Accountant
Also known as: CPA, Auditor
Manage financial records, prepare tax returns, and ensure organizations stay financially compliant.
Salary Range
The highest-paid specialization or seniority level for accountants.
About 1 in 167 reaches this level
About 1.6M accountants and auditors in the US (BLS Employment Projections, SOC 13-2011, 2025). Big 4 equity partners earning $500K+ number roughly 8,000-10,000 (~0.6%).
Salary data based on 2025 BLS, Glassdoor, and industry reports. Actual compensation varies by location, experience, and employer.
How to Become One
This career typically requires a bachelor's degree. Here are the top colleges for it:
Cost to Qualify
A bachelor's alone does NOT make you a CPA. Most states require 150 total college credit hours — 30 beyond a standard 120-credit bachelor's, usually done as a 5th year or a master's — plus roughly $1,000-3,000 in exam and review-course fees and a few hundred dollars for the state license. How you get those 30 credits matters as much as the exam: about a full-time year at a community college runs near $4,000 (NCES puts average public two-year tuition and fees at $4,000 a year), while a two-year private master's runs near $60,000 (NCES puts average private nonprofit graduate tuition at $29,931 a year).
Sticker price, not what most people pay — scholarships, aid and in-state status all move it. Room and board is shown separately on each college's page.
AI Risk Assessment
The way into accounting is narrowing even though the profession as a whole is not shrinking. The jobs new graduates have traditionally learned on (reconciling accounts, sampling transactions for audits, preparing routine tax and compliance paperwork, documenting controls) are the jobs AI and automation now take on. The big firms say so openly. In October 2025 PwC told Accounting Today it expects AI-driven automation across every step of the audit, from planning to final financial statement review, sometime in 2026, and that it has started hiring engineers into its audit practice it "would have never hired" before. In the UK, the four largest firms have cut graduate intake compared with 2023: KPMG by 29%, Deloitte by 18%, EY by 11% and PwC by 6%, according to Accountancy Age in June 2025, which also reported UK graduate accountancy job listings down 44% in a year. It said firms are moving routine work to lower-cost countries such as India, Malaysia and the Philippines at the same time, so AI is not the only cause.
A Stanford study using payroll records from ADP, the largest US payroll company, lists accountants and auditors among its examples of the most AI-exposed jobs, and found that from late 2022 to September 2025, employment of 22 to 25 year olds in the most exposed jobs fell 6% while employment of 35 to 49 year olds grew more than 8%. That is the rubric's entry-level factor.
What keeps this at 4 rather than 5 is that the government expects steady demand. BLS projects accountant and auditor jobs to grow 5% from 2025 to 2035, faster than the average for all jobs, with about 115,300 openings a year. BLS expects AI to automate routine tasks like data entry, but says this "is not expected to reduce overall demand" and will make advisory and analysis work more important. The CPA license is also a real protection: audit opinions must be signed by a licensed person. For students, the realistic picture is a smaller entry funnel and faster pressure to move into advisory, specialized audit or technology-heavy work.
What would change this score. If US firms cut their graduate classes the way the UK firms have, and BLS's growth fails to show up, it goes to 5. If US entry-level hiring holds steady as the audit tools roll out, it drops to 3.
Sources
Ratings reflect a 10-year outlook based on 2025-2026 research, weighted toward entry-level impact. Individual outcomes will vary.
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