What can you do with an accounting degree?
Where accounting graduates actually work, and how exposed those jobs are to AI. Built from ACS 2020-2024 5-year PUMS: 107,426 people whose bachelor's degree is in this field, aged 22-64.
Accounting is a degree with a clear centre of gravity. About one in three people with an accounting bachelor's degree, 33 in 100, work as accountants or auditors. Another 7 in 100 are financial managers, and smaller groups work as bookkeeping and auditing clerks, financial analysts, personal financial advisors and lawyers, at roughly 1 to 2 in 100 each.
A large share sits outside the jobs we score. About 4 in 100 are managers in other roles, 4 in 100 are chief executives and legislators, and 2 in 100 are management analysts, a role we have no page for yet. The first two groups are too varied to score fairly. This page covers about 63% of accounting graduates.
The numbers below come from Census data on more than 107,000 people with an accounting degree, matched to the occupation pages on this site.
How exposed are accounting jobs to AI?
The two largest groups of accounting graduates both work in jobs we rate At risk: accountants and auditors (90 out of 100 structural exposure) and financial managers (85). Together they are about 40% of graduates. The CPA license protects only part of the accountant occupation, and the legal wall for financial managers, personal certification of company accounts under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, covers an estimated 5 to 10% of that occupation.
At risk describes how exposed the jobs are, not what has happened to graduates so far: the studies we reviewed do not show accounting graduates' employment doing worse than other majors'. Our confidence is medium, and we have no real-world AI usage data for accountants or financial managers.
These figures cover the 63% of accounting graduates who work in occupations we score. The other 37% work in roles we do not cover (largest: Other Managers; Chief Executives and Legislators; Management Analysts). Signal 01 averages each job's own structural exposure, weighted by how many graduates work there; it describes tasks, not whether jobs will disappear.
Where accounting graduates actually work
These 10 occupations account for 57% of accounting graduates. The rest are spread across many smaller occupations, each under 1%. Graduates often work outside the field.
Careers next door to accounting, least exposed first
Curated related careers of the main occupations above, ranked by structural exposure (lowest first), so you can see which neighboring routes are less and more exposed.
What the research says about AI and accounting graduates
Accounting shows why task exposure and graduate outcomes can diverge. Employ America (July 2025) listed accounting among high-exposure majors but found its unemployment was lower than before the pandemic. The Census Bureau working paper (September 2026) places accounting in the ninth of ten exposure groups, with a 2024 employment result close to the average major's and an earnings result below the average but far above the most exposed group's, which is dominated by software degrees.
The studies disagree about how much of any graduate weakness is due to AI.
Read the full evidence review: what the studies say about AI and graduate jobs →
How this page was built
Graduate shares come from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS 2020-2024 5-year PUMS), field of degree "Accounting" (code 6201), weighted to the population. Each occupation we cover is scored with the numbers already published on its own page on this site, then averaged by graduate share. Occupations without a page are shown but never scored. Graduates aged 22-64 are included, so the mix reflects the whole working-age group, not only recent graduates. Sources: www2.census.gov, www.bls.gov. This page is general information, not career or educational advice.