If you want to make the most money in consulting, Deloitte pays the best. However if you want to make the most money in auditing or tax PwC is likely your best bet.
What is the highest salary in Big 4 Accounting Firms? The highest-paying job at Big 4 Accounting Firms is a Director with a salary of ₹48.9 Lakhs per year. The top 10% of employees earn more than ₹40 lakhs per year. The top 1% earn more than a whopping ₹100.16 lakhs per year.
EY and PwC are harder to estimate. EY is the second biggest of the Big Four in terms of headcount, which lends credence to this claim in 2019 that their acceptance rate was approximately 3.5%, based on 69,000 global hires from 2,000,000 global applicants.
Deloitte, Ernst & Young (EY), KPMG, and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) are the four of the top accounting companies to work for. They are the best choice for the individual looking for quick growth and a lucrative salary, both in one place.
The Big Four accounting firms
The leading accounting firms in the world are Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), Ernst & Young (EY), and Klynveld Peat Marwick Goerdeler (KPMG).
The average audit partner in our sample has, on a scale from one to nine, an IQ score of 6.82, which is higher than the average IQ of the rest of the population, which is 5.0.
A quick overview of the firms
PwC is the largest by revenue and the most prestigious of the Big Four with a strong and established audit client base.
Graduate salaries at the Big 4 can vary depending on the service line you work in and the job you're doing. In a broad sense, you could expect to be earning anywhere between $45,000 and $75,000, but this can even be different from city to city.
Whether you joined a Big 4 as a springboard for your career or were set on making partner, we generally advise professionals to make a move around three to six years of experience, in order not to leave either too early or too far into their Big 4 career.
As the top-3 management consulting firms in the world, McKinsey, BCG and Bain charge clients around twice as much per day as the strategy units of the Big 4.
EY does not require you to have had work experience to apply for a graduate role, and operates a blind CV policy. Candidates' names and other key details are hidden so that recruiters see only the strengths and future potential of applicants.
In the late 1990s, the Big 6 became the Big 5 when Price Waterhouse merged with Coopers and Lybrand to form PricewaterhouseCoopers (later stylised as PwC). Five became four in 2001 after the insolvency of Arthur Andersen due to the firm's involvement in the Enron scandal.
Advisory giant Accenture consistently pays consultants the highest starting salary compared to the big four consulting firms, with PwC and Deloitte vying for second place at different experience levels.
KPMG staff in Australia have been given a special 4 percent Covid wage bonus, with post-recovery repayments and bonuses now exceeding the 20 percent pay-cuts implemented in the early phase of the pandemic.
The Big Four - additional information
In 2022, Deloitte employed the largest number of people with approximately 412,000. Founded in London in 1845 and headquartered in New York today, Combined, the Big Four employed almost 1.5 million people worldwide in 2022.
Typically, the Big 4 apply specific, predetermined tools to problems within defined subsets of the client company. This is very different from the Big 3 consulting firms, which employ more wide-ranging, free-form solution-finding processes and deal with the client company as a whole.
Deloitte, the oldest of the big four, was founded in 1845 by William Welch Deloitte in London, England. PwC, originally known as Price Waterhouse, was founded in 1849 by Samuel Lowell Price and William Hopkins Holyland in London.
Auditors typically earn more money than accountants because employers tend to pay for their services at higher rates. The national average salary for an auditor is $19.33 per hour.
An Auditor verifies the reliability of the financial statements and makes it legally valid. So we can summarise the responsibility of an Accountant as the creator of accounting statements and the responsibility of the Auditor as the examiner of the statements' reliability.
According to our salary calculator, the average annual salary for Senior Internal Auditors working in Sydney is $115,000 - $147,000.