When a finance job stops requiring a certified public accountant (CPA) license, the hiring manager should test the real work instead. For a job inside a company, each employer should decide role by role whether the license is needed.
The supply of new accounting graduates is shrinking. US schools awarded 55,152 accounting bachelor's and master's degrees in the 2023 to 2024 school year. That was 6.6% fewer than the year before, according to the 2025 Trends report of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). The institute says the rate of decline has slowed. Enrollment in accounting programs rose 12.4% in spring 2025.
The rules for earning the license are loosening. In May 2025, the AICPA and the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy approved a new route in their model law. The new route takes a bachelor's degree, two years of work experience and a passed CPA exam. The older routes need one year of experience and study beyond a bachelor's degree, such as a master's.
The model law is a template that state legislatures and boards can adopt in whole or in part. Each state must pass its own law or rules before candidates can use the new route. When the model law changed in May 2025, 14 states had already done so.
By 2015, every state had adopted a rule requiring 150 credit hours of university study for the license, about five years. Three researchers studied new CPA licenses from 1986 to 2019 to test that rule. One of them is an accounting professor at MIT Sloan. The school wrote about the work in February 2024.
After a state adopted the 150-hour rule, the number of new CPAs fell 14%. The fall was steeper for minority candidates, whose entry dropped 26% relative to other candidates. The researchers found no sign that the extra study improved the quality of CPA work or reduced misconduct. They also found no evidence in a large set of job postings that employers valued the extra study.
A February 2024 study tracked what happened when large firms dropped a college degree requirement. The Burning Glass Institute, a nonprofit data lab, wrote it with Harvard Business School researchers. It covered 11,300 roles. The data came from the career histories of 65 million US workers.
On average, dropping the degree requirement raised the share of hires without a degree by about 3.5 percentage points. About 45% of the firms changed in name only, with no meaningful difference in who they hired. At the firms that did change who they hired, staff hired without a degree were more likely to stay. Their two-year retention rate was 10 percentage points higher than that of colleagues with degrees.
The authors write that hiring for skills takes more than "stripping language from job postings". In place of the CPA requirement, a finance role should use a sample of the real work, scored the same way for every candidate. One example is matching last month's bank statement to the company's books. The cost is the hiring manager's time. The finance team's own budget pays for it.
What to do first:
- Chief financial officer: list the finance roles that must hold a CPA license, with the reason for each, before the next posting goes out.
- Controller, who runs the accounting team: write a work sample and a scoring sheet for each finance role that does not need the license.
- Head of HR: in those roles' postings, replace "CPA required" with the work sample, and record who is hired through it for a year.
The Burning Glass authors say hiring managers are still likely to use a degree as a shortcut once it is no longer required. Their study covered college degree requirements only.
