The 75 percent behind the CPA shortage is not a workforce count

Seventy-five percent is doing far too much work.

It appears in accounts of the CPA shortage as the share of the profession at retirement age, the share about to retire, or the share expected to leave within 15 years. The wording changes. The number does not. By repetition, an estimate with a date and a narrow population has become a permanent fact about everybody who works in accounting.

The source says something else. A November 2015 exposure draft from the AICPA and NASBA states that about 75 percent of AICPA members would be eligible to retire by 2020.

It was written to support a proposed Retired-CPA status. It did not count all licensed CPAs, did not cover all accountants and auditors, and did not predict that eligible members would retire.

The shortage has better evidence than that. Accounting degree completions have fallen for three academic years.

New CPA Exam candidates rebounded in 2025 after the exam transition depressed the 2024 count. The occupation is older than the workforce as a whole, though not unusually old beside other management, business and financial jobs. Most projected openings are replacements for people who transfer occupations or leave the labor force, not newly created positions.

Those facts describe pressure. They do not collapse into one number.

Is there really a CPA shortage?

Answer: The public data show a strained pipeline, but no agency publishes a national CPA shortage count. The AICPA measures graduates and firm hiring, NASBA counts licenses and exam candidates, and BLS measures the broader accountant and auditor occupation. Each series shows a different stage, population and form of demand.

The cleanest evidence of contraction sits at the beginning. The AICPA release announcing its 2025 Trends report counts 55,152 accounting bachelor's and master's graduates in the 2023-24 academic year, down 6.6 percent. That followed declines of 9.6 percent in 2022-23 and 7.4 percent in 2021-22.

The components did not move together. Provisional federal data cited by the AICPA put bachelor's degrees at 40,817, down 3.3 percent, while master's degrees in accounting or taxation fell about 15 percent to 14,335. A smaller graduate class is a real constraint. It is still a count of degrees, not CPAs and not job vacancies.

The hiring number is narrower again. Public accounting firms responding to the AICPA survey reported 11,985 new graduate hires during 2024, and 75 percent of those hires held accounting degrees.

The report explicitly says that a low response rate made a confident national projection impossible. Treating 11,985 as total United States hiring would turn a disclosed limitation into a false denominator.

There is no shortage meter connecting the 55,152 graduates to those firm hires, then to exam candidates, licenses and every accounting job. The chain leaks at every link. Some graduates do not work in accounting.

Some accountants never seek a CPA license. Firms hire graduates from other fields. Active licenses can belong to people outside the accountant and auditor occupation measured by BLS.

Where did the 75 percent retirement claim come from?

Answer: It comes from a 2015 AICPA and NASBA exposure draft proposing a retired license status. The document said about 75 percent of AICPA members would be eligible to retire by 2020. It did not say 75 percent of CPAs had retired, would retire, or would leave over a fresh 15-year horizon.

The original sentence is short: the AICPA estimated that “approximately 75% of its members will be eligible to retire by 2020.” Its nouns and verbs matter.

“Members” is not “all licensed CPAs.” A professional association's membership is a self-selected population. “Eligible” is not “will.” Somebody who can retire can remain employed, move into part-time work, keep a license while leaving public practice, or retire from one role and continue in another. “By 2020” is a fixed date. It does not move forward each time the sentence is quoted.

The document supplied no underlying age table, member count, survey method or retirement model for the estimate. That does not make the 2015 statement false. It means the public record cannot support the extra claims later attached to it.

The context narrows it further. The proposal concerned how state boards should recognize inactive and retired CPAs, including whether an inactive CPA at least age 55 could use a retired title and perform certain unpaid public services. It was not a labor market study. The age estimate was background for a model licensing rule.

Eleven years later, the figure is routinely stripped of that context and presented as a current description of the profession. The honest version is less dramatic and more useful: in 2015, the AICPA expected about three quarters of its members to be eligible to retire by 2020. Nothing in the document establishes how many did.

How old is the accounting workforce now?

Answer: BLS estimates that 27.1 percent of accountants and auditors were age 55 or older in 2025, against 23.2 percent of all employed people. Their median age was 44.7, above the workforce median of 42.1 but below the 45.2 median for management, business and financial operations occupations.

The Current Population Survey age table counts 1.766 million employed accountants and auditors in 2025. Of those, 331,000 were age 55 to 64 and 148,000 were 65 or older.

Together they were 479,000 people, or 27.1 percent of the occupation. The share age 65 or older was 8.4 percent.

That is an older workforce than the national total, but the peer comparison changes the reading. Across the broader group of management, business and financial operations occupations, 26.5 percent were age 55 or older.

The group's median worker was half a year older than the median accountant or auditor. Accounting does not stand apart as a demographic island.

Nor is the other end empty. BLS counts 488,000 accountants and auditors younger than 35, equal to 27.6 percent of the occupation. That is below the 34.4 percent share across all employed people, yet above the 23.8 percent share in the broader management, business and financial group.

There are two important limits. First, this is a household survey of people working as accountants and auditors. It does not identify who holds a CPA license or belongs to the AICPA.

It cannot validate a claim about the current age distribution of CPAs. Second, the 2025 estimates use 11 monthly observations because October data were not collected during the federal shutdown. BLS warns that the annual figures are not strictly comparable with other years.

The table still answers the question the public data can answer. The accounting occupation is modestly older than the workforce. It is not unusually old among comparable professional jobs, and no published BLS number places anything close to 75 percent of it at age 55 or above.

Are fewer people entering the CPA pipeline?

Answer: Fewer accounting students finished degrees through 2023-24, but new CPA Exam candidates rose in 2025. NASBA counted 36,590 new candidates, up 30.7 percent from 27,994 in 2024. The rebound did not erase the graduate contraction, because degree completions and exam entry are different stages measured on different calendars.

The 2024 exam count came with an asterisk large enough to shape the series. The CPA Exam changed at the start of that year.

The AICPA says 42,626 new candidates entered in 2023, the highest count since 2016, as candidates moved before the transition. Its 2024 count then fell to 28,082.

NASBA's separately published 2024 candidate report announcement gives 27,994 new candidates. The difference is only 88, but it is a useful warning. Even two official bodies describing the same examination do not publish identical counts, and neither public page supplies enough definitions to reconcile them.

The next year moved sharply upward. NASBA's 2025 report announcement counts 36,590 new candidates, an increase of 30.7 percent from its 2024 figure. It also counts 87,660 total candidates, though total candidates include returning test takers and cannot be read as new supply.

That rebound is too large to dismiss and too short to declare a reversal. One year follows an exam redesign that pulled candidates into 2023 and pushed others out of 2024.

The AICPA's graduate data end with the 2023-24 academic year, while NASBA's candidate data run through calendar 2025. A degree usually comes before exam entry, but the lag is neither fixed nor published as a national measure.

The related Money & World analysis of the CPA Exam pass rate shows why candidates, section attempts and people finishing the exam must remain separate. The shortage question belongs to counts of people moving through stages. A section pass rate answers a different question.

What does the BLS forecast of 115,300 openings mean?

Answer: It is an annual average for accountants and auditors from 2025 through 2035, not a count of posted CPA vacancies. BLS attributes 63,200 openings a year to occupational transfers and 44,100 to labor force exits. Net growth contributes about 7,940, or 6.9 percent of the total.

The BLS occupational separations table starts with 1.5952 million accountant and auditor jobs in 2025 and projects 1.6746 million in 2035. That is growth of 79,400 jobs, or 5.0 percent, across the decade.

The opening count is much larger because it includes replacement. BLS projects 107,300 permanent separations a year.

Occupational transfers account for 63,200 of them. Labor force exits account for 44,100. Add annualized employment growth of roughly 7,940 and the result rounds to 115,300 openings.

Retirement is present, but it is not isolated. The BLS definition says labor force exits include retirement and other departures from the labor force.

The agency does not publish a retirement-only figure in this table. Calling all 44,100 exits retirements would overstate the evidence. Calling all 107,300 separations retirements would also convert occupational transfers into retirements.

Transfers matter more. They represent 54.8 percent of all projected openings, compared with 38.2 percent from labor force exits and 6.9 percent from net growth.

BLS counts a transfer when somebody permanently leaves for a different major occupational group. A move from one accounting firm to another while remaining an accountant does not create a projected opening under this method.

BLS also cautions against treating the annual figure as a hiring target. It is an average over ten years and a measure of scale. It cannot predict the vacancies in a particular city, at a particular firm or at a particular level of experience next spring.

Why can a shortage coexist with rejected entry-level applicants?

Answer: Because the national statistics do not match workers to vacancies by experience, location or license status. An opening created when a senior auditor retires is not automatically an entry-level job. The BLS forecast measures movement across an occupation, while the AICPA firm survey cannot be projected to national hiring from its response base.

This is the question underneath many claims that the shortage cannot be real because a new graduate cannot get an interview. The apparent contradiction comes from asking a national occupation total to describe a local matching problem.

The public sources in this analysis do not publish openings by seniority. They do not show how many vacancies require a CPA license, how many sit in public practice rather than industry or government, or how many employers will train a new graduate.

They also do not measure how many applicants live within reach of the vacancy. Any confident national answer about an experience gap would go beyond the documents.

What the data establish is narrower. Almost 93 percent of projected openings arise from permanent departures from the occupation, rather than net expansion. The worker replacing somebody who transferred or left the labor force need not have the same experience, but the work and supervision structure do not disappear merely because BLS records an opening.

The AICPA hiring survey adds one piece. A quarter of the new graduates hired by responding public accounting firms in 2024 did not hold accounting degrees. That suggests firms draw from a wider educational pool than the accounting graduate count alone. It does not establish whether the new hires filled entry-level, specialist or experienced positions, and the report says its respondent total cannot support a national hiring estimate.

A shortage can therefore be specific without being universal. The available national data can show fewer graduates, a large replacement need and a modestly older occupation. They cannot promise that every accounting graduate will find an opening suited to that person's location and experience.

How many CPAs are there in the United States?

Answer: NASBA reported 653,408 actively licensed CPAs in August 2025 from 53 of 55 jurisdictions. BLS separately counted 1.766 million employed accountants and auditors in its 2025 household survey and used 1.5952 million jobs in its projection base. These are different populations and should not be divided into one another.

The license count comes from page 34 of NASBA's 2025 annual report. It is the nearest official national count of active CPA licenses, with a stated coverage gap of two jurisdictions.

It is still not an employment count. An active license can be held by an executive, educator, regulator, retiree with current continuing education or somebody working outside the BLS accountant and auditor occupation. Conversely, the BLS occupation includes accountants and auditors who are not CPAs. The two circles overlap, but neither source publishes the overlap.

The two BLS totals differ for methodological reasons of their own. The household survey estimates employed people and supplies the age distribution.

The National Employment Matrix combines occupation and industry data to create a base for projections. One gives 1.766 million people, the other 1.5952 million jobs. Their difference is not evidence that either is wrong, and it is not a hidden count of unlicensed accountants.

This is why a national shortage ratio remains elusive. The numerator could be vacancies, projected openings, retirements, transfers or unfilled jobs.

The denominator could be AICPA members, active licenses, exam candidates, accounting graduates or everybody employed in the occupation. Change either one and the answer changes with it.

What do the numbers actually establish?

Answer: The graduate pipeline contracted through 2023-24, exam entry recovered in 2025, and replacement needs dwarf projected job growth. Accountants are older than the workforce but close to their professional peers. No current primary source shows 75 percent of CPAs at retirement age, and no public series measures a single national shortage.

The profession has a supply problem at several points, but not every point is moving in the same direction. Graduate completions are down. New exam candidates are up from the transition year.

Employment is projected to grow, slowly. More workers are expected to change occupations than to leave the labor force, and retirement is only one kind of labor force exit.

That is a less theatrical account than a retirement cliff. It is also the one the documents support.

Frequently asked questions

Are 75 percent of CPAs really at retirement age? No current primary source establishes that. The original 2015 statement concerned AICPA members who would be eligible to retire by 2020. Eligibility is not retirement, members are not all CPAs, and the date does not roll forward.

What percentage of accountants are age 55 or older? BLS puts the 2025 share at 27.1 percent for accountants and auditors. The figure covers the occupation, not CPA licensees specifically. It comes from an 11-month annual average that excludes October 2025.

Are CPA Exam candidate numbers still falling? Not in the newest NASBA count. New candidates rose from 27,994 in 2024 to 36,590 in 2025. The comparison follows a major exam transition, so one rebound does not by itself establish a lasting trend.

Does BLS project 115,300 new accounting jobs every year? No. Net growth is about 7,940 jobs a year across the 2025-35 projection. The rest of the 115,300 annual openings comes from occupational transfers and labor force exits.

How many active CPAs are there? NASBA reported 653,408 active licenses as of August 2025, using data from 53 of 55 United States jurisdictions. The count is not an age table and does not show how many licensees work in the BLS accountant and auditor occupation.