The median accountant in the United States earned $81,680 in 2024, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That same handbook notes, plainly, that "overtime hours are typical at certain periods of the year, such as for quarterly audits or during tax season."
Those two facts, sitting one paragraph apart on a government page, are most of the story. Accountants are quitting because the trade has gotten worse: the hours are long and predictable in the wrong way, and the pay has not kept pace with the workload or the rising cost of the credential.
The reasons are well documented, and each one holds up against a primary source. But there is a second question underneath the first, and it is the one that matters if you sign returns for a living: of everyone leaving, whose departure actually hurts a firm?
Accountably's CEO, Jugal Thacker, is a Washington-licensed CPA with 7+ years inside US firms, moving from reviewer to manager to advisory. What follows is the data, and what it means for the partner whose name is on the return.
Why are accountants quitting?
Accountants are quitting for a short stack of overlapping reasons: long and compressed hours, pay that has lagged both the workload and the cost of becoming a CPA, thin work-life balance, and limited advancement once the busy seasons blur together. None of these is new. What changed is that competing careers now offer better versions of all four.
The trade press and the surveys converge on the same list. The Bureau of Labor Statistics records the hours and the pay. Accounting Today's salary and busy-season surveys record what people say about them. Read together, they describe a job whose demands rose while its relative rewards fell.
The major reasons follow in turn, along with the pipeline problem sitting underneath them, and then the question the reasons lists usually skip: what a firm owner is supposed to do about the capacity that has already left.
How many hours do accountants actually work?
Accountants work long hours, and the length is concentrated in busy season rather than spread across the year. The Bureau of Labor Statistics states it directly: most accountants and auditors work full time, and "overtime hours are typical at certain periods of the year, such as for quarterly audits or during tax season."
The surveys put numbers on it. In a busy-season survey of 110 tax and audit professionals, reported by Accounting Today, 31% worked more than 61 hours a week, with most of the rest landing in the 51-to-60-hour band. Together, nearly 80% worked more than 51 hours a week through the season.
Seniority does not buy an escape from the load. In the same survey, managers and partners were the most likely to work more than 70 hours a week, at 38% and 21%. The people with the most signing authority are carrying the most hours, which is exactly backward from how most professions age.
What happened to work-life balance in accounting?
Work-life balance is among the reasons accountants most often cite when they leave, and the survey data shows why. Among the 110 professionals Accounting Today surveyed about the 2024-2025 season, 74% rated their work-life balance "fair" or "poor," and seniors were the most likely to rate it "poor," at 47%.
The stress tracks the same shape. In that survey, 54% called the season stressful. This is not a complaint about a hard week. It is a recurring, scheduled compression that arrives every year and lands hardest on the people a firm most wants to keep.
Balance also competes against other fields now. A finance or advisory role often asks for fewer scheduled all-nighters at a comparable title, so the accountant weighing a move is not comparing accounting to unemployment. They are comparing April to a calendar that never has an April.
Does the pay still justify the work?
Pay is rising, and for many accountants it still does not justify the hours or the fifth year of school the CPA demands. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median wage for accountants and auditors at $81,680 in May 2024. Firm salaries have climbed since: Accounting Today's 2025 Salary Survey reports a median base of $75,000 for staff, up 15% from the prior year, $93,000 for seniors, and $127,000 for managers.
Raises help, but many accountants still feel they have to leave to capture one. In that survey, about a third of respondents said they would need to change firms to make a meaningful salary increase, while 54% disagreed. When a third of your people believe the fastest raise is the door, retention is already leaking.
The comparison that stings is against the cost of entry. Consultant Jennifer Wilson, quoted in the survey, framed the floor bluntly: "You can't have less than CPI, you can't. Then people are losing money to work for you." A credential that requires a fifth year of tuition and then trails inflation is a hard sell to a capable graduate weighing other offers.
Is technology pushing accountants out of the profession?
Technology is changing accounting work, but the evidence does not support the idea that automation is quietly firing accountants. The Bureau of Labor Statistics expects the opposite: automating routine tasks "makes these workers more efficient by allowing them to focus on analysis and other high-level responsibilities," and the change "is not expected to reduce overall demand."
So automation is real, and it is not the reason firms are losing experienced reviewers. Software absorbs data entry and reconciliation, which moves an accountant's day toward judgment and advisory work, the parts a machine does not do. Employment in the occupation is projected to grow, not fall.
Where technology does bear on turnover is subtler. Faster preparation pushes more finished work toward the small number of people qualified to review and sign it, so the bottleneck moves toward review rather than away from the profession. Fear of being automated out is not what the data shows. The load on the reviewer is.
If so many are leaving, why aren't new graduates filling the gap?
The exits would matter less if the pipeline refilled them, and it is not keeping up. US schools awarded 55,152 accounting degrees in the 2023-24 academic year, down 6.6% from the prior year, according to the AICPA's 2025 Trends report. Fewer graduates enter while experienced accountants retire out.
The government's own numbers show how much of the churn is replacement rather than growth. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects about 124,200 openings for accountants and auditors each year through 2034, but employment grows by only 72,800 across the entire decade. The great majority of those openings are backfilling people who left the occupation, retirement among them.
There is a catch inside the recovery that firms feel first. A new graduate is not a reviewer. Even after licensure, the person who can catch the error that would embarrass you in front of a client is years of supervised work away. The pipeline can improve at the entry level and still leave a firm short exactly where it hurts.
What does the accounting exodus mean for the firm you run?
For a firm owner, the exodus is not an abstract labor trend. It is the specific risk that the person who leaves is a reviewer, because seniority carries signing authority and reviewers are the hardest role in the building to replace. When an experienced accountant walks, a firm does not lose a pair of hands. It loses judgment.
Here is where the standard reasons lists stop short. They catalog why people leave, then pivot to retention advice: better culture, more flexibility, higher pay, clearer paths. All of it is worth doing, and none of it is fast. Culture, compensation and career design work on the people you keep, over years. They do not put a qualified reviewer back on your bench before next busy season.
That timing gap is the real problem. The reasons are a multi-year story, but a filing deadline is a fixed date. So the honest question is not only "how do we keep our people," but "how do we protect the review chain when the market is thin and the season is not moving." That is a capacity question, and it has a near-term answer that hiring locally does not.
You can measure your own exposure in one step. List every person whose review you would accept on a return you sign, and be honest rather than generous. If that list resolves to one or two names, you have already found your ceiling, and losing any one of those names is the departure that actually hurts.
Frequently asked questions
Why are accountants leaving public accounting specifically?
Public accounting concentrates the hours and the stress into busy season, when partners and managers routinely work the longest weeks. Accounting Today's busy-season survey found 74% of respondents rating their work-life balance "fair" or "poor." Combined with pay that many feel trails the workload, that annual compression pushes experienced people toward industry roles with steadier calendars.
Are accountants underpaid?
It depends on the comparison. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a median wage of $81,680 in May 2024, and firm salaries have risen since. The stronger complaint is relative: the CPA requires a fifth year of education, and about a third of the accountants in Accounting Today's 2025 survey said they would need to change firms to get a meaningful raise.
Is AI going to replace accountants?
Not on current evidence. The Bureau of Labor Statistics expects automation of routine tasks to make accountants "more efficient" and says the shift "is not expected to reduce overall demand." Automation moves the work toward analysis and review rather than eliminating the role, which tends to load the reviewer more, not less.
Will the accountant shortage get better as enrollment recovers?
Slowly, and not where firms feel it first. Degree output fell 6.6% in 2023-24 per the AICPA's 2025 Trends report, and even as enrollment improves, a new graduate is not a reviewer. The experienced review capacity a firm relies on takes years of supervised work to rebuild.
How can a firm respond without waiting years to hire?
By protecting the review chain instead of only chasing headcount. Retention and recruiting matter, but they are slow. A firm can add reviewed preparation capacity in the near term, keeping the signature, the opinion and the final judgment in-house, so the constraint that binds during busy season is eased before the pipeline catches up. Client consent and data-security requirements apply and vary, so check them with counsel first.
Where this leaves your firm
Accountants are quitting for reasons that are real, sourced and mostly structural: the hours, the pay against a costly credential, thin work-life balance, and a pipeline that is not refilling the senior ranks. Those forces are not going to reverse on a business cycle, and the retention levers everyone recommends, however sound, act on a horizon measured in years.
What you control is narrower and more useful. You control whether your review capacity is measured or assumed, and whether you add capacity in a way that protects your reviewers' hours or spends them.
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. You sign; we make it signable. 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 should not take our word for it. 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. If what comes back is not signable, you have lost an afternoon and learned something cheap. If it is, you have measured the only number that decides whether outside capacity helps your firm.
If you're a firm carrying this volume, don't trust us. Test us.