Occupation / job
Accountants and Auditors
Median annual pay. Half earn less than this.
Hourly at a standard 2,080-hour year. We do not yet have unpaid-time or cost data for this, so this is not an adjusted figure.
The middle half. A quarter earn below this range.
Source: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 · view
What this figure cannot tell you
It covers people EMPLOYED in this occupation. Anyone who trained for it and was never hired is not in the median above, and neither is anyone doing the work self-employed. No verified count of qualified people exists for this occupation, so this page shows none rather than an estimate. Why that matters · The occupations where we could source it
Who this suits
At $83,680 against a $50,020 national midpoint, Accountants and Auditors pays 67% more than the typical American job — $33,660 a year of difference. Read the entry requirements before the number.
1,449,500 people are employed as Accountants and Auditors, which puts it among the largest occupations in the United States. At this scale you are never short of a vacancy and never scarce, and the second fact is why the first one is cheap.
Financial specialist work suits people who are precise about other people’s money and unbothered that the calendar, not the workload, decides when the pressure arrives.
No verified preparation time is on file for Accountants and Auditors. The wage survey behind every figure on this page asks employers what they pay, not what they required, so the honest answer here is that we do not know.
Who should not do this
$67,020 to $109,810 — 1.6x, or $3,565 a month between the quarters. An unremarkable spread, which means the useful planning number for Accountants and Auditors is the bottom of it rather than the middle.
At $67,020, or $32.22 an hour, the 25th percentile sits $17,000 above the $50,020 the typical American job pays. Occupations with floors this high almost always have a requirement holding them there.
Avoid it if you would find it hard to deliver an unwelcome finding to the person who commissioned the work.
No failure rate is shown, and the absence is deliberate: the 1,449,500 figure counts people already working as Accountants and Auditors, not everyone who trained and never got hired. Without a licensing register to divide by, a rate here would be an invented denominator.
What the spread tells you
At 1.6x between $67,020 and $109,810 this is a normally shaped occupation. $83,680 is what the middle of Accountants and Auditors earns after the years it takes to get there, which is not the same as what it offers you now.
In cash terms the middle half of Accountants and Auditors runs $67,020 to $109,810 — $42,790 a year between the 25th and 75th percentiles, against a midpoint of $83,680.
Between $67,020 and $109,810 — the two ends of the middle half — sits $83,680. Moving from the midpoint to the upper quarter is worth $26,130; the whole climb from the lower quarter is $42,790.
The distance from the midpoint up to $109,810 is $26,130 — well over the $16,660 down to $67,020. Distributions leaning this way mean the median understates what the upper half of Accountants and Auditors earns, and half the field is in that upper half.
Converted to an hourly rate over a full-time year: $32.22 at the bottom quarter, $40.23 at the midpoint, $52.79 at the top quarter. The typical American job works out at $24.04 on the same basis.
What these figures are, and what they are not
This is payroll data: it comes from employers, about people they employ. Anyone doing the work of Accountants and Auditors for themselves is not in it, and there is no reason to assume $83,680 describes them.
With no unpaid-hours or cost data for Accountants and Auditors, the hourly figure is $83,680 over a 2,080-hour year — a unit conversion, not an adjustment.
How this is calculated · Self-employment failure rates · What credentials cost and pay back · Look up something else