Over 90% of finance and accounting leaders report difficulty finding qualified professionals, according to Robert Half’s 2025 Talent Report. That number has been climbing for years. But if you run a regional CPA firm, it probably still understates your reality.
The CPA shortage is not a temporary hiring cycle. It is a structural supply problem that has been building for a decade and is now acute enough that the AICPA has called it a pipeline crisis. Accounting degree completions fell roughly 30% over the past ten years, from about 79,000 in 2014–15 to 55,152 in 2023–24, according to the AICPA’s 2025 Trends Report. The pool of new candidates sitting for the CPA exam hit a multiyear low in 2024.
What makes this harder for regional firms specifically is that the shortage is not evenly distributed. The professionals most likely to leave public accounting are exactly the ones you most need: tax practitioners, managers, and seniors who can run client work independently.
Here is what is driving the shortage, how it is affecting searches at regional firms right now, and what you can realistically do about it.
Why the CPA Shortage Goes Deeper Than a Hiring Slump
The phrase “talent shortage” gets used to describe temporary imbalances between supply and demand. What is happening in public accounting is different. It is a structural contraction at the entry point of the profession that has compounded over a decade.
The data are stark. The AICPA’s 2025 Trends Report documents that combined bachelor’s and master’s accounting degree completions fell to 55,152 in 2023–24, down from a peak of roughly 79,000 in the mid–2010s. That is a 30% reduction in new graduates over ten years. At the same time, demand has not softened. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects 6% growth in accounting and auditor roles through the early 2030s, a rate faster than the average for all occupations.
First–time CPA exam candidates also thinned considerably. The AICPA reports 28,082 new exam candidates in 2024, compared to 42,626 in 2023. Some of the 2023 surge was a pull–forward effect ahead of the new exam format. But strip out that spike and the underlying trend is a multi–year decline in the number of people pursuing licensure.
There are real reasons for this. The 150–credit–hour requirement adds roughly a year of education beyond a standard bachelor’s degree, increasing both time and cost without a corresponding increase in early–career pay. The CPA exam sections carry demanding pass rates. And accounting’s reputation among younger professionals has struggled to compete with technology, finance, and data roles that offer similar or higher compensation with more immediate career mobility.
There is some positive signal in recent enrollment data. Undergraduate accounting program enrollment was 12% higher in spring 2025 compared to spring 2024, per the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. If that trend holds, it may eventually expand the graduate pool. But the keyword is eventually. The professionals you need to hire this year, or next year, graduated two to five years ago. A pipeline recovery takes at least five years to show up as licensed practitioners in regional firm recruiting.
The CPA shortage you are managing today is the result of a decade of declining input. It will not reverse on a single recruiting cycle.
Why the CPA Shortage Hits Regional Public Accounting Firms Hardest
The aggregate data on the accounting shortage mask an important distribution problem. Research published in the CPA Journal in October 2025 found that the decline in employment is concentrated in public accounting, specifically within tax and non–audit fields. Employment in audit has experienced virtually no decline. The shortage is falling most heavily on regional CPA firms, and within those firms, on their tax practices.
This matters because it shapes where you are actually competing for talent. A national firm with a large audit practice and deep university recruiting infrastructure is dealing with a different problem than a 20–person regional firm running a primarily tax and advisory book.
Eighty–two percent of public accounting firms report significant retention challenges, according to research cited in the CPA Journal. That figure is consistent with what managing partners describe when they talk about firm staffing. The problem is not just finding new people. It is keeping the ones you already trained.
The retention piece has a structural driver that does not get discussed enough. Experienced accountants, particularly those three to seven years into their public accounting careers, are leaving for the private sector in large numbers. They are moving to corporate finance roles at private companies, PE–backed portfolio companies, and regional corporations that offer more predictable hours and more competitive total compensation.
This is not coincidence. The same private equity deal volume that is generating demand for CFOs, Controllers, and Finance Directors is creating an active secondary market for public accounting talent. A tax manager with four years of regional firm experience and a track record of managing client engagements is exactly the profile that a PE–backed manufacturing company wants for its controller role. The accounting firm talent shortage and the demand for CPA credentials in corporate finance are directly connected supply–demand forces working against each other.
If you want to understand how that market is structured and what it is competing with, the article on what PE sponsors need to know before hiring a private equity executive search firm lays out the decision logic from the other side of the table. It helps explain why the pull from corporate finance is as strong as it is.
What a Search Actually Looks Like in This Market
The abstract data on the CPA shortage become concrete when you look at hiring timelines. Finance roles requiring CPA credentials now take an average of 73 days to fill, 41% longer than comparable positions without the credential requirement, according to Talentfoot’s 2025 hiring data.
Seventy–three days is more than two full billing cycles. For a firm in the middle of tax season or heading into audit season, that timeline is not a process inconvenience. It is a direct revenue and client service problem.
What is making searches harder is the compression in the licensed candidate pool. In 2025, roughly 38% of employers posting CPA–required positions ultimately hired candidates without an active license, per Talentfoot’s modeled placement data. They substituted equivalent corporate finance experience. That is a viable option for some corporate roles. It is generally not a workable path for a public accounting firm that needs to sign returns or issue audit opinions.
There is also the issue of how searches are run. If you are posting and waiting for a licensed candidate to come through standard channels, you are competing with every other firm and company that wants the same profile. The candidates actively applying to posted jobs represent a small fraction of the total pool. The larger fraction are passive: employed, not actively looking, but open to a conversation if the opportunity is right.
This is where firms that approach hiring strategically pull away from those that do not. Passive candidate outreach, referral networks, and specialized search firms that already carry relationships with licensed practitioners are not premium options in this market. They are the baseline for closing searches in a reasonable timeframe.
Firms that manage the shortage best treat hiring as a continuous activity rather than a reactive one. When a key person announces, the search should not be starting from zero.
Where Your Staff Is Going and Why the Numbers Keep Growing
Understanding where talent goes helps clarify what you are competing against. The Wall Street Journal documented that over 300,000 accountants left the profession between 2019 and 2022. Bloomberg News research found that more than 720 companies cited insufficient accounting and finance staff as a factor in potential financial reporting errors, a 30% increase from 2019.
Some of that attrition is retirement. A large segment of the senior CPA population, trained in the 1970s and 1980s, is exiting the workforce. What is harder to replace is mid–career talent: managers and seniors with five to ten years of public accounting experience who are now fielding calls from corporate recruiters every quarter.
The pull from private industry has gotten stronger. Total compensation for finance roles at PE–backed and private companies has risen sharply, particularly at the controller and VP Finance level. A CPA with five years of regional firm experience and a client engagement track record is worth considerably more to a 100–person manufacturing company than their current public accounting salary reflects. The gap is often wide enough that they make the move without extended negotiation.
Tax roles are particularly affected. The CPA Journal research found that while tax practitioners earn roughly $7,500 more per year than audit professionals at entry level, per the Robert Half salary guide, the tax field still faces a deeper shortage than audit. Higher demand and lower supply in the same specialty makes tax managers and seniors among the hardest profiles to place in any regional market.
If you want context on what corporate finance compensation looks like on the other side of this equation, the CFO compensation benchmarking guide for PE–backed portfolio companies covers the ranges your staff is being recruited into. The numbers explain why retention requires more than a counter–offer once someone is actively exploring.
What Competitive Firms Are Doing to Stay Staffed
The firms managing the accounting firm talent shortage better than average are doing a few things differently. None of these are new ideas, but the ones that are working are being executed with more consistency and urgency than before.
Compensation adjustments are the most visible change. EY announced a 10% salary increase for accountants in 2025 as part of a three–year, $1 billion talent investment. That benchmark matters even if you are not EY. It resets the reference point for what early–career accountants expect when they evaluate offers. Robert Half’s 2025 salary data show that starting salaries in high–demand accounting roles, particularly tax, are rising faster than general inflation, with signing bonuses now routine rather than exceptional at many firms.
Credential flexibility is a second lever. Some firms are redesigning role requirements to widen the candidate pool. Rather than requiring an active CPA license on every hire, they bring in CPA–eligible candidates and support them through the licensure process with paid study time, exam fee coverage, and mentorship. This works for some positions and is not workable for others, but the firms using it strategically are closing searches weeks faster than those holding a strict credentialing bar across the board.
Outsourcing is a third response, though one with real limits for regional advisory and tax practices. About 25% of CPA firms outsource at least part of their accounting or bookkeeping work, according to the AICPA. For most regional firms, the practical version of this is staff augmentation during peak periods: it addresses capacity without solving the core need for licensed professionals in client–facing roles.
I put together a full breakdown of what that looks like in practice in the CPA Firm Talent Playbook, available for download at insidefinancesearch.com/cpa. It covers the staffing model questions regional firms are facing right now, how to structure the search process, and what to do when a key person exits mid–season.
What the CPA Shortage Means for Your Next Hire
The instinct when talent is scarce is to post a role, see what comes in, and make the best decision from that pool. That worked when the CPA shortage was moderate and candidate flow was reasonable. It does not work in a market where 90% of accounting leaders are already struggling to hire and the graduate pipeline is 30% smaller than it was a decade ago.
Here is how I would frame the decision for a managing partner working through a search.
Start with the passive candidate pool. The person who is right for your role is almost certainly currently employed. They may not be actively searching. That means the search has to go to them, not wait for them to find you. A specialized recruiting partner, a strong referral network, or both are the realistic paths to that population.
Be honest about your offer before the search starts. If your compensation is at market, you can compete. If it is below market, you need either a differentiated value proposition or a willingness to adjust on comp before you launch. Losing a finalist at the offer stage after a 73–day search costs another 30 to 45 days. Most firms cannot absorb that mid–cycle.
Think carefully about the CPA requirement. For client–facing roles where licensure is non–negotiable, that has to be in the brief from day one and reflected in the compensation package. For roles where a CPA–eligible candidate could grow into the requirement, widening the brief may close the search several weeks faster.
Finally, treat the departure of a key person as a signal worth understanding. If a manager or senior left for a corporate role, that tells you something about where your offer stood relative to the market. It is worth understanding that gap before the next one happens.
The CPA firm staffing model is getting harder to run with reactive hiring. The firms pulling ahead are the ones building the infrastructure to find people before the seat is open.
Conclusion
The accounting profession has been losing ground on the supply side for a decade. The AICPA’s own data put the scale of it plainly: roughly 30% fewer accounting graduates than ten years ago, a compressed exam pipeline, and a licensed practitioner population aging out faster than it is being replaced.
For a regional CPA firm, that backdrop is not abstract. It shows up in searches that run longer than they should, candidates who accept other offers mid–process, and staff who leave for corporate roles that are difficult to match on compensation alone.
The public accounting talent shortage is a structural problem. But there is a meaningful difference between firms managing it strategically and those that are not. The ones doing better are hiring more proactively, paying closer attention to market compensation, and working with recruiting partners who already carry relationships in the licensed practitioner pool.
If you are working through a search right now, or want to get ahead of one before busy season, Royal Search Group works exclusively with accounting and finance professionals and has deep experience placing talent at regional CPA firms. You can reach Michael Hill directly at michael@royalsearchgroup.com.