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Are Interns the Canary in the Compensation Coal Mine?

One of the best parts of having a database that’s constantly growing and constantly available to everyone is the timeliness of the data it provides. In this email we’re going to take advantage of this and see where we’re at in terms of salary movement in 2023.

Before that though, I’m happy to share a quick word from our sponsor who has saved me countless hours already this tax season.

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Lets talk salaries now

In recent years, there’s been quite an evolution around accountant salaries. With labor demand increasing, the shortage of accountants, and people generally standing up for themselves more in terms of compensation, we’ve seen some pretty solid increases in compensation. Now the question is if this is only the beginning, or if we’re going to see this taper off in the coming years when we (hopefully) stop constantly experiencing “unprecedented times”.

To get an idea of where we may be headed, I used the website data to determine the average salary at each level at US firms for the audit and tax stream. Then I compared the changes in these levels year over year since the launch of the website (2021) to determine the average increases and where we stand so far in 2023.

*Manager and Senior Manager levels have smaller sample sizes for 2023 (<50), so may be a weaker indicator of 2023 salary changes so far

In green you see the average salaries of each level from 2021. In blue, we have the 2022 salary increases at each level, the highest being at the Senior and Manager levels, each exceeding 10.5% increases, and the overall increase across all levels coming in at 9.4% for the year. In 2023 so far, we’re getting some conflicting signals. Intern salaries being reported are on average -3.3% lower than in 2022, which could be a strong indication of Firm intentions giving they have the most flexibility with setting salary levels for new incoming employees compared to existing employees. On the flipside however, we’re seeing modest increases to the average reported salaries for Analysts (+1.2%) and Seniors (+1.5%) and large increases to the average reported salaries for Managers (+7.3%) and Senior Managers (+9.6%).Before looking at the numbers, my expectation was that I would be seeing a bit of a flattening, with the larger % salary increases going to the lower levels and more modest ones at the manager and above levels based on the narrative I’ve been hearing, but based on the data this does not seem to be the case.

Recruiters are annoying.

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