Texas CPA compensation, mid-year 2026

The 2026 mid-year numbers, pulled from 214 confirmed offers across Austin, Dallas, and Houston between July 2025 and January 2026, tell a more sober story than the last two years led firms to expect.

Senior manager base compensation in tax practice is landing between $165K and $198K, with signing bonuses now appearing in roughly one in three offers — a reversal from 2024, when signing bonuses at this tier were rare enough to be a differentiator. Directors are seeing $210K–$265K base, with variable compensation tied to book portability rather than firm-wide performance. That shift matters: it means firms are pricing the risk of the individual, not the market.

Equity partner offers in Texas are the number people ask about and the number firms are most careful with. The honest range for a non-managing equity seat at a mid-sized regional firm is $385K–$520K in total cash, with buy-in expectations between one and three times that figure structured over four to seven years. The variance is almost entirely a function of book expectations at entry.

Three second-order observations from the data. One: Houston energy-adjacent practices are paying a 6–9% premium over Dallas for the same tier, reversing a decade-long gap. Two: firms that lost a partner in 2024 are now paying 12–14% above market to replace them, which is the tax on delayed action. Three: remote flexibility is no longer a compensation lever at senior tiers — it is assumed, and firms that treat it as a concession are losing offers in the final round.

The full breakdown by tier, city, and service line is available in the report below.