Running a PracticeBy Maya C.September 19, 2026

How to Get Accounting Clients: What the Evidence Supports, and What Is Just Advice

Nobody has measured how businesses choose an accountant. Here is what the CAS and Ignition benchmarks do show, and what is only judgment.

How to get accounting clients is a question with far less evidence behind it than the search results suggest. No published survey of business owners measures how they choose an accountant, so every referral percentage in circulation is an assertion rather than a finding. What has been measured, by the 2024 Client Advisory Services Benchmark Survey from CPA.com and AICPA PCPS, is that firms drawing more than half their advisory revenue from defined industry niches report median revenue growth of 19% and say their referrals arrive better matched to the clients they want. That is a survey of 206 self-selected firms, and it is close to the whole of the usable data.

The short version: pick an industry, publish your scope and price, keep your listings verifiable, and treat every tactic beyond that as judgment rather than evidence, because nobody has measured which ones work.

The referral statistics circulating online have no traceable source

You will see a number on almost every page about this subject: a share of small businesses said to choose their accountant on a referral. It has no study behind it. Trace any instance of it and the citation chain ends at a marketing page, an agency blog or another article repeating the same figure, never at a survey with a named sample, a field date and a method. That is why no such figure appears anywhere on this page, including in the sentence you just read.

This site is a directory, which is exactly why it is worth saying plainly. A statistic claiming that referrals dominate would be convenient for the firms selling referral coaching, and a statistic claiming that directories dominate would be convenient for us. Neither exists. So this page publishes no figure for how clients find accountants, not even to argue against one.

What follows is everything on the subject that does carry a sample.

What the only published benchmark of advisory practices found

The 2024 Client Advisory Services Benchmark Survey is published by CPA.com and AICPA PCPS and is free to download. Read the method before the numbers. The survey opened for participation on May 1 and closed after 13 weeks, and was marketed to previous respondents, to firms that had opted in to receive CAS information from the AICPA and CPA.com, and through advertising and social media aimed at the profession. The report states that “206 respondents self-selected to participate in the survey,” that most questions drew between 161 and 190 responses, and that it reports medians rather than averages because averages “may be skewed by very large or very small practices.” CPA.com also sells coaching, consulting and a branded framework to the firms it is surveying, so the incentives run one way.

With that said, here is the niche finding, which is the most defensible growth claim available in this field.

Measure, 2024 CAS Benchmark Survey	Firms with more than 50% of CAS revenue from defined industry niches	All 206 respondents
Median revenue growth over the previous year	19%	17%
Median annual CAS revenue	Over $2.2 million	$1,606,409
Referral quality	More than 65% report that all or most referrals are aligned to their ideal client profile	Not reported on that basis
Reliance on time and materials billing	12% bill only on time and materials	10% of all respondents relied on hourly billing

The survey also records that 29% of respondents are not yet serving defined client industry niches, and CPA.com’s own recommendation is that CAS leaders should educate their referral sources about the industry niches the firm serves.

Two cautions belong with those numbers. The sample selected itself, so firms confident enough in their practice to fill in a benchmark survey are over-represented. And the finding is an association: firms with niches report better growth and better-aligned referrals, which is not the same as the niche having caused either. What it does support is the narrower, useful claim that a defined industry focus and better-matched referrals travel together in the only data anyone has published.

For context on profession-wide growth, the same report cites the 2023 National Management of an Accounting Practice survey as reporting “a median increase in firm net clients fees of 9.11% over the previous year.” That figure is quoted here as the CAS report quotes it; the MAP survey’s own sample and method are not established on this page.

If advisory work is where you are heading rather than compliance, our guide to client accounting services covers what the same survey says about how those practices are built.

What happened to firms that raised their prices

The second body of evidence is about pricing rather than acquisition, and it matters because the fastest route to more revenue is often not more clients.

The Ignition 2025 U.S. Accounting and Tax Pricing Benchmark is an online survey of 219 US-based accounting professionals fielded in July 2025. It is vendor research: Ignition sells proposal and billing software, and the report states that its sample consists of Ignition customers, a group that tends to have more structured pricing processes and tools in place. It reports shares of firms, never averages.

In that sample, 79.9% of firms planned to increase fees in 2026, 6.4% did not and 13.7% were unsure. The most common planned increase was 5%, chosen by 37.1% of firms, followed by 10% at 30.3%. The stated reasons were covering rising business costs at 48.6%, improving profit margin at 17.7%, and pricing out lower-value clients at 11.4%.

The part worth sitting with is what happened to firms that had already done it. Of those that raised fees in the preceding year, 33.3% lost some clients while reporting profitability stable or higher, and 32% said most clients accepted the change without issue. Losing clients to a price rise and losing money are different events, and in a third of those cases the first happened without the second.

The practical consequence for a firm short of clients is that the acquisition problem and the pricing problem are often the same problem viewed from different ends. Our pages on bookkeeping services pricing and the CPA hourly rate set out what buyers are seeing when they compare you.

Niche positioning, in the terms a buyer recognizes

A niche is only worth claiming if the work is genuinely different, because that is what a prospective client can tell from the outside. Job costing and retainage in construction, fund accounting and restricted grants for nonprofits, trust accounting in a law firm, entity-by-entity reporting in real estate: these are recognizably distinct sets of requirements, and a firm that can describe them precisely is making a checkable claim rather than a positioning statement.

That is also where a prospective client’s search begins. Our accounting software by industry coverage sets out what is different about each trade’s books, including law firms, nonprofits, contractors and real estate. If you cannot yet explain what your chosen industry does differently at that level of detail, the niche is a label rather than a specialism, and the referral alignment the CAS survey describes is unlikely to follow.

One more sourced point in favor of narrowing: the survey found that only 32% of all respondents, and 30% of top performers, charge a separate fee for an initial client assessment. Most firms are giving away the diagnostic work in which a specialist’s advantage is most visible. Whether to charge for it is a judgment call, but it is worth making deliberately rather than by default.

The listings a prospective client can actually verify

Being findable is a different job from being persuasive, and the listings that carry weight are the ones a buyer can check.

The IRS Directory of Federal Tax Return Preparers with Credentials and Select Qualifications lists preparers holding recognized credentials. If you are not a CPA, an enrolled agent or an attorney, the route in is the Annual Filing Season Program, which the IRS describes as a way for non-credentialed preparers to be listed in that public directory and to obtain “limited representation rights for your clients.” That is a concrete, free listing tied to continuing education rather than to marketing spend.

For CPAs, the state board of accountancy is the record of authority, and NASBA’s CPAverify lookup aggregates most of it. Note its stated limit: the database is aggregated from 53 of the 55 CPA licensing jurisdictions and excludes Hawaii and New Mexico. A prospective client who checks you there and finds nothing will not know why, so a firm licensed in either state should say where its license can be confirmed.

Software vendor programs are the third category, and they cost little. Xero states that “The Xero partner program is free and there are no ongoing costs,” with eligibility requiring an accounting practice with at least one registered accountant on staff and a staff member committing to the advisor certification within 30 days. Intuit requires an annual recertification exam to keep ProAdvisor status. Both are worth keeping current if you work in those ledgers, because a lapsed certification is visible to the vendor’s own referral machinery in a way you do not control.

Our own directory lists accounting firms by state and city, and a practice serving local businesses can claim its entry there.

How to get accounting clients when the evidence runs out

Everything in this section is reasoning from the facts above, offered as judgment. No survey ranks these tactics against each other, and any page that tells you one of them produces a given percentage of clients is making it up.

Write down what you will not do. The clearest signal a specialist sends is a defined scope with exclusions in it. It also prevents the scope creep that turns a fixed fee into unpaid work.
Publish a price, or publish the shape of one. The market has moved decisively to fixed fees: the CAS survey reports that “84% of all respondents are shifting to fixed-fee billing,” with reliance on hourly billing falling from 53% in 2018 to 10% in 2024. A published starting price is a form of confidence, and it spares a buyer a conversation they may not bother to start.
Ask existing clients for an introduction to a business like theirs. This follows directly from the niche finding: the referrals that arrive matched to your ideal client come from sources that understand which clients you serve, and the cheapest way to make that understood is to say it to the clients you already have.
Answer the question the client actually typed. A page that settles one narrow question for one kind of business does more than a services page listing everything you do.
Send an engagement letter every time. The AICPA’s member insurance program publishes guidance and sample engagement letters and frames the letter as a liability gatekeeper. It is also the document that makes a price rise a conversation rather than an argument.
Be reachable on a schedule you can hold. Promise a response time you can meet in your busiest week rather than your quietest one, and put it in the engagement letter. Nobody has measured what responsiveness is worth in won work, and it is still the thing a client has to describe when someone asks them about you.

Who to bring in, and when

Two professionals earn their fee as a practice grows. An attorney in your state should review your engagement letter template, your client contract and any subcontracting arrangement before volume makes a bad template expensive. And a CPA firm you trust should be the place work goes when a client’s lender, investor or franchisor asks for a compilation, a review or an audit, or when a tax position turns on facts rather than forms: those engagements are issued by CPAs in licensed firms, so referring them out protects both the client and you. If you do not have that relationship yet, the directory linked above lists CPA firms by state and city. Where the client’s need is forecasting and a reporting pack rather than compliance, fractional CFO work is the more accurate description of the hire, and naming that distinction for a client is itself a way of being the person they come back to.

Frequently Asked Questions

What percentage of accounting clients come from referrals?

Nobody knows, and any figure you see quoted has no study behind it. No published survey of business owners measures how they choose an accountant, and the referral percentages in circulation trace back to marketing pages rather than to research. What is sourced is narrower: in the 2024 CAS Benchmark Survey of 206 self-selected firms, more than 65% of firms with defined industry niches reported that all or most of their referrals were aligned to their ideal client profile.

Does specializing in an industry actually bring in more clients?

The 2024 CAS Benchmark Survey found that firms drawing more than 50% of their advisory revenue from defined industry niches reported median revenue growth of 19% over the previous year, against 17% for all 206 respondents, and better-aligned referrals. That is an association in a self-selected sample, not proof that the niche caused the growth. It is the strongest published evidence in favor of specializing, and it is worth reading as direction rather than as a guarantee.

Should I raise my prices or chase more clients?

Both are levers and the pricing one has more evidence attached. In Ignition’s 2025 survey of 219 US accounting professionals, 79.9% of firms planned a fee increase for 2026, and among firms that had raised fees in the previous year, 33.3% lost some clients while reporting profitability stable or higher and 32% said most clients accepted the change without issue. A firm at capacity with underpriced work has a pricing problem rather than an acquisition problem.

How do prospective clients check that I am who I say I am?

Through the IRS Directory of Federal Tax Return Preparers with Credentials and Select Qualifications for preparers, and through the state board of accountancy or NASBA’s CPAverify for CPAs. CPAverify aggregates 53 of the 55 licensing jurisdictions and excludes Hawaii and New Mexico, so a firm licensed in either state should say where its license can be confirmed.

Is it worth paying for leads?

There is no published data on cost per acquired client, close rates or proposal win rates for accounting firms, so nobody can tell you what a lead is worth in this market, including anyone selling you one. The checkable question is what you charge a client over the life of the relationship: the 2024 CAS Benchmark Survey reports a median typical monthly fee of $3,000 among its respondents, and firms with a written CAS business plan reported $4,000. Work out your own equivalent before agreeing to any per-lead price.

Sources

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