The CPA Shortage: Why It Is Happening and What It Means for Hiring

Fewer students are entering accounting programs than a decade ago, and the ones who do often see public practice as a stepping stone rather than a destination. Entry-level compensation in traditional firms has historically lagged other finance and tech career paths, and the CPA path itself, undergrad plus a professional education program plus articling hours, is a longer commitment than many alternatives offer. Add a wave of retirements among CPAs who qualified decades ago, and the pipeline is shrinking on one end while demand keeps growing on the other.

We hear this from other firm owners constantly, and the same frustration comes up in almost every conversation: firms cannot get it right on hiring. If your schedule is full, you cannot take on more clients unless you hire more people. That sounds obvious, but most firms treat hiring as a background task instead of the actual bottleneck.

Yes. Talent acquisition is consistently the single biggest lever on how fast an accounting or advisory firm can grow, more than sales pipeline or client demand. Firms that could take on more work often cannot, because they cannot staff it. We have turned down engagements we wanted because we did not have the capacity to do them well, and that is a direct consequence of the shortage, not a strategy choice.

No, but the job is changing shape. AI tools already handle reconciliation, first-pass categorization, and document review, the mechanical parts of the work. What AI cannot do is exercise judgment: reading a set of financials and knowing what actually matters to the person making the decision. Our approach has been to let people self-select into the tools rather than force a change management program on everyone. People either have the mindset to adopt new ways of working or they do not, and you cannot drag someone into the future. The accountants leaning into AI early are becoming more valuable, not less.

Yes, if you pick the right environment. Here is an honest observation from inside the profession: most people who train in public practice do not stay in public practice. It is a common path into industry, controllership, and finance leadership roles, and that has always been true. The designation opens doors well beyond audit and tax. Nobody grows up dreaming of becoming an accountant, but for the people who find their footing in the work, it becomes a genuinely durable career.

We built our operating model around the assumption that great people are scarce, not around the assumption that clients are scarce.

• We hire for intellect and values first, and we do not lower the bar to fill a seat faster, because a bad hire pulls senior staff off their own work to constantly patch problems.
• We are remote by conviction, not convenience, which widens who we can hire well past our physical office.
• We gave staff a real say over new client capacity. If the team says there is no room, we turn the work away rather than overload people.
• We run no HR department and no annual performance reviews at 75+ staff. When you hire well and do not tolerate bad behavior, most of the bureaucracy other firms build to manage people becomes unnecessary.

There is a difference between fault and responsibility. We are easy on people when something goes wrong, and firm about ownership when someone will not take responsibility for a mistake. It is a safe place to make mistakes and grow, and that is the closest thing we have to an operating manual.

A shortage does not mean firms should lower their standards to hire faster. It means the firms that stay selective and build an environment good people actually want to stay in will out-compete the ones racing to fill seats. It also does not mean remote work equals no culture. Our team runs a weekly gratitude ritual where colleagues call out who helped them that week, and it happens whether someone is dialing in from our home market or from across the world.