There is a specific energy on r/accounting these days: screenshots of resignation letters, countdowns to a final busy season, threads where someone announces they finally left the firm and a hundred colleagues line up to say congratulations. Leaving public accounting has stopped being a quiet, slightly awkward exit and become something people celebrate out loud.
If you are reading this, some version of that pull is probably working on you too: the hours, watching the partner track change shape under your feet, or just wanting to own the work instead of billing it under someone else's name.
This is the first post in a series on breaking away and building your own firm. Start here, because the hardest part is not the entity paperwork or the software stack. It is deciding, with clear eyes, whether leaving public accounting to start your own firm is the right move for you, and whether now is the right time. No hype. Just the real math and the real tradeoffs.
The push is real, and it is not just in your head.
Busy season still routinely means 60 to 80 hour weeks, and the strain concentrates in the middle of the org chart, where seniors and managers carry the delivery while recognition lags. That grind is what sends a lot of capable people looking for the exit.
But hours are only half the story. The ground under public accounting is genuinely shifting.
On one side, the talent shortage has made your skills more valuable than they have been in a generation. The pipeline of new CPAs thinned for most of the past decade, accounting degrees conferred fell 6.6% in the 2023 to 2024 academic year, and the profession is aging into a wave of retirements. Enrollment is finally ticking back up, but demand still badly outruns supply. Translation: clients need you, and firms are anxious about losing you. That is leverage, whether you stay or go.
On the other side, private equity is rewriting what a public accounting career even looks like. Firm mergers and acquisitions hit a record in 2025, with deal volume up 26% year over year and climbing again in 2026, most of it PE-driven. By one count from the International Federation of Accountants, fewer than 200 direct PE investments spawned roughly 900 roll-up transactions in a single year. The partner track you have been grinding toward is being repriced in real time. When Blackstone took a stake in Citrin Cooperman at a reported $2 billion valuation, it signaled that the old partnership model now competes with a very different kind of payday.
None of that tells you to leave. It does mean the firm you are loyal to may not be the same firm in three years, and the path you signed up for is less stable than it looks.
Ask people who made the leap what changed, and almost nobody leads with money. They lead with control.
You choose your clients. You set your prices. You decide how you work and when. One CPA who left the big-firm world for his own practice described the shift as climbing into a convertible with no ceilings, on growth or on income. The AICPA's Carl Peterson, who leads small firm interests there, makes the same point: once the work is yours, the upside has no cap.
The income upside is real too, it just arrives later than the freedom does. Benchmarks compiled from AICPA practice-management data put a typical solo or small firm between $100,000 and $500,000 in annual revenue, and owners who get routine compliance work off their own desk keep a healthy share of it. One sole practitioner profiled by the Journal of Accountancy set his rule simply: take home the large majority of everything billed and collected. That is equity in your own name, which no salary at someone else's firm can build.
Here is the part the celebration threads skip.
When you go solo, you are not just the accountant. You are the head of sales, the IT department, the collections team, the HR function, and the person who still has to get the returns out the door. Every hour spent chasing a lead or fixing the client portal is an hour you are not billing. The work you were good at becomes maybe half the job.
The income is uneven, especially early. There is no steady deposit on the fifteenth, and no one covering you when a client pays sixty days late. The first year or two can be genuinely lean, and that feast-or-famine rhythm takes a real cushion to ride out.
You also give up infrastructure you probably take for granted: the research department, the second reviewer, the brand that got your calls returned, the retirement match, the health plan, the bench of people who absorbed the overflow every April. On your own, when you get sick during busy season, there is no backup. That isolation is one of the most common surprises new owners report. Go in expecting the tradeoff, not an escape hatch: plenty of people find it was worth it, and some simply prefer the new kind of stress to the old one.
Strip away the emotion and most of the fear comes down to two numbers: what it costs to start, and how long your savings last while you ramp.
The startup cost is smaller than most people assume. Thomson Reuters puts the typical range at $2,500 to $25,000, driven mostly by whether you go virtual or take on an office, and by your software choices. This is not a business that needs a loan and a build-out. A laptop, the right software, insurance, and an entity will get you open.
The replacement-income math is also less frightening than the fear suggests. Say you earn $130,000 as a manager. If you bill your work at an effective $200 an hour, replacing that gross takes 650 billable hours a year, roughly 13 hours a week across a working year. You do not need a hundred clients to replace a salary. You need a manageable book at rates you control.
The catch is the ramp, not the arithmetic. On day one you have zero of those hours, and it takes months to fill a book. So the number that actually governs the decision is your personal runway: how many months of living expenses you have saved to bridge the gap between giving notice and reaching steady collections. People who leap comfortably tend to have several months to a year of expenses set aside, plus a concrete sense of where the first clients come from. If you have neither, the question is not whether to go, it is when.
Overhead and taxes trim that clean 13-hour picture: self-employment tax, your own benefits, software, the unbillable hours of running the shop. Build those in and the honest read is this. The money works, but on a delay, and the delay is what your savings are for.
One hard-nosed item belongs in the decision itself, not just the setup: what you actually signed.
The federal picture got simpler. The FTC's 2024 rule that would have banned most non-competes never took effect, and the Commission formally removed it from the books in early 2026. Enforceability is back to state law, and it is a genuine patchwork. California, Minnesota, North Dakota, and Oklahoma void most non-competes. States like Florida, Texas, and Georgia still enforce reasonable ones.
For an accountant, though, the non-compete is often not even the sharp edge. The non-solicitation clause is. That is the provision governing whether you can take, or even respond to, the clients you have been serving. It is where quiet departures turn into lawsuits, and it turns as much on how the contract was drafted as on your state.
None of this is a reason to stay. It is a reason to read the agreement before you give notice, know which clients you can ethically and legally approach, and talk to an employment attorney if there is any ambiguity. The next post in this series digs into the mechanics of the clean break.
You are probably ready if:
You are probably not ready yet if:
Wanting out of your current situation is a fine reason to start looking. It is not, by itself, a plan. The people who thrive on their own usually ran toward something specific, a kind of client, a way of working, a book they could already picture, rather than just away from a bad busy season.
If that sounds like you, the next post covers making the leap: the entity, the licensing and registrations, insurance, the tech stack, and landing those first clients. This one was about the decision. Take it seriously, run the numbers, and if the math and the timing line up, the door is genuinely open.
The demand side is unusually favorable. A sustained talent shortage means clients need practitioners and referral sources are hungry, so a new firm can fill a book faster than it could in a saturated market. The bigger variables are personal: your savings runway, your client pipeline, and your tolerance for an uneven first year. Timing the profession matters far less than timing your own readiness.
There is no universal number, but people who transition comfortably typically have several months to a year of personal living expenses set aside, separate from any startup budget. Startup costs themselves are modest, often in the low thousands, so the real cushion is for your household during the ramp to steady collections. The thinner your client pipeline at launch, the more runway you want.
It depends on what you signed and where you practice. Your non-solicitation clause, more than any non-compete, governs whether you can approach clients you served at the firm, and enforceability varies widely by state and by how the agreement was drafted. Read the agreement before you resign, and get an employment attorney's read if anything is unclear. The next post in this series covers the clean break in detail.
Often, but not right away. The freedom and control arrive on day one; the income upside builds as you fill your book and move routine compliance work off your own desk. Solo and small firms commonly generate six figures in revenue with owners keeping a substantial share, but the first year or two usually runs leaner than a steady salary while you ramp.
