The Accounting Talent Shortage Is Hitting Washington Firms Hard

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Every industry in the United States is dealing with some version of the same problem right now. The Baby Boomer generation, which has defined the American workforce for decades, is retiring in large and accelerating numbers, and the professionals replacing them aren’t arriving fast enough to fill the gap. That dynamic is showing up in healthcare, skilled trades, education and manufacturing in ways that are well documented and widely discussed. In the accounting profession, though, the retirement wave is landing on top of a set of conditions that make the talent shortage significantly more acute than what most other industries are experiencing, and Washington firms are feeling that pressure in ways that are directly shaping how owners think about the future of their practices.

The gap between the professionals leaving the field and the ones entering it isn’t closing. It’s widening, and the consequences are no longer theoretical.

Washington Is Already Naming This a Crisis

The accounting talent shortage isn’t being treated as a vague future concern in Washington. The state’s own professional leadership has been direct about it. The Washington Society of CPAs dedicated a feature article in their fall 2024 publication to what they described as a talent pipeline crisis, examining the impact of Baby Boomer retirements and the shortage of Millennial and Gen Z accounting professionals entering the field to replace them across the industries that depend on their work.

The piece highlighted Gonzaga University professor Andrew Brajcich, the Jud Regis Endowed Chair of Accounting and a past chair of the WSCPA, as one of the leaders working actively to address the problem. One concrete outcome of that work has been expanding the window for CPA exam applicants from 18 months to 36 months, now the longest application window in the country, an accommodation designed specifically to reduce the attrition of candidates who were leaving the pipeline before completing the credentialing process. That kind of structural change at the credentialing level signals how seriously Washington’s accounting leadership is taking the problem. When the state’s professional association is covering it as a defining issue and university professors are working to change exam policy to keep more candidates in the process, the talent shortage has moved well past abstract concern and into active crisis management.

The Retirement Wave Is Real, and It’s Hitting Accounting Especially Hard

The broader workforce retirement trend is well established. Roughly 10,000 Baby Boomers reach retirement age every day in the United States, and that pace is expected to continue through the end of the decade. Most industries have been aware of this dynamic long enough to begin building response strategies, whether through automation, workforce development pipelines or compensation restructuring. The accounting profession has been aware of it too, but the scale of the exposure is particularly significant.

Approximately 75 percent of CPAs are part of the Baby Boomer generation and are approaching retirement age, which means the profession is facing a retirement wave proportionally much larger than what most other industries are managing. When three quarters of a profession’s licensed practitioners are approaching the end of their careers simultaneously, the incoming pipeline has to be performing exceptionally well just to maintain steady state.

It isn’t.

The Pipeline Was Already Struggling Before Retirements Accelerated

The talent shortage facing Washington CPA firms isn’t solely a retirement story. The supply side of the profession was already contracting before the retirement pressure intensified, and the combination of the two forces is what makes the current situation so difficult to navigate for firm owners trying to plan more than a few years out.

According to the AICPA’s 2023 Trends Report, 47,067 students earned a bachelor’s degree in accounting in the 2021 to 2022 school year, down 7.8 percent from the previous year, and the number of students earning a master’s degree in accounting fell 6.4 percent to 18,238. Those aren’t rounding errors in an otherwise healthy pipeline. They represent meaningful year-over-year contraction in the foundational supply of accounting professionals at the exact moment the profession needs that supply to be growing.

The credentialing numbers tell an even starker story. Unique CPA exam candidates decreased 34.2 percent since the last high in 2016, with overall exam candidates dropping from 48,004 in 2016 to 30,251 in 2022. NASBA has been direct about what this means, stating that there is no question numbers in all categories have trended downward over the past seven years. The profession itself has named this openly, with AICPA leadership stating directly that there is a talent shortage in accounting that affects business as a whole. Washington’s credentialing reforms, including the expanded exam window championed by Gonzaga’s Brajcich, are a direct response to the reality that the existing pipeline structure was losing too many candidates before they ever reached licensure.

Demand Is Growing While Supply Is Shrinking

What makes the talent shortage particularly difficult for Washington firms is that it isn’t a case of declining demand for accounting services creating a natural correction in workforce size. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 130,800 openings for accountants and auditors are projected each year on average over the decade. Demand is moving in the opposite direction from supply, and that gap is showing up directly in how Washington firm owners experience the hiring market: longer timelines, fewer qualified applicants, and compensation pressure that smaller independent firms struggle to absorb the same way larger regional organizations can.

Experienced mid-level accountants, senior staff and managers are increasingly difficult to retain as larger firms and corporate finance departments compete aggressively for a limited pool of professionals. The imbalance isn’t resolving itself.

Burnout Is Accelerating Departures From the Profession

Nearly all accountants, 99 percent, experience exhaustion, feelings of inefficiency and alienation from their jobs at some point in their careers, compared to 44 percent of U.S. workers broadly who report feeling burned out at work. That’s not a marginal difference in occupational stress. It’s a structural problem with how the profession is experienced by the people working inside it, and it has direct consequences for both retention and pipeline health that compound the shortage at every level simultaneously.

For Washington firm owners, burnout manifests in ways that directly affect succession planning. Staff leave public accounting for corporate roles with better hours and comparable compensation. Experienced professionals exit the workforce earlier than planned. Younger accountants who completed their degrees and passed the exam make deliberate decisions not to pursue partnership or firm ownership because they’ve watched what that path demands from the people ahead of them and decided the tradeoff isn’t worth it. The result is a shrinking pool of professionals willing to take on the responsibilities that independent firm ownership requires.

The Shortage Is Now Showing Up in Business Outcomes

The evidence that this has moved beyond an internal industry concern is now documented in public filings. Nearly 640 U.S.-listed companies cited insufficient accounting personnel for a material weakness, and roughly 180, or 28 percent, replaced their CFO in connection with that reporting, according to the Wall Street Journal. Financial reporting quality, audit integrity and operational stability are all being affected in ways that show up in regulatory filings and executive turnover rather than just industry conference panels.

The Journal of Accountancy has noted that offshoring can open the door to a global talent pool, reflecting how seriously domestic firms are struggling to staff their practices through traditional recruiting channels. When a profession’s leading publication is actively discussing international staffing as a mainstream response to a domestic shortage, the depth of the problem is no longer in question.

What This Means for Washington Firm Owners

For CPA firm owners in Washington, the talent shortage is a practical constraint that affects daily operations, long-term growth planning and succession options in concrete ways. Firms that relied on developing internal successors are finding that those potential successors are harder to attract, harder to retain and less interested in ownership responsibility than previous generations were. The WSCPA recognized this dynamic directly in their pipeline crisis coverage, and the work being done at the university level to reform credentialing pathways reflects a genuine understanding that the traditional model for developing the next generation of firm owners is no longer functioning the way it needs to.

Consolidation is a rational response to a market where scale provides recruiting advantages and operational resilience that smaller independent firms can’t easily replicate on their own. Merger and acquisition activity among top accounting firms nearly doubled to 225 deals in 2025 alone, and that number reflects owners making clear-eyed decisions about the environment they’re operating in rather than waiting for conditions to improve. For Washington firm owners thinking about what the next chapter looks like, whether that means a near-term transition, a strategic merger or simply understanding what their practice is worth in the current market, working with experienced accounting firm brokers in Washington is a conversation that more owners are having earlier than they expected to. The firms navigating that process with good information and adequate preparation time are consistently reaching better outcomes than the ones who wait until the pressure becomes unavoidable.

The Window for Planning Is Narrowing

Succession planning, practice valuation, buyer identification and client retention structuring all take time to do properly, and the owners who approach those processes proactively have significantly more control over how the transition unfolds and what it ultimately delivers. The accounting talent shortage isn’t a problem Washington firms can hire their way out of on a short timeline, and the credentialing reforms happening at the state level, while meaningful, won’t produce the volume of experienced professionals the market needs quickly enough to change the near-term picture for owners approaching retirement.

What firm owners can control is how they position themselves within a market that has changed substantially and isn’t likely to reverse. The owners taking that seriously now are the ones who will look back on this period as one they navigated well rather than one that caught them off guard.