The Finance Talent Shortage: Why Accounting and Finance Roles Are Hard to Fill

Key Takeaways

• A shrinking talent pipeline is the main culprit behind the finance talent shortage. Accounting degrees fell 6.6% from 2023–2024, and more than 300,000 professionals left the field between 2019–2022.
• Today’s open roles take longer to fill. Every working day that a finance seat sits empty costs roughly $320 in lost output.
• The squeeze hits finance functions unevenly. FP&A, audit, tax, and compliance each face distinct pressures, from seasonal crunches to scarce analytics and the demand for AI skills.
• Employers who adapt win the talent. Streamlining interviews, opening roles to CPA-eligible candidates, benchmarking pay, and using temporary-to-hire talent all shorten time-to-fill.

Hiring in accounting and finance has changed, and if you manage a finance team, you’ve likely felt the difference firsthand. Roles that once drew a stack of qualified applicants within a couple weeks now sit open for longer, offers get countered, and your existing team absorbs the overflow.

Unfortunately, this isn’t expected to be a temporary rough patch. A structural talent shortage, fueled by a shrinking pipeline of new professionals, retirements, and professionals exiting the field altogether, has reshaped accounting and finance hiring. The result is longer time-to-fill, fiercer competition for talent, and the consequences that result when teams are consistently short staffed.

If you’re a hiring manager, HR leader, or finance executive trying to fill accounting and finance roles quickly, this guide is for you.

WHY IS THERE A FINANCE TALENT SHORTAGE?

Start with supply. According to the 2025 AICPA and NASBA Trends Report, though the rate of accounting enrollment programs is on the rise, U.S. colleges awarded just 55,152 accounting degrees during the 2023–24 academic year, a 6.6% decline from the year before. Additionally, the Wall Street Journal reports that more than 300,000 accountants and auditors left the profession between 2019 and 2022, which translated into a 17% decline in the workforce. As of August 2026, the estimated number of actively licensed CPAs is just over 650,000.

Now add demographics. By some industry estimates, about 75% of CPAs reached retirement age in 2020. As they begin to exit, they take decades of institutional knowledge with them, and there simply aren’t enough early-career professionals entering the field to replace them.

Demand, meanwhile, keeps rising. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) projects employment of accountants and auditors to grow 5% by 2035 and expects about 115,300 openings each year within that timeframe. When supply falls while demand climbs, you get exactly what employers are seeing today: difficulty finding the right people to fill open positions.

While the picture looks bleak now, there are reasons to hope for a turn in the tide. Undergraduate accounting enrollment is on the rise, experiencing a 12% year-over-year increase in spring 2025. At two-year institutions, the enrollment increase was 24%. Additionally, a growing number of states have introduced alternative CPA licensure pathways to lower the barrier to entry. However, even a recovering pipeline takes time to produce experienced hires, which means the pressure you feel when filling openings is here to stay for a while longer.

WHY ACCOUNTING AND FINANCE ROLES ARE HARD TO FILL

On top of the shortage, there are three main influences making finance and accounting hiring particularly difficult.

A Shrinking CPA Pipeline

The CPA credential itself presents a bottleneck. The traditional 150-hour education requirement adds roughly a year of schooling and cost to the path, which can deter students weighing accounting against fields that are easier to enter quickly and offer higher pay. Though new CPA exam candidates rebounded after a dip in 2024, the profession is still replenishing its ranks at a rate that’s outpaced by demand. Like we mentioned previously, more states are rolling out alternative licensure routes, but those changes will also take time to have an impact on the workforce. As it stands, when hiring for CPA roles, you’re competing for a slice of a limited pie.

A Widening Skills Gap

Employers increasingly look for technical accounting abilities paired with data analytics, ERP fluency, and comfort with AI tools. And the gap this creates is most noticeable in analytical roles. According to one Corporate Finance Institute estimate, about half of finance and accounting hiring managers report difficulty finding qualified financial planning and analysis (FP&A) talent. Candidates who combine a strong technical foundation with the communication skills to translate numbers into action items for decision-makers are scarce, which means overall applicant volume might look healthy while qualified applicant volume remains thin.

Fierce Competition for a Limited Talent Pool

Because demand outpaces supply, unemployment in the field is far below the broader market. BLS data puts the employment rate for accountants and auditors at about 2% in 2025, with financial and investment analysts near 1.7% and compliance officers around 1.5%, all well under the national rate of 4.3% for all professions. In practice, that means the qualified talent you want to hire is usually already employed and will likely receive counter offers from current employers who don’t want to lose them. For candidates who apply to your open roles, ensure that your hiring process moves quickly and your offers reflect the current market. Otherwise, you risk losing out to competitors who are better prepared.

WHY FINANCE HIRING TAKES SO LONG

Finding the right candidate is just one part of the process, and it’s easy for hiring timelines to stretch beyond what’s necessary if you aren’t careful. Some of the reasons why it might take a while to hire include:

• Shallower applicant pools: With fewer qualified candidates available, it simply takes more time to find candidates worth interviewing.
• More stakeholders in the room: Where a few people once made a hiring call, many more may often have a say in the final decision. Every added voice means more schedules to coordinate and opinions to consider.
• Changing compensation expectations: Pay has risen higher than many budgets can accommodate, so offers stall, get countered, or fall apart late in the process if expectations aren’t discussed up front.
• Extended interviews: Extra rounds, assessments, and panel interviews increase the time commitment and effort of everyone involved and hand competing employers with a more condensed interview process a chance to swoop in.

TIME-TO-FILL BENCHMARKS AND THE COST OF AN OPEN ROLE

How long should you expect a finance search to take? Across industries, financial services and accounting roles commonly take over 120 days to fill, which opens the door for consequences that could be avoided with a shorter turn around.

Consider what an open finance seat costs while it goes unfilled:

• Your existing team absorbs the extra work, which raises the risk of burnout and turnover among the people you can least afford to lose. One survey found that 99% of accounting and finance professionals reported experiencing burnout, with 24% at medium-to-high levels; short staffing only adds to the pressure.
• Close and reporting deadlines are more likely to slip, and thin coverage increases the odds of errors or compliance gaps in a function where accuracy is non-negotiable.
• The lost productivity that comes with prolonged vacancies can be expensive. The cost of a vacancy is determined using the following formula: the open role’s salary divided by the number of working days in a year (260). At the BLS median accounting wage of $83,680, every working day a finance seat is empty represents $320 in lost output. This number can be considerably higher for senior roles or positions that directly generate more revenue. Stretched across a search that may take months, lost output has the potential to reach tens of thousands of dollars.

HOW HIRING CHALLENGES DIFFER BY ROLE

What makes a role hard to fill, and how long it takes to hire the right candidate, varies with the kind of work and credentials involved.

HOW TO REDUCE HIRING FRICTION AND HIRE FASTER

While you can’t solve finance hiring challenges on your own, you likely have more control over your own outcomes than you may think. The employers who fill finance roles fastest tend to do these five things well:

1. Tighten and Stage the Interview Process

Plan out your interviews from requisition to offer and cut any steps that don’t add value. Decide who needs to be in the room and who can sit out, schedule interview rounds in advance rather than one at a time, and aim to reach the offer stage within days instead of weeks. When top candidates leave the market quickly, speed becomes a competitive advantage.

2. Revisit Your Requirements

Ask yourself whether every role needs to be filled by an active CPA or someone with a specific number of years of experience. Opening a position to CPA-eligible candidates or equivalent hands-on experience can widen your pool without lowering the bar on quality. Be honest about which prerequisites are essential and which are simply nice to have.

3. Benchmark Your Compensation Honestly

Pay expectations are always shifting, and stale salary bands can stall searches. Check your offer against current market data before you post, so you don’t lose finalists to counteroffers or watch a role remain open unnecessarily.

4. Lean on Contract and Temporary-to-Hire Talent

Bringing in contract professionals keeps critical work moving while you search for the right permanent fit. Or, if you think you may have found a good fit but still have reservations, temporary-to-hire placement enables both sides to evaluate the match on the job before either commits, lowering the risk of a costly mis-hire. Some more-experienced professionals choose to pursue project and interim work rather than full-time employment, so you can still find highly qualified candidates for your roles through these pools.

5. Create a Pipeline Before You Need One

The fastest hires are the ones you have lined up before the seat even opens. Cultivating relationships with qualified candidates ahead of time, often through a specialized recruiting partner, turns a months-long search into a shortlist you can act on the day a role becomes available. In a tight market, it’s crucial to be proactive.

GETTING AHEAD OF THE FINANCE TALENT SHORTAGE

Chances are, the finance talent shortage will impact hiring into the near future. But the employers who will stay ahead are likely the ones who move quickly on hiring decisions, have realistic expectations about requirements and compensation, and start building relationships with talent before roles open up.

That’s where a specialized recruiting partner can help. At KBW Financial Staffing & Recruiting, we focus exclusively on accounting and finance hiring across New England, which means we’re already connected to the professionals you’re trying to reach. If a hard-to-fill finance role is weighing on your team, get in touch to start the conversation.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Why are so many accountants quitting the profession?

Accountants are leaving the profession for several overlapping reasons:

• Burnout from heavy workloads and long busy-season hours
• Pay that has lagged behind fields such as technology and advisory
• The time and cost of the 150-hour CPA licensure requirement
• Limited work-life balance and slow paths to advancement

These pressures are widespread, with 99% of accounting and finance professionals reporting some level of burnout, which has pushed more than 300,000 people out of the field since 2020.

Will the accountant shortage get better anytime soon?

The accountant shortage is likely to persist in the near term, though there are early signs of improvement. Undergraduate accounting enrollment rose about 12% in 2025, and a growing number of states have added alternative CPA licensure pathways to widen the pipeline. Even so, it takes years for new graduates to become experienced hires, so employers should expect a tight market for accounting and finance talent for the foreseeable future.

How can a staffing agency help fill financial roles faster?

A specialized staffing agency can shorten a finance search by handling the slowest parts of hiring for you. Because recruiters maintain active relationships with pre-vetted accounting and finance professionals, they can present qualified candidates quickly instead of starting from scratch. They also benchmark market pay, screen for fit, and offer contract or temporary-to-hire talent to keep critical work moving while you find the right permanent hire.

Which industries are hit hardest by the accountant shortage?

The accountant shortage is felt most acutely in public accounting firms, where retirements and demanding busy seasons create the most openings. Beyond public accounting, industries with heavy compliance and reporting demands tend to struggle, including financial services, healthcare, and highly regulated or fast-growing sectors. Any organization competing for licensed or specialized talent, such as audit and tax professionals, also feels the squeeze.