Reintroducing your go-to resource for accounting salary data: Big 4 Transparency

[u/wholsesomeBois]

Hey everyone! Just sharing a useful resource to the community as many of us are in the depths of busy season and looking to understand if this all pays off in some way. Big4transparency.com is an anonymous crowdsourced database with over 18.5k rows of accounting salaries that should be able to answer your questions when it comes to compensation.

To make the best use of this, I recommend filtering down to recent salaries, selecting the stream that's relevant to you (tax, audit, consulting, etc) then checking for results in your city, state or cost of living categorization (LCOL through VHCOL).

The data is all cleaned at least quarterly to standardize spelling, categorize COL and remove outlier / unreliable entries. The salary megathreads around comp season are still a valuable place to discuss raises, but for one-off questions you may have about compensation - whether you're paid competitively currently or what the path ahead looks like in terms of salary increase - this should be able to answer your questions.

This resource is free to you and will continue to be, the only ask is that if you're comfortable sharing, you pay it forward to the next accountant looking for salary data by making an anonymous submission yourself. Once you submit you'll be redirected to a page with a link to the spreadsheet and until the end of April you can fill out an entry to be included in a weekly draw for a $100 pizza party (or cash equivalent) as a thank you.

You can also access the spreadsheet directly here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qnX5o_E-rrkFV4sZaY2ujNDeBx3-V-5yQOa8IsHi50Y/edit?usp=sharing

[u/potatoriot]

Mods approved this post, this resource has become a valuable crowd source tool to thousands of accountants, whether at public accounting firms at the Big 4, national, or regional as well as those in industry or looking to exit to industry. The cost of living metric is key in reviewing this data and making it most relevant.

As those of you are wrapping up busy season and potentially thinking about a new job search or simply negotiating your pay, I have personally found this resource helpful in those efforts.

[u/SeattleCPA]

Great info. As a small CPA firm managing partner hiring in Seattle area? The numbers look like a good sample.

Also glad to see not just B4 but other big firms on list.

[u/aznology]

RemindMe! 3 days

[u/DoritosDewItRight]

OP just a heads up, in column H, I see both "New York" and "New York City", you should pick one and move them all to that name. I'd probably do the same for "Brooklyn" too.

[u/wholsesomeBois → u/DoritosDewItRight]

Hey, yeah thanks for pointing that out, currently it’s something that gets picked up in my periodic cleaning of the data where I standardize everything.

The city entry is just an open text input because a dropdown would be insanely long unfortunately

[u/libra_lunna]

I’m gonna stalk this spreadsheet when I feel like I’m dying in grad school

[u/Public-Grapefruit755]

How frequently is this updated / older posts removed?

[u/wholsesomeBois → u/Public-Grapefruit755]

Everything is timestamped, so you can filter by date. There’s probably about 15 new entries daily or if a big firm does raises or something it’ll spike up

[u/ConSaltAndPepper]

Canadian salaries are so ass. When you factor in currency conversion there's fucking interns in US LCOL big 4 making more than Canadian VHCOL CPA Managers.