The AICPA has released their mildly anticipated Trends report for 2025 and we’ll be doing a full breakdown shortly. In the meantime, let’s look at CPA candidate numbers.
The report reflects the increase in candidates that was expected ahead of a major CPA exam change (CPA Evolution launched in 2024): 42,626 new candidates in 2023. The number fell to 28,082 in 2024, which is also to be expected after major CPA exam changes, making it the smallest number on this chart covering 2008-2024.
Although the 2025 report only goes back to 2008, we can go back a little further thanks to earlier articles about the number of CPA candidates in a given year. Reminder, these figures are for NEW candidates, not total candidates.
- 2006: 36,078
- 2007: 38,513
OK so 28,082 still wins if this was The Price is Right and the AICPA wrote down $1.00.
Zooming out and looking at total unique CPA candidate numbers, we see that expected bump in 2023 and the accompanying drop the following year. There were 74,175 unique candidates in 2024, a drop from 2023 but up from 2020, 2021, and 2022.
The good news: unique candidate numbers are not in freefall. The expected drop between 2023 (old exam with BEC) and 2024 (new exam with new disciplines) was smaller than the drop we saw in 2011 following the major CBT-e changes even though the increase from 2022-2023 was more than that of 2009-2010. If that number can hold, it may even get to be colored orange in 2027’s report!
See you soon for a full report on the report.
Earlier:
Less related but still interesting:
Is this a good thing? And for who?
Seems like the pipeline is fine for CPA firms so they’re not incentivized to change anything aside from the amount of work they offshore.
I would honestly think the number of CPA Candidates should trend down since offshoring is no longer an experiment. Offshoring is here to stay and is going to take more and more work that used to be done stateside.
Why is the profession selling a dream aside from the AICPA President to collect a $2M salary?