The Real Cost of Tax Season: Why Your Best Staff Leave in May and What That's Actually Costing Your Firm

It's April 16th. The deadline passed. Your team is still in the office.

Not because there's work left to file but because everyone is catching up on the work that piled up while they were buried in returns. Your senior accountant, who has been billing 60-hour weeks since January, just sent you a message that she needs to talk. You already know what the conversation is going to be. You have had it before. You will have it again next year.

Here is the thing that almost no CPA firm owner wants to say out loud: the structure of tax season is not just exhausting. It is economically destructive. The numbers, when examined honestly, tell a different story from the one many firm partners tell themselves. 

The Hours Nobody Officially Counts

Every CPA firm owner knows their billable hour targets. Fewer look carefully at the total hours being absorbed during the busy season and what those hours are actually costing. 

A survey conducted by Distinct Recruitment in 2025 asked 110 tax and audit professionals across North America about the just-concluded busy season. The most common workload reported was 51 to 60 hours per week, selected by 48.1% of respondents. Another 19.4% said they worked 61 to 70 hours a week. And 12% reported working more than 71 hours a week. That last group, more than one in ten of the people surveyed, is working almost double a standard full-time schedule.

For partners and managers, the picture was even starker. Among those in senior roles, 38.2% averaged 51 to 60 hours, but 20.5% reported working 71 or more hours per week. These are not exceptional years. This is the pattern.

48.1%

worked 51-60 hrs/week in busy season 2025

12%

worked 71+ hours — nearly double a full-time schedule

20.5%

of partners and managers logged 71+ hours weekly

The Turnover Tax Nobody Talks About

Public accounting firms lose between 15% and 22% of their staff every single year. That statistic, from a 2025 analysis of data across 600 firms, is not a pandemic artifact. It is the baseline. 

The timing of those departures is not random. Departure rates spike 40% to 60% above baseline in the April through June window. Post-busy-season attrition is so predictable it has a name in the profession. Everyone knows it is coming. Many firm owners treat it as inevitable.

The Illinois CPA Society found that nearly 49% of employees who left accounting firms cited too many hours and burnout as their primary reason. Work-life balance was cited by roughly 48%. Those two factors account for the majority of voluntary departures in the profession.

Research published in The CPA Journal put a dollar figure on what replacing a departing staff member cost: as much as 50% to 60% of that person's annual salary, in direct costs alone. That is before you account for lost institutional knowledge, the disruption to client relationships, and the additional burden placed on remaining staff who then become more likely to leave themselves.

If your firm employs 10 people at an average fully-loaded cost of $75,000 per year, and your annual turnover rate is 18%, you are replacing roughly 1.8 people per year. At 50%-60% replacement cost, that is $67,500 to $81,000 in annual turnover expense. Every year. Invisibly. Without it ever appearing as a line item on your P&L.

The Pipeline Is Not Going to Fix This

Some firm owners look at the burnout data and conclude that the solution is simply better hiring. More people, better distributed workload, problem solved. The problem is that the supply of accounting graduates is contracting, not expanding.

According to the AICPA's 2025 Trends report, the number of students earning accounting degrees in the 2023-24 academic year fell 6.6% compared to the prior year. That followed a 9.6% decline the year before. The accounting workforce has shrunk by more than 17% since 2020, with more than 300,000 professionals exiting the field. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects 136,400 annual job openings in accounting through 2034. The pipeline to fill those openings is going in the wrong direction.

What Does Not Change If You Just Hire More People

Because here is what actually happens in busy seasons: your senior people spend a significant portion of their time on tasks that do not require their credentials or their judgment. Data entry. Transaction categorization. Pulling prior-year comparisons. Formatting workpapers. Building depreciation schedules that follow a formula.

These are not strategic tasks. They are preparation tasks. And when your licensed CPAs are doing preparation tasks for 60 hours a week, three things happen simultaneously: the returns get prepared, your advisors get exhausted, and your advisory capacity, the high-margin work your clients would pay more for and that your firm needs to grow, never gets built.

A FloQast survey found that nearly 99% of accountants reported experiencing burnout, with 24% reporting it as moderate to severe. That survey was not describing exceptional circumstances. It was describing a profession operating at a structural capacity ceiling.

The Question Firm Owners Should Actually Be Asking

The right question is not how to hire enough people to endure the busy season. The right question is how much of a busy season's workload actually requires a licensed CPA to perform it.

The preparation of a tax return involves two distinct types of work. There is the professional judgment layer: the interpretive, advisory, review, and sign-off work that requires a licensed CPA's credential and expertise. And there is the preparation layer: the data entry, schedule building, document organization, and reconciliation work that requires accuracy and training, but not a license.

Most firms bundle both layers together and have their most expensive, most credentialed people doing both at the same time, under the most compressed schedule of the year. Separating those two layers is not a radical idea. It is the way the profession already works at scale.

REAL-WORLD EXAMPLE

How Finaceal Helped a 4-Partner Denver Firm Stop Losing Staff Every May

A four-partner CPA firm in the Denver metro area was losing one to two staff members every post-busy-season. Three departures in two years had cost them over $150,000 in replacement expenses alone. An honest look at where time was actually going revealed that roughly 55% of each staff member's busy season hours were pure preparation work data entry, populating depreciation schedules, organizing workpapers, none of which required a CPA license, all of which was being done by credentialed people at credentialed billing rates.

They ran a two-week pilot with Finaceal ahead of the 2024 season. Finaceal logged into their existing Drake instance, prepared drafts for three client returns within the agreed 48-hour turnaround, and organized workpapers to the firm's own standard. The reviewing partner made two judgment-call adjustments in minutes. Everything else was complete. The firm moved to a full engagement for the 2024 season, Finaceal handled first-draft preparation for 180 returns, no additional hire was made, and staff averaged 49 hours per week during busy season compared to 67 the year before. Zero staff departed in May. Two advisory conversations that had been deferred for two years finally happened in February.

If Your Firm Is in a Similar Position

The pattern described in this article is not unique to one firm or one size of practice. It runs through the profession. The firms that break it are the ones that make a deliberate structural decision: preparation work goes to a capable, supervised, security-compliant partner. Review and advisory work stay with licensed CPAs.

Work with Finaceal

Finaceal works as a silent preparation partner for US CPA firms. We log into your existing software using a standard user account and prepare draft returns, reconcile books, and build financial packages. Your CPA reviews everything, enters their PTIN, and signs. Nothing that reaches your client ever carries our name.

Start with a free two-week pilot. You nominate two or three clients. We do the work. No invoice either way.

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