Private Equity Is Buying Up Accounting Firms. Here's What That Actually Means for You.

If you've noticed more accounting firms suddenly backed by names you'd expect to see in a private equity press release rather than a CPA directory, you're not imagining it. Over the past several years, private equity has moved aggressively into public accounting, and the pace has only picked up. Firms that once operated as traditional CPA partnerships are increasingly structured with outside investors behind them.

For business owners and individuals choosing who handles their taxes and financial planning, this shift is worth understanding, not because it makes any single firm good or bad, but because it changes the incentives on the other side of the relationship.

Why private equity wants a piece of accounting

Accounting has traditionally been a hard industry for outside investors to buy into. Most states require CPA firms doing audit work to be majority-owned by licensed CPAs. Private equity firms found a workaround: split the business in two. One entity, still owned by CPAs, handles the licensed attest work. A second entity, backed by investor capital, owns everything else: staff, technology, administration, and non-attest advisory services. That structure, often called an "alternative practice structure," is what has let PE money flow into firm after firm.

The appeal is straightforward. Accounting firms have steady, recurring revenue. A wave of Baby Boomer partners are retiring without a clear succession plan. And the industry is short on new CPAs, which makes firms with strong staff and client bases more valuable by the year. The numbers show how fast this has moved: accounting M&A activity was up 26% year over year in 2025, and financial buyers, private equity and PE-backed platforms, now account for 54% of all deal volume in the sector, according to Capstone Partners data reported by Accounting Today. Funds focused specifically on accounting services have raised $12.7 billion so far in 2026 alone, with the typical fund size up nearly 24% from last year. That's a lot of capital looking for firms to buy.

What it means for the people doing the work

Investor capital can genuinely help. It can fund better technology, higher starting pay, and resources a smaller firm might not otherwise be able to afford. That's real, and worth acknowledging.

But it also changes what a career at that firm looks like. Traditional CPA firms grow partners over a decade or more, with equity that reflects an ownership stake in a firm they helped build. When a firm sells to private equity, a meaningful share of that future upside shifts to outside investors instead. And that ownership doesn't necessarily stay put. Since 2021, roughly two dozen of the top 100 U.S. CPA firms have taken private equity investment, including at least ten of the top 30, and those firms are already starting to change hands a second time. Citrin Cooperman took investment from New Mountain Capital in 2022, then was sold again to Blackstone in January 2025, reportedly at a markedly higher valuation than the original deal. Industry consultant Allan Koltin, who tracks these deals closely, has predicted even more of these ownership flips in 2027, and "a lot more" by 2028. Each time ownership turns over, staff can end up managing toward whatever growth and margin targets the newest owner sets, rather than the client relationships that made the firm worth buying in the first place. It's not surprising that in one recent industry survey, 35% of accountants said they oppose private equity ownership of accounting firms outright.

What it means for the clients

Clients usually feel this indirectly, through who picks up the phone and how consistent that person is over time. A firm optimizing for growth ahead of a future sale has real incentive to add services, raise fees, and standardize how clients are served across a larger book of business. Some of that can be genuinely useful, better technology and a broader menu of services, for instance. But industry leaders are also raising real questions about the downside. Fewer independent firms competing for the same work could push prices up over time. And as consolidation accelerates (the recent tie-up between Baker Tilly and Moss Adams created the sixth-largest firm in the country almost overnight) some firm leaders are asking hard questions in public. Crowe LLP's CEO has said plainly that he wonders what long-term impact these ownership changes will have in 10, 15, or 20 years. Consultants who work with these firms have flagged a similar risk: fast-growing, PE-backed platforms can end up as a collection of disparate businesses stitched together under one roof, rather than a firm with one culture and one standard of client care.

None of this means a PE-backed firm can't do good work. Plenty do. But it's worth knowing whose interests are actually built into the incentive structure behind your advisor, and how many owners that advisor is likely to have over the life of your relationship with them.

The case for staying independent

This is exactly the trade-off a smaller, independent firm is built to avoid. When a firm is owned by the people actually doing the work, there's no outside investor with a five-year clock counting down to a sale, and no pressure to hit growth numbers that have nothing to do with what a client actually needs. The incentive is simple: keep clients happy long enough that they stay, because that's the whole business model. There's no next flip to prepare for.

It also tends to show up in smaller, more concrete ways: fewer layers between a client and the person who actually understands their return or their business, more consistency in who they're working with year over year, and advice shaped around the client's situation rather than a standardized package designed to scale across thousands of accounts.

Bigger isn't the same as better, especially when "bigger" is being funded by someone whose time horizon is measured in a single hold period rather than in the length of the relationship.

Where this leaves you

Private equity in accounting isn't going away, and it isn't inherently a red flag. But it is a real shift in who a firm ultimately answers to, and it's a reasonable question to ask any firm you're evaluating: who actually owns this practice, and what are they optimizing for?

If you'd rather work with a firm where the answer is simply "the people you're talking to," reach out to Abell & Advisors to talk about what that actually looks like in practice.