Busy Season Capacity: How Firms Scale Without Overhiring for Four Months

Every firm faces the same maths. Four months of the year need roughly twice the capacity of the other eight.

Hire for the peak and you carry idle cost from May to December. Hire for the average and you burn out your best people every February.

Neither is a plan. But the pipeline that used to make this manageable is thinner than it was.

The pipeline, honestly

The number that matters most isn't graduates. It's people actually sitting the CPA exam for the first time.

Degrees tell a similar story, though a gentler one. The 2023–24 academic year produced 55,152 accounting bachelor's and master's degrees, down 6.6% on the year before. Master's degrees fell about 15%.

But there is genuinely good news underneath, and it rarely gets reported.

The rate of decline in degrees is also easing: down 6.6% in 2023–24, against 9.6% the year before. The pipeline is still narrow. It is no longer narrowing as fast.

A statistic worth retiring

You will see "75% of CPAs are eligible to retire" quoted constantly.

It traces back to an AICPA figure from around 2013, which projected that 75% of members would become eligible for retirement by 2020. It was a projection about a date that has now passed, and eligibility was never the same thing as leaving.

No current AICPA-sourced equivalent exists. If a capacity plan is built on that number, it's built on a thirteen-year-old forecast.

The 150-hour rule is changing

Several states have now created alternative routes to licensure that don't require 150 credit hours.

This matters for capacity planning in about three years, not this January. But it changes who you can recruit from, and it's worth building into your longer view.

What busy season actually looks like

In a 2025 survey of 110 tax and audit professionals across North America, nearly 80% worked more than 51 hours a week during busy season.

Seniors carried the worst of it: 35.5% exceeded 60 hours a week, and 75% described the season as somewhat or extremely stressful.

That's the real cost of hiring for the average. It doesn't show up as a budget line. It shows up as a resignation in May.

What the data says about turnover

Turnover rises sharply with firm size.

2025 National MAP Survey, hosted by the Indiana CPA Society. Utilisation across all sizes ranged from 48.1% to 60.1%.

Notice that realisation falls as firms grow. Bigger firms take on more complex work, write off more of it, and lose more people doing it.

What firms are actually doing

Two responses show up in the data, and they are very different in character.

Culling clients

In the 2025 National MAP Survey, 56% of firms reported culling clients in the previous financial year. That is capacity management by subtraction, effective, and permanent.

Offshoring, cautiously

That second number is the interesting one. Of firms that offshore at all, most send only 1–5% of their total work. This is not wholesale relocation. It's a narrow, deliberate slice.

And separately, CPA Trendlines found 42% of firms turning away work for lack of staff.

The capacity model that works

Build it in layers. Each one absorbs a different kind of demand.

The mistake is treating all three as one hiring decision. They have different lead times, different costs and different failure modes.

What travels offshore well, and what doesn't

And remember the compliance layer. Sending return data offshore requires client consent under Section 7216: obtained in writing, in the right format, before anything moves.

For context: the season itself

The 2026 filing season opened on 26 January and closed on 15 April. The IRS projected around 164 million individual returns.

By the week ending 1 May 2026, it had received 143.7 million returns, 97.6% of them filed electronically. Tax professionals prepared 74.7 million of the e-filed returns; taxpayers self-prepared 65.6 million.

Roughly half of all e-filed returns still go through a preparer. The capacity problem isn't going away.

The takeaway

Key takeaways

• New CPA exam candidates fell from 42,626 in 2023 to 28,082 in 2024. That's the number to watch, not degrees.
• Enrolment rose 12.4% in spring 2025: the first real good news in years, but it won't reach your firm for three or four seasons.
• Nearly 80% of tax and audit staff work over 51 hours a week in busy season. Seniors carry the worst of it.
• Only 29% of firms offshore anything, and most of those send just 1–5% of total work.
• Size the core team for the quiet months and layer peak capacity on top. Treating it as one hiring decision is what causes both problems.

Sources

1. Journal of Accountancy. The accounting graduate pipeline: where do things stand? (AICPA Trends data, October 2025). https://www.journalofaccountancy.com/news/2025/oct/the-accounting-graduate-pipeline-where-do-things-stand/

2. Indiana CPA Society. 2025 National MAP Survey Executive Summary. https://www.incpas.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2025-national-map-survey-executive-summary.pdf

3. Distinct Recruitment. Busy Season 2025: workload, stress and support in public accounting (n=110). https://www.distinctrecruitment.com/us/resources/blog/busy-season-2025-a-snapshot-of-workload-stress-support-in-public-accounting/

4. Accounting Today. States move beyond the 150-hour rule for CPA licensure. https://www.accountingtoday.com/list/states-move-beyond-the-150-hour-rule-for-cpa-licensure

5. Internal Revenue Service. IRS opens 2026 filing season. https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/irs-opens-2026-filing-season

6. Internal Revenue Service. Filing season statistics for week ending 1 May 2026. https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/filing-season-statistics-for-week-ending-may-1-2026

The often-quoted figure that 75% of CPAs are eligible to retire originates in an AICPA projection from around 2013 about the year 2020. No current equivalent statistic exists, and it is not used in this article.