A while back, the William H. Carr School of Accountancy reached out wanting to run a proper peer-reviewed study using Big 4 Transparency data. They were the first school to actually do this, and I'm happy to say it won't be the last, there are already four or five other papers in the works using pieces of what we've built here. This one got published in Accounting Horizons and even got picked up by Forbes, which, not going to lie, felt pretty cool.

I sat down with Dr. Ryan Dunn, one of the professors behind it for the podcast, and I want to walk you through some of the high level points and framing I found interesting about the overall trajectory of the profession.

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The study looked at 14,652 individual-year observations from 2021 to 2024 and found average weekly hours dropped about 5%. Not a massive number on paper, but real. And when they tested whether that translated into anything meaningful, it did. Fewer hours worked was tied to statistically significant increases in job satisfaction. It seems obvious logically, but arriving at statistical significance in that finding is important to be able to claim it as a fact in studies and discussions going forward.

The interesting part is where the hours came down the most: mid-level staff and non-Big 4 firms saw the biggest drops. Senior managers, directors and partners had much less decrease.

Here's where it gets more nuanced than the headlines. Nominal wages went up 13% over that same period. Real, inflation-adjusted wages went down 3.7%. So no, salaries are not stagnant, they're actually rising faster than a lot of comparable fields, which was a genuine surprise to me but they’re trailing inflation. Dunn's team checked accounting against similar fields (finance, engineering, computer science) using BLS data and found accounting held its own or did slightly better than other comparable career paths. The issue isn't that accounting stopped raising pay. It's that inflation simply outran everyone during this window.

Still stings the same in your bank account either way.

Here's where I think the historical lens actually matters. Accounting has been the laggard on real wage growth for a long time, and the numbers back that up in a way that's a little rough to look at.

Research published in the Journal of Business, Industry and Economics found that from 2009 to 2021, real (inflation-adjusted) median salary growth for Accountants and Auditors was just 1.35% over twelve years. That's roughly $900 in today's dollars. Compare that to other "similarly skilled" fields over the exact same window: Computer and Mathematical Occupations grew 5.76% in real terms, and Personal Financial Advisors grew 8.91%. We weren't just behind. We were barely moving while adjacent professions pulled ahead.

So when this new study shows real comp fell 3.7% from 2021 to 2024, it initially seems like a huge loss for the profession, but in relative terms that’s a tightening of the gap that was created over the previous decade.

This is the part that genuinely surprised me. If you've read this newsletter before, you know I've made the case that partnership might not be as enviable as it used to look. This study backs that up with actual regression results: senior managers, directors, and partners saw the steepest real compensation declines of any level, while staff and seniors were the most protected.

My own theory, which I floated on the pod, is that firms are also investing more heavily in capital expenditures like AI infrastructure and tech revamps and something had to give. Either way, the “boomer partner hoarding all the money” narrative doesn't really line up with the reality in this case. The people at the top absorbed more of the inflation hit than anyone else.

Across the Big 4, KPMG was the only firm to post a real compensation increase over the period. It was small, not statistically significant, but the only one in positive territory while everyone else declined. Meanwhile EY made a lot of noise about a $1 billion wage investment pledge, but it was to come into effect mostly after the window of this study, so it's not really showing up here, but I’ll be curious to see if they come out as a leader or not in the next 3 year window for a follow-up study.

The part I appreciated most talking to Dunn wasn't just the findings, it was hearing how seriously they validated the data before publishing. They cross-checked it against BLS numbers and Accounting Today's annual comp report and got consistent trends both times. That's the kind of thing that makes me feel good about everyone who's taken two minutes to submit their salary over the years. It's not just helping the next person negotiate, it's also now sitting inside peer-reviewed academic research that firms, regulators, and future accountants will reference.

If you want the full conversation with Dunn, including how academic research actually filters up to regulators like the PCAOB and SEC, it'll be on the podcast next week.

And if you're one of the people who's ever submitted a salary here, thank you. You're now technically a contributor to academic literature. Put that on a resume.

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