The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects about 124,200 openings for accountants and auditors every year through 2034. In the 2023-24 academic year, US schools awarded 55,152 accounting degrees, bachelor's and master's combined. And NASBA counts 653,408 actively licensed CPAs, as of August 28, 2025.
The accounting talent shortage is real and it is structural: a sustained gap between the accounting roles US employers need to fill and the qualified people entering and staying in the profession. But none of those three numbers describes the constraint you actually hit inside a firm. That constraint is review capacity. And the pipeline recovery the profession is celebrating cannot reach your review chain this decade.
Some writers call it the accounting talent crisis. Accounting graduates fell 16.9% across the ten school years to 2021-22, the Journal of Accountancy reported on the AICPA's 2023 Trends report. The label matters less than the shape, which is a supply problem concentrated at both ends of a career.
Key takeaways
Five things worth remembering:
- The numbers quoted about "accountants" describe an occupation of 1,579,800 people, while actively licensed CPAs are a much smaller group, 653,408. The two get swapped constantly.
- Projected annual openings run about 2.3 times the number of accounting degrees awarded. The two counts come from different measurement frames, so read the ratio as directional, not as a headcount deficit.
- Master's degrees in accounting or taxation fell about 15% in 2023-24, against a 3.3% fall in bachelor's degrees. The credential end of the pipeline is thinning fastest.
- Enrollment is genuinely recovering, but a student who started a four-year accounting program in 2025 does not reach CPA licensure before roughly 2031 under any current pathway.
- The profession's own national pipeline body lists offshoring and outsourcing among its capacity strategies.
How big is the accounting talent shortage, in verified numbers?
Three figures carry almost all the weight in public discussion of the shortage. Each one measures something other than what it is usually taken to mean.
| Figure | What it actually measures | Source and date |
|---|---|---|
| 124,200 openings a year | Churn plus growth: retirements, transfers out of the occupation, and new positions, not unmet demand | BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2024-34 projections. |
| 55,152 degrees | Bachelor's plus master's degrees combined, down 6.6%, not bachelor's alone | AICPA 2025 Trends report, October 2025. |
| 653,408 CPAs | Actively licensed CPAs on August 28, 2025, compiled from 53 of the 55 licensing jurisdictions, not the population BLS counts | NASBA Accountancy Licensee Database. |
How many CPAs are there, and how many accountants?
Two bodies count two different populations, and the counts get swapped constantly. NASBA's Accountancy Licensee Database put the total at 653,408 actively licensed CPAs as of August 28, 2025, aggregated from 53 of the 55 CPA licensing jurisdictions. Hawaii and New Mexico are not in that total. The BLS counts something broader: 1,579,800 accountants and auditors employed in 2024, a category that takes in a great many accountants who hold no CPA license.
So the occupation BLS measures runs about two and a half times the size of the licensed CPA population. Different bodies, different dates, different definitions. A figure about accountants is not a figure about CPAs, and most of the numbers in circulation are the former.
How many accounting jobs open every year?
The BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook projects about 124,200 openings for accountants and auditors each year, on average, from 2024 to 2034, with employment growing 5% over the decade. Read the definition carefully. A BLS "opening" is not a new job. Employment in the occupation is projected to rise by 72,800 across the entire decade.
Set that against the 124,200 openings a year the BLS projects and the great majority of them are replacing workers who transfer to different occupations or leave the labor force, retirement among them. The number describes churn plus growth, not unmet demand.
How many accounting graduates does the pipeline produce?
Schools awarded 55,152 accounting bachelor's and master's degrees in the 2023-24 academic year, down 6.6% from the prior year, according to the AICPA's 2025 Trends report as reported by the Journal of Accountancy in October 2025.
The AICPA's own release breaks that total apart, using provisional data from the Department of Education's Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System: 40,817 bachelor's degrees in accounting, down 3.3% year over year, and 14,335 master's degrees in either accounting or taxation, down approximately 15%. That master's decrease, the release adds, "aligns in part with a steeper drop in the funnel of bachelor's degree earners in previous years."
Read those two rates against each other. They cover the same year and come from the same data release, and the gap between them is the story. The Journal of Accountancy, reading that release, calls the 6.6% fall in the combined total primarily attributable to the decline in master's degrees awarded. Master's programs are the route most closely tied to the fifth year of education and to the credential track. That is the end of the pipeline thinning fastest, and the bachelor's cohort feeding it was already thinner.
What happens when you put the openings and the degrees side by side?
Projected annual openings outnumber accounting degrees awarded by about 2.3 to one. Set the openings against bachelor's degrees alone and the ratio is about three to one.
Treat that as directional, not as a headcount deficit. The two figures come from different measurement frames. BLS counts openings in a broader occupation than public accounting, some of which are filled by people who never earned an accounting degree, and not every graduate enters the field. What the ratio does establish is that no plausible increase in graduates closes the gap on its own.
Why is there an accounting talent shortage?
Four forces drive the accounting talent shortage: a retirement wave among experienced accountants, the 150-hour requirement that added a fifth year and pushed students off the CPA track, workload and flexibility expectations the profession did not meet, and an international student channel that narrowed after 2020. Each one is documented below.
The retirement wave
The BLS builds retirement into its own projection. Newly created positions account for 72,800 jobs across the whole 2024 to 2034 outlook. The 124,200 openings it forecasts each year are dominated by workers leaving the occupation, retirement among them.
In a CPA firm, that exit has a specific shape. Seniority carries signing authority. When an experienced accountant retires, the firm does not lose a pair of hands. It loses a reviewer, and a reviewer is the hardest role in the building to backfill.
The 150-hour rule and the cost of a fifth year
The traditional route to a certified public accountant (CPA) license runs through 150 semester hours of education. By 2008, NASBA described that requirement as "solidly in place, as almost all states have enacted legislation to put it into law". Those 150 hours run roughly a fifth year beyond a bachelor's degree, and NASBA still calls that route the traditional pathway. Students noticed the cost.
The National Pipeline Advisory Group's draft strategy report, an 85-page document produced by an independent group convened in 2023 under an AICPA Council resolution, collects the evidence in one place. Citing Center for Audit Quality and Edge Research work from July 2023, it reports that 57% of business majors who did not choose accounting said they did not want to pursue 150 hours for the CPA.
Citing the Pennsylvania Institute of CPAs, December 2023, the same report adds that 52.9% of accounting majors not planning to become CPAs said the extra education was not worth the time investment, and 45.6% said it was not worth the financial investment.
Workload, flexibility, and what students say they want
The same NPAG report records what students say would draw people into the profession. In its preliminary survey, 76% of students said greater flexibility in work hours and location would draw people into a career in accounting, and 72% of students, along with 71% of all other stakeholders, named "more manageable workloads for accounting and finance employees."
Respondents to those surveys, students and professionals alike, see both as among the most highly effective strategies for encouraging young people to choose a career in accounting. They act on recruitment and on retention, which is the cheapest capacity a firm will ever buy. Neither one creates an experienced reviewer.
The supply channel that quietly closed
A fourth cause sits underneath the other three. International students used to fill a meaningful slice of the pipeline. Per the NPAG report, drawing on national data compiled for the 2023 AICPA Trends report, non-resident students seeking a bachelor's or master's degree "made up roughly 10% of accounting degrees awarded between 2014 and 2018. That percentage fell to 5.3% by the 2021-2022 school year."
The broader channel narrowed too. NPAG cites the US Chamber of Commerce reporting a 1.65-million-person shortfall in foreign working-age individuals against the pre-2020 immigration trendline.
A supply channel closed, quietly, while the profession was arguing about the 150-hour rule.
Is the accounting pipeline recovering?
Partly, yes, and the evidence is good. During the 2025 spring semester, 266,506 students were enrolled in two-year and four-year accounting programs in the United States, a 12.4% increase over the prior year and the highest total since 2020. The rate of decline in degrees awarded is also slowing, from a 9.6% drop the year before to 6.6% in 2023-24.
If you run a university accounting department, that's genuinely good news. If you run a CPA firm, it isn't news yet at all.
How long until a student starting today can review a return?
Walk the timeline for a student who started a four-year accounting program in 2025. A bachelor's degree lands around 2029. Then licensure. On May 14, 2025 the boards of the AICPA and NASBA approved a third path into the profession's model law, a bachelor's degree plus two years of experience. A candidate now chooses among that route, a graduate degree plus one year of experience, or the traditional 150 semester hours plus one year.
Add any of the three to a 2029 graduation and you land in the same place, roughly 2031, assuming continuous full-time study, a first-time exam pass, and a state that has adopted a pathway.
NASBA keeps the running list of jurisdictions that have signed the new pathways into law. Adoption is a state-by-state decision, and requirements still vary.
Then note what a license buys. A licensed CPA with two years of experience is a competent preparer and a junior reviewer at best. The person who can catch the thing that would have embarrassed you in front of a client is five to ten years further on. That person is not in the enrollment statistics. That person is already in your firm, or already retired.
What does the accounting talent shortage actually do to a CPA firm?
Three things, in the order partners tend to feel them. Deadlines start slipping. Quality gets uneven under load. Then people leave, and the ones who leave are rarely the ones you could most afford to lose.
There is a quiet fourth effect, and it never shows up in a survey: the growth you turn away. The client you did not take in February. The advisory engagement you could not staff. Nobody records revenue that was never invoiced.
Why review capacity is the ceiling, not preparation capacity
Preparation capacity is purchasable. You can hire a preparer, train a preparer, or contract a preparer. Review capacity is a different asset, because review is judgment, and judgment is what your signature attests to.
Watch what happens when a firm solves only the preparation half. Volume goes up. Every return still funnels through the same two or three people who are qualified to review it. The partner who was drowning is now drowning in review instead of preparation, which is worse, because review is the part nobody else can do for them.
What an outside team can and cannot change
So the question that decides whether an outside team helps is not how many hands it adds. It is who designs it.
"The person designing your offshore team has sat in your seat, signed off on returns, and felt your April. That's not a recruiter's promise; it's a practitioner's."
Be exact about the limit. Nothing outside your firm adds a person who can sign. The signature, the opinion and the final judgment stay with your firm. What an outside team can change is how many minutes your signer spends per return.
Work that arrives having already passed a preparer, a senior, a quality check and a final review costs your reviewer less time than work that arrives raw. You sign; we make it signable.
That is the only offshore claim worth anything, and it is measurable. In one Accountably engagement, a regional CPA firm with 12 placements tripled its return volume, cut partner review time 60%, saved roughly $420,000 a year, and made zero in-house hires.
Isn't the shortage at the entry level, not the experienced level?
The strongest counterargument comes from outside the US profession.
A February 2024 poll by the Global Accounting Alliance, the Confederation of Asian and Pacific Accountants and AICPA & CIMA found that 28 of the 33 accountancy bodies polled believe there is a shortage of professional accountants in their jurisdictions. That same poll reports that "The pipeline (pre-entry and entry-level) has the most significant challenges, while fewer concerns were noted at more experienced levels."
Take it seriously, and read what it measures. It records what national accountancy bodies observe about people entering the profession. It does not measure where the work stops moving inside one firm during filing season, and it does not claim to.
Both findings hold at once. The pipeline pinches at entry, because entry is where people decide whether to join. A firm pinches wherever the work stops, and in a firm the work stops at whoever has to review it before a partner signs. Only one of those is on your desk in April.
What are the real accounting talent shortage solutions?
No single lever closes a gap this size. The profession is pulling four, and they operate on different timescales.
Automation and AI
The Bureau of Labor Statistics expects technological change to affect the role of accountants across the 2024 to 2034 projections decade: some routine accounting tasks may be automated as platforms such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence and blockchain become more widespread. Automating routine tasks, data entry among them, makes accountants more efficient by letting them focus on analysis and other high-level responsibilities.
Be precise about the limit. Automation compresses the routine work. It does not form a professional judgment, and it does not sign. Faster preparation puts more finished returns in front of the same reviewer, sooner.
The BLS does not expect that efficiency gain to reduce overall demand for accountants. Automation is necessary. It isn't sufficient.
Pay, flexibility, and workload design
Compensation, flexible location and hours, trimmed client bases, better scheduling. The NPAG survey data says students want flexibility and manageable workloads, and these are the levers that answer them. They work on retention, which is the cheapest capacity you will ever buy. None of them adds a reviewer to your bench before next April.
Rethinking who has to be a CPA
The licensure change is the profession's structural bet. The model law now recognizes three routes to licensure, and jurisdictions are signing them into law one at a time. It will widen the entry gate. It will not produce a reviewer faster than time allows.
Non-traditional capacity strategies, including offshoring
The profession's own pipeline body puts this on its list. NPAG lists six ways to prevent burnout and give employees a better work-life balance. The third reads:
"Investing in non-traditional talent strategies to increase overall capacity. This includes offshoring, outsourcing, or adding non-accounting operational team members to support service delivery."
The same report observes that "a global perspective has also led some firms to turn to offshoring for accounting talent, primarily to countries like India, the Philippines, South Africa, and Mexico," and describes looking to international accounting talent, through offshoring or immigration, as "a potential element of the talent pipeline solution."
That is the profession's own advisory group, convened in response to an AICPA Council resolution, in its own draft strategy report. Offshoring is not a workaround the profession disowns. It is on the profession's own list.
Whether it works in your firm is a separate question. Offshore engagements fail in three recognizable ways: the firm buys preparation capacity and inherits a review problem, quality is inconsistent enough that a partner spends the saved hours fixing work, or managing the arrangement becomes a second job. Each of those is a failure of setup, and each of them is visible before you commit a client file, if you look.
How do you check your firm's review capacity?
Before you evaluate any solution, measure the constraint. Five steps and one spreadsheet. The inputs come from last season's time records, and if you don't keep them, estimate and mark the estimate as one.
- Count your reviewers. List every person whose review you would accept on a return you sign. Be honest, not generous.
- Count last season's returns, split by complexity tier.
- Estimate review hours per return at each tier.
- Work out your ceiling in returns. Total review hours your reviewers can give across the season, divided by the average review hours a return consumes. That quotient is the number of returns your firm can actually sign off.
- Compare it with the volume you expect. If expected volume passes the review ceiling before it passes your preparation capacity, you have a review problem, and hiring preparers will make it worse.
If step one resolves to one or two names, you have already found your ceiling. Often one of those names belongs to the person running the calculation.
Where this leaves your firm
The accounting talent shortage is not a headline waiting to correct itself. Retirements have already happened. The pipeline thinned fastest at exactly the credential end. An international supply channel closed while the profession argued about the 150-hour rule. And the enrollment recovery, welcome as it is, cannot put a reviewer on your bench this decade.
What you control is narrower and more useful. You control whether your review capacity is measured or assumed. You control whether you add preparation capacity in a way that consumes review hours or protects them. And you control how much proof you demand before your name goes on someone else's work.
Accountably places trained offshore accountants and tax preparers inside US CPA, EA and accounting firms, ramped on your software and your SOPs in roughly three to four weeks. The signature, the opinion and the final judgment stay with your firm. Since 2022 that has meant 20+ firms and 30+ placements, and if someone is not the right fit in the first 30 days we replace them free under our 30-Day Fit Guarantee.
You shouldn't take our word for any of that. Once client consent and data handling are settled, and before a single live file moves, run a Free 40-Hour Proof Pilot: a fixed 40-hour block of your own representative work, prepared on your SOPs and software, put through the full multi-layer review, and graded by your reviewer.
Yes, that spends reviewer time, which is the resource you have least of. It is a bounded spend. One fixed block, graded once, on work that has already passed four sets of eyes. If what comes back isn't signable, you have lost an afternoon and learned something cheap. If it is signable, you have measured the only number that decides whether outside capacity helps your firm: minutes of partner review per return.
If you're a firm carrying this volume, don't trust us. Test us.
Frequently asked questions
Is the accounting talent shortage temporary or structural?
Structural. The drivers are demographic, educational and international, and none of them reverses on a business cycle. Retirements have already occurred, degree output has fallen for most of a decade, and today's students cannot reach licensure this decade. Enrollment growth in 2025 is a real improvement to a long-run supply curve, not a fix for the coming season.
Will AI fix the accounting talent shortage?
Not by itself. The Bureau of Labor Statistics expects the automation of routine tasks to make accountants more efficient and to make their advisory and analytical duties more prominent, without reducing overall demand. Automation does not form professional judgment and it does not carry signing responsibility. In a firm, that means AI tends to move the bottleneck toward review rather than remove it.
How many accountants does the US actually need?
The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes no shortfall figure for the occupation. What it publishes is a projection: about 124,200 openings for accountants and auditors each year on average from 2024 to 2034. That figure counts growth, retirements and people transferring out of the occupation, so it measures churn plus growth, not unmet demand. Ask any number presented as a national deficit which body produced it and what that body counted.
Why are fewer students becoming CPAs?
Cost and time, primarily. Research cited in the National Pipeline Advisory Group's draft strategy report found that 57% of business majors who did not choose accounting were unwilling to pursue the 150 semester hours the CPA requires. The same report cites Pennsylvania Institute of CPAs research in which 52.9% of accounting majors not planning to become CPAs called the extra education not worth the time investment, and 45.6% called it not worth the financial investment.
Does offshoring solve the accounting talent shortage?
It solves a capacity problem, not a talent-pipeline problem, and only when the review chain is built correctly. The National Pipeline Advisory Group, convened in 2023 in response to an AICPA Council resolution, lists offshoring and outsourcing among its capacity strategies. Firms that offshore preparation without strengthening review typically move their bottleneck rather than remove it. Requirements such as client consent and data security also apply and vary by engagement, so check them with counsel before any files move.