Seventy-three days. That's how long it takes to fill a CPA-credentialed accounting role right now, on average.
Not 73 days to find someone good. 73 days until their first day. Then add four to eight more weeks before they're actually up to speed on your clients, your systems, your way of doing things.
Do the math: you make the decision to hire in January, and your new person is contributing at full capacity sometime in late April. For a accounting firm, that's almost the entire tax season gone.
Where That Number Comes From — and Why It Keeps Growing
The 73-day average comes from multiple placement data sources — Robert Half, Talentfoot, AICPA workforce surveys — measured across 2024 and 2025. It has moved upward every year for five years straight.
The reason isn't that your hiring process is broken. The reason is that the pool of qualified candidates has genuinely, structurally shrunk.
The number of licensed CPAs in the US fell from approximately 1.93 million in 2019 to around 653,000 today. That's not a dip. That's a collapse. The people who left that workforce — mostly Baby Boomers retiring — didn't get replaced. CPA exam candidates are down 27% over the last decade. Accounting degree completions are falling. The pipeline is not recovering.
So when you post a role and it takes 73 days to fill, it's not a reflection of the job post. It's a reflection of a market with far more demand than supply. You are competing with every other firm trying to hire from the same shrinking pool.
What Those 73 Days Actually Do to Your Firm
Here's what most vacancy cost analyses miss: it's not just the $3,000–$5,000 per week. It's the compounding of everything that doesn't happen during those 10 weeks.
Client work that should have been picked up two months ago still isn't done. The partner who meant to spend more time on advisory conversations is still knee-deep in reconciliations. The new client referral that came in got a slower response than it deserved because everyone was covering the gap. The decision to grow — to take on more clients, to open a second service line — gets pushed another quarter because you don't have the capacity.
73 days isn't just expensive. It's a tax on everything your firm is trying to become.
And It's Getting Worse
The drivers of the talent shortage are not temporary. They're structural — meaning they don't resolve on their own.
Baby Boomer retirements are accelerating, not slowing. The 150-hour credit requirement for CPA licensure is deterring qualified candidates who look at the cost-benefit analysis and choose a different career. The profession's reputation for burnout is keeping young talent out. The pipeline produces fewer people every year. And the demand for accounting work is going up, not down.
Tactical improvements — better job posts, higher salaries, more aggressive recruiting — don't fix a structural supply problem. They improve your position in the queue. You pay more and wait slightly less. The underlying problem stays exactly the same.
The Fix That Actually Works
You can't optimize your way out of a supply problem in one talent market. The only real fix is to access a different talent market — one where the supply dynamics are not broken.
India graduates over 750,000 accounting and commerce professionals every year. The supply is growing, not shrinking. The training is directly relevant to US accounting workflows. The quality, when properly vetted, is genuinely high.
And the timeline? 48 hours to profiles. Seven days to placement. No 73-day search. No recruiting fees. No competing with every other firm for the same scarce resource.
A dedicated offshore bookkeeper, accountant, or tax preparer placed through NetBounce doesn't just close the vacancy. It changes the model — so the next time someone leaves, it doesn't break your quarter.
Straight Answers
No — not without a structural change in the talent pipeline, which would take a decade or more to show up. Baby Boomer retirements are accelerating. CPA exam candidates continue to fall. The 150-hour requirement remains in place. Every trend in the data points toward the timeline getting longer, not shorter.
NetBounce delivers vetted candidate profiles within 48 hours of your discovery call. Most placements are active within seven days. This isn't an approximation — it's the actual process: brief, match, interview, place. The 73-day timeline is a domestic-market problem. Offshore placement operates in a completely different talent market.
