Why CPA-Required Accounting Roles Are Taking Longer to Fill Than Ever
The AICPA's 2025 Trends Report confirms that accounting degree completions have fallen to a 20-year low, with only 55,152 degrees awarded in 2023-24, down 6.6% from the prior year and roughly 17% below the peak from a decade ago. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects more than 120,000 accounting and auditing openings each year. The gap between the shrinking pipeline of new accounting graduates and the number of professionals employers need each year is at the center of the hiring problem finance leaders are facing right now. Roles requiring CPA licensure sit at the most constrained part of it.
Key Takeaways:
The Supply Gap Is Structural: The AICPA's 2025 Trends Report confirms accounting degree completions have fallen to a 20-year low, with just 55,152 degrees awarded in 2023-24. The BLS projects over 120,000 accounting and auditing openings each year. The CPA shortage and broader accounting talent shortage are both products of supply and demand moving in opposite directions for over a decade.
The Retirement Wave Has Not Peaked: The AICPA estimates that 75% of its currently licensed members had already reached retirement age by 2020. The profession is losing experienced practitioners faster than the pipeline is replacing them.
CPA Exam Participation Dropped Sharply in 2024: Accounting Today reported that new CPA exam candidates fell from 42,626 in 2023 to 28,082 in 2024, a significant single-year decline, though 2025 has shown early signs of recovery.
The Skills Required Are Expanding: The Controllers Council 2025 Corporate Finance and Accounting Talent Research Study found that 31% of controller job listings now require data analytics or AI-related skills, up from 25% the prior year. The credential requirement is not softening. The skill set attached to it is widening.
Employers Are Rethinking What They Require: With the qualified pool tighter than it has been in two decades, a growing number of employers are distinguishing between roles that genuinely require active CPA licensure and roles where CPA-eligible or CPA-preferred candidacy is enough to meet the actual business need.
Finance leaders are increasingly finding that searches which once took six weeks can now stretch toward three months. A Senior Accountant role that once drew a strong applicant pool is now drawing a fraction of that volume. The quality of who applies has not necessarily declined. The number of people who are both available and credentialed has.
That pattern is showing up in finance and accounting searches at companies of every size and in every industry. The accounting talent shortage is not broken in the way it was during the early pandemic disruptions, where timing and remote work created short-term volatility. What is happening now is structural, driven by demographic and pipeline forces that have been building for over a decade and are not reversing quickly. At the center of it is a CPA shortage that shows up most visibly in how long credentialed searches take and how thin the qualified pool is when they open.
A Pipeline That Has Been Shrinking for Ten Years
The accounting talent shortage did not arrive suddenly. The data behind it has been building in the same direction for years.
The AICPA's 2025 Trends Report, released in October 2025, found that accounting degree completions fell to just 55,152 in the 2023-24 academic year, a 6.6% decline from the prior year and roughly 17% below where completions stood a decade ago. That represents a 20-year low for the profession's entry point, and it comes at a moment when demand from employers is moving in the opposite direction.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects more than 120,000 accounting and auditing openings annually through 2033. That projection was made against a backdrop of roughly 55,000 degrees awarded each year, before factoring in the share of graduates who enter adjacent fields, leave the profession early, or do not pursue CPA licensure at all. The arithmetic is not favorable to employers.
There is one note of genuine optimism in the recent data: CPA Trendlines and CFO Dive reported that accounting program enrollment rose 12.4% in 2025, a meaningful reversal of years of declining interest. CPA exam candidates are also trending upward through the first half of 2025. Neither of those signals has yet translated into a meaningfully larger pool of credentialed professionals in the market, because the pipeline from enrollment to licensure takes years to move through. But they are worth watching as a signal that the structural shortage may begin easing in the latter part of the decade.
Why the Retirement Wave Compounds the Problem
The pipeline problem on the supply side is pressing enough on its own. The retirement picture adds urgency to it.
The Controllers Council has cited AICPA data estimating that approximately 75% of AICPA members were eligible for retirement as of 2020, meaning they had reached retirement age, not that they had left the workforce. That figure has been widely cited because it captures something most accounting hiring conversations understate: the profession is not just struggling to attract new entrants. It is losing significant portions of its experienced workforce at an accelerating pace, with limited capacity to replace those practitioners.
The combined effect is a profession that is being compressed from both ends simultaneously. The entry point is narrowing as fewer graduates complete accounting degrees and pursue licensure. The experienced end is thinning as licensed practitioners retire. What remains in the middle, the pool of credentialed professionals with meaningful industry experience who are available and interested in a new role, is smaller than it has been in a long time, and the employers competing for that pool are growing more numerous, not fewer.
Where CPA-Required Roles Feel It Most
Not all accounting roles are affected equally by the shortage. The ones that specify active CPA licensure as a requirement, rather than a preference, sit at the most constrained part of the market.
The credential functions as a hard filter in the hiring process. A position listed as CPA-required is effectively screened from the majority of accounting professionals in the labor market, most of whom either hold an inactive license, are working toward licensure, or hold relevant experience without the credential itself. In a market with surplus qualified candidates, that filter is a useful quality signal. In a market where the qualified pool is already thin, it narrows an already narrow search further.
The Wall Street Journal reported in 2025 that the number of people sitting for the CPA exam has declined significantly over the past decade, a trend tied in part to the 150-hour educational requirement that most states still impose as a prerequisite for licensure. Debates over that requirement are ongoing, with several states moving to modify or eliminate it in an effort to lower barriers to entry, but the regulatory landscape is changing slowly relative to the hiring pressure employers are feeling right now.
The Controllers Council's 2025 research adds another layer: 31% of controller-level job listings now require data analytics or AI-related competencies, up from 25% the prior year. Employers are not simply looking for a licensed CPA. They are looking for a licensed CPA who also brings fluency in tools and capabilities that barely appeared in accounting job descriptions five years ago. As we covered in The 2026 Accounting Salary Landscape, the combination of credential requirements and expanding skill expectations is reshaping what competitive compensation looks like at the senior level.
What Employers Are Doing About It
The response to tighter talent markets in accounting is not uniform, but a few patterns are emerging among employers navigating the constraint more successfully.
The most common adjustment is a deliberate reassessment of what the role actually requires versus what the listing specifies. There is a meaningful difference between a senior accounting role where active CPA licensure is operationally necessary and one where the credential was listed as required because it had always been listed that way. Employers who have separated those categories are finding that CPA-preferred or CPA-eligible language opens their candidate pool without materially compromising their ability to find qualified people for roles where the license is not genuinely critical to daily function.
A second adjustment is the timeline expectation. Employers who are calibrating their search to the current market, rather than to how searches moved two or three years ago, are building more runway into the process and reducing the operational disruption that comes from underestimating how long a credentialed search takes in this environment.
A third is compensation. As we covered in Public vs Private Accounting: What Changes When You Make the Switch, the credentialed professional has options on both sides of that decision, and compensation expectations have moved meaningfully. Employers who are benchmarking against data from 2022 or 2023 are frequently discovering their offers are below where the market has moved.
What the Data Suggests Is Coming
The near-term picture for employers filling CPA-required roles does not change quickly. The licensing pipeline that produces active CPAs moves through a multi-year process from enrollment to exam completion to licensure, and even the encouraging enrollment data from 2025 will take years to translate into a materially larger pool of credentialed professionals.
The AICPA is actively working to address the pipeline through initiatives aimed at lowering financial and administrative barriers to licensure, expanding outreach to undergraduate programs, and making the profession more accessible to students who might otherwise self-select out. Several states are revisiting the 150-hour requirement specifically. Those efforts matter and the early enrollment data suggests they may be having some effect, but the employers managing searches today are doing so in a market shaped by decisions made five and ten years ago, not decisions being made now.
The employers who navigate that environment most effectively are the ones who go into a CPA-required search with a realistic sense of the pool size, a compensation offer benchmarked to the current market, and enough lead time to run the search properly. The ones who struggle are almost always the ones who expected the search to move the way it did before the market shifted.
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The Agency Recruiting places accounting and finance professionals nationwide, including the credentialed talent that is hardest to find through a posting alone. If your organization has a senior accounting search underway or coming, contact us to talk about what the current market looks like and who is actually available.
