accounting enrollment in spring 2026 was 281,992 students against 266,868 a year earlier, growth of 5.7% compared with 1.3% across all majors, while accounting enrollment at two-year and related programs fell 3.2% (Journal of Accountancy, Student enrollment in accounting continues to rise).
Then comes the wait. Enrollment now is degrees in a few years and licensed CPAs a few years after that, and the degree count closest to your hiring, for the 2023 to 2024 academic year, was still falling (AICPA, Accounting Firms Report Strong Hiring Outlook, AICPA Report Finds).
The pipeline also has to cover people leaving. Retirement is a rising share of firm departures (2025 National MAP Survey).
What the Numbers Support
Read together, the series describe a bottleneck at entry and a growing retirement share among the people leaving firms, not a generation that decided accounting was beneath it. Interest is rising, the licensed channel is still narrow, and the requirement sitting between the two is the one the profession has spent the last two years rewriting.
Keep one distinction when you use any of this to plan. Job-opening projections get quoted as though they were a headcount of empty seats, when they forecast vacancies to be filled rather than people waiting to fill them, and a rise in enrollment is not a hire. The numbers that decide your season sit inside your own firm: the work you have already committed to, the hours you can genuinely staff, and how much review capacity sits above them.
If the honest answer is that the work is already larger than the people you can hire locally, that is a capacity decision rather than a recruiting one. Accountably places trained offshore accountants and tax preparers inside US CPA and EA firms, ramped on your software and SOPs in about 3 to 4 weeks. Since 2022 that has meant 30+ placements across 20+ US firms, and the signature, the opinion and the final judgment stay with your firm. The entry point is a Free 40-Hour Proof Pilot on a fixed block of your own representative work, put through multi-layer review, so your reviewer grades real output before your name is on the line. Don't trust us. Test us.