US Accounting Hiring in 2026: 44 Candidates per Opening

Median posted pay runs from $52,052 for accounts receivable specialists to $157,500 for financial reporting managers, a spread of about 203% across nineteen roles. The table sorts into three bands and they are worth reading separately. Management sits above $110,000. Financial reporting managers lead at $157,500, then corporate controllers at $135,000, tax managers at $133,300, accounting managers at $124,910, audit managers at $122,750 and payroll managers at $110,500. The senior individual contributor band clusters tightly between $72,820 and $90,000: accounts payable managers at $90,000, cost accountants at $89,800, financial reporting accountants at $89,200, senior accountants at $85,000, internal auditors at $82,130, forensic accountants at $81,250 and auditors at $72,820. Nine roles sit inside an eighteen thousand dollar band, which is the flattest middle of any role table in this series. Transactional work is the third band. Tax accountants are $70,000, staff accountants $65,000, payroll specialists $62,500, bookkeepers $60,000, accounts payable specialists $55,000 and accounts receivable specialists $52,052. The feed carries no posting count per role, so treat the exact ordering as directional.

California leads states at $99,840, ahead of New York at $95,000, Massachusetts at $93,600 and Georgia at $88,125. Illinois and New Jersey tie at $85,000, then Texas at $84,078, Colorado at $82,500, Pennsylvania at $72,500 and Florida lowest at $70,000, a state spread of about 43%. Cities spread wider, about 63%. San Francisco tops the list at $138,794, which is 70% above the national median and the single largest metro premium in this report. New York follows at $117,500 and Boston at $110,950. San Diego is lowest of the ten at $85,000. Georgia is the cut worth a second look. It ranks fourth among states on a median well above Illinois, Texas and Colorado, and Atlanta is the only city outside the coastal markets to reach six figures. State medians pool metro and non-metro postings unevenly and no cut here carries a posting count, so read both as directional.

Posted pay is close to flat across the year. The median sits at $85,000 in January, drops to $80,000 in February and April, and settles at $82,130 in June, July and August, which is the same figure three months running. Top to bottom the whole year moves about 6%. That flatness is the finding. Read the monthly line as a change in what was posted rather than a change in what accountants are paid, since only 42.6% of postings disclose a range and the mix of roles posted moves a pooled median on its own. On this feed the mix barely moves it. All eight months clear the floor of 100 disclosed ranges we apply before publishing a monthly point, so nothing is suppressed here. Volume is a different story. May carries 1,350 postings against 4,083 in April and 4,423 in June. That trough has appeared in every industry pull we have run this year, so treat it as an ingestion window rather than as a May hiring collapse.

Two figures in this section come from Glozo data that public salary sources do not publish. Against 17,850 active postings, the feed carries a measured talent pool of 782,713 accounting professionals in the United States. Divide one by the other and there are about 44 available professionals for every open role. That is a supply-side measurement, and it is the number most discussions of accounting hiring are missing. It describes everyone carrying an accounting title, not the credentialed subset, and the two are not the same population. The skills section below prices that distinction directly. Postings clear in 10.8 days on average. internal auditors stay open longest at 15.9 days, then audit managers at 12.9 and forensic accountants at 12.8. bookkeepers close fastest at 9.6 days, with tax accountants at 9.7 and payroll managers at 10.2. The whole spread is 6.3 days across nineteen roles. Pay and time to fill have no relationship here. Pearson correlation across all nineteen roles is -0.047, and removing the single longest-running role leaves 0.022. Audit is the one shape in the data: the three roles that stay open longest are internal auditors, audit managers and forensic accountants, and they sit in three different pay bands. What keeps a posting open in this market is the specialism, not the salary.

Full-time work accounts for 89.9% of postings. Contract roles are 5.3%, part-time 2.4%, internships 1.6% and temporary work 0.7%. The 10.1% that is not full-time is the widest non-permanent share of any technical or financial market in this series, and its shape is specific to accounting. Contract at 5.3% is roughly the share you would expect from interim controller and project reporting work. Part-time and temporary together are seasonal, and the employer list makes that visible: two of the five largest posting employers in the feed are consumer tax preparation firms. Internships at 1.6% sit alongside a talent pool that is 14.4% entry level. Unlike every technical market we measure, the formal entry route and the measured junior population point the same way here.

The largest premium belongs to a credential, not a tool. Certified Public Accountant carries 19.6%, worth about $16,013 on the market median. Financial modeling follows at 18.2%, US GAAP at 14.0%, financial reporting at 13.7%, Certified Management Accountant at 13.3%, internal controls at 12.8% and Certified Internal Auditor at 10.8%. The ordering is the whole story. All three certifications in the feed rank in the top seven. All three enterprise systems rank in the bottom four: NetSuite at 8.7%, Oracle Financials at 8.3% and SAP FICO at 7.4%. Revenue recognition is lowest of the thirteen at 5.2%. That is the reverse of the technical markets in this series, where the tool is what carries the premium: Kubernetes at 18% leads our cloud report and Synopsys EDA at 9.1% leads semiconductors. In accounting the platform a candidate has used is worth less than half of what the licence is worth, and no ERP on the list beats 8.7%. Data analytics at 10.1% is the one general skill priced near the credentials.

The measured pool is 782,713 professionals, the largest in this report series, and it is the shape rather than the size that matters. Specialists are 48.9%, experts 21.5%, leaders 15.1% and entry level 14.4%, or 113,088 people. That entry share is roughly eight times the 1.6% we measure in cloud infrastructure, 1.7% in semiconductors and 2.1% in cybersecurity. Accounting is the only market we have measured with a genuinely deep junior layer. Both ends are thick: 118,268 people sit in the leader tier, more than the entry tier holds. Posted pay tells you where the constraint actually is. The ladder runs $55,737 at entry, $70,720 for specialists, $128,000 for experts and $140,000 for leaders, a range of about 2.5 times. The step from entry to specialist is 26.9%. The step from specialist to expert is 81.0%, and the step above that is 9.4%. So the pay wall is in the middle of the ladder, not at the door. The specialist median sits 13.4% below the overall market median while specialists are 48.9% of the pool, which is what a large, well supplied middle looks like when it is priced accordingly.

The gender pay figures here come from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, not from Glozo postings. For accountants and auditors, the 2025 annual averages in the Current Population Survey give a median of $100,932 a year for men and $81,952 for women, a gap of 18.8%. On the weekly basis the Bureau publishes on, that is $1,941 against $1,576. Two limits are worth stating plainly. These are earnings of people already in the job, while every other figure in this report is posted pay on open roles, so the two sets describe different things and should not be read against each other. And Glozo collects no gender data on candidates or on postings, so nothing else in this report is broken out by gender.