How Many CPAs Are in the US? 17,702 Firms Mapped by State and Metro

Nobody outside the state boards can tell you how many individual CPAs there are in the United States, and anyone quoting a single national figure is quoting someone else's estimate. What we can count is firms: of 27,281 US accounting firms profiled from their own public websites, 17,702, or 64.9%, present themselves as CPAs, and 17,440 match a record in a state licence registry we have parsed.

Those two numbers are close, and they are not the same firms. The gap between them is the most useful thing on this page if you are trying to verify who you are about to hire.

How many firms hold a CPA credential?

Two independent signals, cross-tabulated. "Claims CPA" means the firm says so on its own site. "Licence record" means we matched the firm to an entry in a state board registry.

13,181 firms, 48.3% of the corpus, are confirmed on both signals. That is the strongest position a firm can be in here.

The 4,521 firms that claim a CPA with no matching record are not, for the most part, lying. A licence is issued to a person, not to a trading name, so a firm called "Riverside Financial Group" whose principal is licensed under her own name will not match. We have also parsed only 40 state registries, so a firm in an unparsed state cannot match by definition. Treat the missing record as a question to ask, not as a finding.

The 4,259 firms with a record but no claim on the site are the mirror image: licensed, and simply not shouting about it.

Where are they?

21,268 firms in the corpus publish a US location. Those spread across the 50 states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, and they are heavily concentrated: the top five states hold 9,726 firms, 45.7% of everyone with a location, and the top ten hold 12,727, or 59.8%.

At the other end, North Dakota has 21 firms in the corpus, Hawaii 26, Montana 35, South Dakota 39, Alaska 41 and West Virginia 41. If you are hiring in a small state, the local pool is genuinely small, and the case for looking beyond it is stronger.

Read the claim rate column, not just the firm count. New York is 82.0% CPA against Illinois at 60.3% and Michigan at 59.0%. That is a 23 point spread in how likely a randomly chosen local firm is to be a CPA practice, and it is larger than most people expect.

Which cities have the most CPA firms?

City as the firm publishes it, not a metropolitan statistical area, so neighbouring suburbs are counted separately from the core city.

San Antonio and Brooklyn top the claim rate at 84.1% and 83.2%. Denver sits at 56.8%, the lowest of the large cities, with Los Angeles at 61.2% and Chicago at 63.3%. A low claim rate does not mean a city is short of CPAs. It usually means a larger share of its firms are bookkeeping and advisory practices that are not CPA firms at all, which changes what you should be searching for rather than how hard the search will be.

How concentrated is the market really?

Less than the headline states suggest. The 21,227 firms that publish a city sit in 5,851 distinct cities, and 3,282 of those cities contain exactly one firm. Only 37 cities hold 50 firms or more, and between them those 37 account for 3,703 firms, 17.4% of the total.

So the profession is concentrated by state and dispersed by town. Most American places have one accountant or two, and the practical consequence is that "local" and "good fit" are usually competing constraints outside the top 40 cities. That is one reason the remote question matters more than it used to.

What the licence column does and does not prove

Our licence coverage is a function of which state registries we have parsed, not of who is licensed. Firms located in the 40 states whose registries we have parsed carry a licence record 80.1% of the time. Firms located elsewhere carry one 17.5% of the time. Georgia sits at 15.4% and North Carolina at 13.7% purely because those registries are not in our set yet. Do not read those two states as having fewer CPAs.

We also match 157 firms to an enrolled agent record rather than a CPA licence. Enrolled agents are credentialed federally by the IRS rather than by a state board, and they have unlimited rights to represent taxpayers before the IRS. That is a different credential from a CPA, not a lesser one, and it is the right credential for a straightforward representation matter. The IRS explains the scope on its enrolled agent page.

For verification of an individual CPA, the authority is the state board that issued the licence. NASBA, the association of those boards, runs CPAverify, a free lookup that covers participating boards. Its coverage is not universal either, so a blank result there also means "check the state board directly" rather than "not licensed".

What this means when you are hiring

Search for the credential, not just the city. In a market where the local CPA rate ranges from 59% to 82% by state, filtering on the credential changes your shortlist far more than moving a few miles.

Verify the person, not the firm name. The 4,521 firms claiming a CPA without a matching record are mostly a naming artefact. Ask which individual holds the licence and in which state, then look that person up.

Ask whether you need a CPA at all. A lot of small business work is bookkeeping and tax preparation that does not require one, and paying CPA rates for it is a common and avoidable mistake. Our bookkeeper vs accountant vs CPA guide draws the line, and how to find a good CPA covers the questions worth asking once you have decided you do need one.

You can start from certified CPAs near you, or browse firms by state and city.

Method

What was counted. Two signals for each of 27,281 US accounting firms in the AccountingNearYou corpus, as of 28 August 2026. First, whether the firm presents itself as a CPA practice on its own public website. Second, whether we matched the firm to an entry in one of the 40 state CPA registries we have parsed, or to a federal enrolled agent record. Locations are the city and state a firm publishes; each firm carries a single state.

From what. Firms' own websites for the claim, state board registries for the licence record. No survey, no purchased list.

What these numbers do not mean. This is not a count of individual CPAs, and it cannot be converted into one: a firm may have twenty licensed staff or one. It is not a census of firms either, since the corpus undercounts firms with thin or absent websites. The licence column measures registry coverage as much as it measures licensure, so a low rate in Georgia or North Carolina reflects our parsing backlog rather than the profession there. A CPA claim on a website is a claim: we report it as one and never as verification.