Accountant salary in 2026, by level and by industry

The median accountant earned $83,680 a year in May 2025 - $40.23 an hour - according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Outlook Handbook entry for accountants and auditors. That single number covers 1,595,200 people, a first-year Staff Accountant and an Audit Partner sitting in the same pool. The rest of this post is the spread underneath it: the tenth and ninetieth percentiles, the four industries BLS breaks out separately, and the pay ladder that runs from bookkeeping clerk to financial manager.

One thing this post does not contain is a city table. That is not an oversight, and the second section explains what happened to the page that used to hold one.

What the median hides

Source: BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, accountants and auditors, May 2025 wage estimates.

How to read this. A median is the midpoint, not an average, which matters in a field with a long upper tail - one partner earning several times the typical wage pulls a mean upward and leaves a median untouched. The percentiles pool everything BLS has: all fifty states, every industry, every year of experience, one distribution. So "the lowest 10 percent" is not a synonym for "entry level". It is the bottom tenth of everyone in the occupation, which takes in part-year workers and small-town practices as well as people in their first year out of school.

The two forms of the median are one estimate, not two facts. $83,680 a year and $40.23 an hour are the same May 2025 figure expressed two ways, and the Handbook notes that most accountants and auditors work full time. That is worth holding onto if you are comparing the hourly number to a contract rate, because a contract rate has to cover the weeks nobody is paying you.

Here is what the table does not tell you. BLS publishes no wage by years of experience and no wage by job title inside occupation code 13-2011. There is no federal number for Staff Accountant and none for Senior Accountant, because both titles live inside the same code and the Handbook never separates them. If a site quotes you a precise Senior Accountant median, it came from a private survey, and the survey should be named.

Can you get accountant salary by city?

Not from a BLS occupation page. The address that used to hold the national, state and metropolitan wage tables for accountants and auditors - the OEWS page for 13-2011 - now returns an index of downloadable OEWS files by year, with no occupation wage data displayed on it at all. The state and metro estimates still exist inside those downloads. There is no per-occupation metro page left to open and read.

That is worth stating plainly instead of filling the gap with an invented table, and it should change what you anchor on. Anchor on your level and your industry, not your city. The occupation's internal spread runs from less than $56,020 at the tenth percentile to more than $144,090 at the ninetieth. The gap between its best- and worst-paying industries runs from $93,290 down to $81,490 - a much narrower band, sitting inside the first one. Where you fall in your own occupation moves your pay across a far wider range than which of the four industries you move to, and a city median would sit somewhere inside both. A metro figure describes a market. Your percentile describes you.

The ladder: clerk, accountant, manager

The accounting pay ladder, May 2025

BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, May 2025 wages and 2025-35 projections. The 7 percent figure covers financial analysts overall.

	Median annual wage	Lowest 10 percent	Projected change, 2025-35
Bookkeeping, accounting, and auditing clerks	$50,670	Less than $36,000	-6%
Accountants and auditors	$83,680	Less than $56,020	+5%
Budget analysts	$91,640	Less than $62,250	+2%
Financial and investment analysts	$102,740	Less than $63,720	+7%
Financial managers	$166,570	Less than $94,310	+10%

Two of the steps in that ladder are made of different material. The step from clerk to accountant is education: BLS gives the typical entry-level requirement for bookkeeping, accounting and auditing clerks as some college with no degree, and for accountants and auditors as a bachelor's degree. The step from accountant to financial manager is time. BLS says financial managers typically need five years or more of experience in another business or financial occupation, which is the honest description of what a Senior Accountant title is buying - not a wage band, a position in a queue.

Now read the second column against the first. The tenth percentile for financial managers, $94,310, is above the median for accountants and auditors. It is also above the ninetieth percentile for bookkeeping clerks, $74,550, by a margin no amount of seniority inside the clerk role will close. The two lower occupations are almost exactly the same size - 1,532,400 clerks against 1,595,200 accountants in 2025 - and one is projected to shed jobs through 2035 while the other adds them.

Accountants and auditors, 2025

1,595,200Employed in 2025

115,300Projected openings per year, 2025-35

+5%Projected employment change, 2025-35

Those two projection figures describe different things, and the difference is the point. The Handbook expects about 115,300 openings a year over the decade, but total growth of only 79,400 jobs across all ten years combined. The great majority of what you will see advertised is therefore a replacement - a retirement, a move into a financial manager role, an exit from the field - rather than a newly created seat. The clerk occupation is the same arithmetic pushed further: BLS expects it to shed about 85,600 jobs by 2035 and still carry roughly 144,100 openings a year, because the churn out of a shrinking occupation is bigger than the shrinking.

Which industry pays accountants the most?

Median annual wage by industry, May 2025

The four top industries BLS breaks out for accountants and auditors. The occupation-wide median is $83,680.

Finance and insurance		$93,290
Management of companies and enterprises		$91,940
Government, excl. state and local education and hospitals		$83,350
Accounting, tax preparation, bookkeeping, and payroll services		$81,490

The industry that employs the most accountants pays them the least. BLS puts 21 percent of accountants and auditors in accounting, tax preparation, bookkeeping and payroll services - public accounting, in ordinary speech - and its median of $81,490 sits below the occupation's own $83,680. Finance and insurance, with 8 percent of the workforce, has a median of $93,290. Government, also 8 percent, is at $83,350.

Notice how little of the workforce those four bars account for. Management of companies and enterprises - the second-best-paying of the four, at $91,940 - employs 6 percent. Add the four shares together and you get 43 percent of the occupation; another 5 percent are self-employed. The rest, more than half of all accountants and auditors, work somewhere the Handbook does not break out at all: manufacturers, hospitals, universities, retailers, every company large enough to need a finance function. If you are applying to one of those, there is no published industry median for your situation, only the occupation-wide $83,680 and the percentile spread around it.

A Senior Accountant weighing a move out of a public firm into a corporate finance and insurance role is looking at the distance between an $81,490 median and a $93,290 one. That is not a raise anyone has offered her. It is the midpoint of one large group set against the midpoint of another, and her own offer will turn on the employer, the market she cannot look up, and what she is paid today. Hours are the other half of the trade. The Handbook notes that longer hours are typical at certain times of the year, such as for quarterly audits or during tax season, which is a public accounting sentence more than a corporate one.

Which rung is worth aiming at

Budget analysts had a median of $91,640 in May 2025, but the whole occupation held only 50,400 jobs that year and is projected to grow 2 percent by 2035. Good job, thin target. Financial and investment analysts had a May 2025 median of $102,740 across 377,200 jobs, with financial analysts overall projected to grow 7 percent over the same decade - more money, across an occupation roughly seven times the size.

What the posting calls the job

O*NET lists the titles employers actually report for this occupation: Accountant, Accounting Officer, Audit Partner, Auditor, Cost Accountant, CPA, Financial Auditor, Financial Reporting Accountant, General Accountant and Internal Auditor. Neither Staff Accountant nor Senior Accountant appears on that list. The seniority prefix is a company convention; the noun underneath it is one of ten, and search engines index the noun.

Three of them are worth running as separate searches if you are aiming at the upper half of the wage distribution. Cost Accountant and Internal Auditor surface different postings from Staff Accountant even inside the same employer, because they sit in different departments. Financial Reporting Accountant pulls the roles closest to the SEC filing work that requires a license.

O*NET also reports the software the job runs on - Microsoft Excel, Intuit QuickBooks, SAP software and Google Sheets are among the technologies listed for 13-2011.00 - and places the occupation in Job Zone Four, considerable preparation needed. Of the respondents O*NET surveyed, 69 percent said the job requires a bachelor's degree, 7 percent an associate's degree, and 7 percent a post-baccalaureate certificate. O*NET's related occupations for 13-2011.00 redraw the same ladder and widen it: bookkeeping, accounting and auditing clerks below; budget analysts, credit analysts, financial and investment analysts, financial examiners, personal financial advisors, tax examiners and tax preparers alongside; financial managers and treasurers and controllers above.

Take a Staff Accountant three years into a manufacturer's general ledger team. The work O*NET describes for 13-2011.00 is the same work a Cost Accountant posting at the plant next door describes, and the same work an Internal Auditor posting describes from the other side of the controls. One resume covers all three. The searches do not overlap, and the pay distribution behind them is a single distribution - which is exactly why running only the title on your current business card narrows the range you will see without narrowing the range you could be paid.

One vintage note, because it is easy to get wrong. O*NET's employment and projection figures for this occupation are on the 2024–34 cycle, while the Handbook's are on 2025–35. Every projection in this post is the 2025–35 set, and figures from the two cycles should not be put in the same sentence.

Does the CPA change the number?

BLS does not publish a wage by credential. There is no CPA median and no non-CPA median in the Handbook, so a percentage premium for the license is a private survey's figure, not a federal one.

What the Handbook does say is where the license is not optional: any accountant who files a report with the Securities and Exchange Commission is required to be a licensed CPA. It also states that all states require CPA candidates to complete 150 semester hours of college coursework, which is 30 hours more than the usual four-year bachelor's degree. The Handbook also says accountants and auditors seek certifications from a variety of professional societies without attaching a wage to any of them, so the same caution applies one level down. Read the license as a gate on a class of work - public company filings, audit sign-off - rather than as a documented raise. Every wage figure in this post covers licensed and unlicensed accountants together, which is one more reason the ninetieth percentile sits so far from the median.

If you are applying for this role

Three specifics, in the order they will save you time.

Search more than one noun. Staff Accountant and Senior Accountant are company labels. Run the same search against Cost Accountant, Internal Auditor, Financial Reporting Accountant and General Accountant - the titles O*NET says employers report - and postings appear that the first two words never surfaced.

Expect a number between the tenths. The occupation's median was $83,680 in May 2025, with the outer tenths at less than $56,020 and more than $144,090. When a posting names a band, compare it against those three figures and against the four industry medians above, not against a city average you cannot source.

Ask which industry, early. Which of the four BLS buckets the employer sits in explains more of the eventual number than the title does, and it is a question a recruiter answers on a first call without hesitating - unlike the salary question, which they usually deflect.

Widening a search from two title variants to six multiplies the forms, and that is the real cost of doing this properly. HeroApply fills those forms from your resume, so a wider search does not mean retyping the same employment dates another thirty times.