The Accounting Talent Shortage Is Real – and It’s About to Get Worse

If you’ve tried to hire a controller or a senior accountant in the past two years, you already know what the numbers are starting to confirm. The accounting talent market is tight, getting tighter, and showing no structural signs of easing. For privately owned companies trying to build or maintain a finance function, that means higher cost, longer time-to-hire, and a growing dependency on whoever you manage to hold onto.

Understanding what’s driving this, and what it means for how you staff your finance function, is worth a few minutes.

What’s actually happening

The pipeline problem starts at the educational level. The AICPA reported that U.S. accounting graduates fell to 55,152 in the 2023–2024 academic year, down 6.6% from the prior year. That decline is part of a longer trend: CPA exam candidates dropped more than 33% between 2016 and 2023. At the same time, the generational transition in the profession is accelerating. Approximately 75% of AICPA members had reached retirement age by 2020, meaning the senior end of the workforce is shrinking faster than the junior end can replace it.

The result is a structural imbalance that isn’t going to resolve itself quickly. The shortage isn’t cyclical. It’s not an artifact of a hot economy that will reverse in a downturn. It’s a pipeline problem compounded by a retirement wave, and it’s affecting companies up and down the market.

What it costs you in practice

For a privately owned company, the talent shortage shows up in a few specific ways. Salaries for experienced accounting professionals have risen significantly, with controller compensation in the $150,000 to $200,000 range becoming common even for mid-sized companies that wouldn’t have expected to pay that a few years ago. Time-to-fill has extended, with many companies reporting searches of three to six months for senior roles. And retention has gotten harder. A good controller or senior accountant has options, and they know it.

The subtler cost is concentration risk. When your entire accounting function depends on one or two people, especially when one of them carries most of the institutional knowledge, you’re one resignation away from a significant operational disruption. The month-end close stalls. Reporting to lenders gets delayed. Relationships built around your finance team’s credibility suddenly have a question mark.

What the alternatives look like

Companies responding to this dynamic are increasingly separating the question of “who does this work” from “how do we make sure it gets done well.” Structured external support, whether a fully outsourced accounting function or a hybrid that combines an internal coordinator with external execution, provides coverage, consistency, and continuity that’s difficult to replicate with a lean internal team in a tight talent market.

The shift in framing is meaningful. Instead of building a team of employees that the company recruits, trains, manages, and tries to retain, the accounting function becomes a service that’s delivered to a defined standard with built-in redundancy. The company gets reliable financial reporting without owning the talent risk associated with producing it.

That model doesn’t work for every company or every situation. But for companies growing through the $10 to $50 million range, where the complexity is real but the scale doesn’t yet justify a large internal finance team, it’s worth understanding what a well-structured external partnership actually looks like.

We’d be glad to walk through what an outsourced accounting engagement looks like for a business at your stage.