Throughline

Business and finance

Accountant or Auditor in the United States

28 postings read · sampled 2026-08-02 · source ats

What employers actually ask for

Credentials named in the 28 postings we read, ranked by how many mentioned each one.

What it costs

Exam and application fees plus typical self-study hours. Almost nobody needs every credential on this list — start with the top line.

Most-asked-for, on its own
$1,500CPA · ~400 hrs
asked for in 19 of 28 postings — 68%
If you earned all 5 of them
$5,059
fees checked 2026-08
1400 hrs
1400 hours — over a year at 10 hrs/wk

Not in the total: Bachelor's Degree — cost varies by institution; Master's Degree — cost varies by institution.

This sample is small enough that one posting moves any percentage by more than a couple of points, so we are not calling anything low-signal here. Read the numbers above as a direction, not a measurement.

What it pays

BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025. A different survey from the postings above, so the two do not share a sample.

$56,020
10th percentile
$83,680
median
$144,090
90th percentile

Every credential above costs $5,059 — about 3 weeks' pay at the median.

Who was hiring

Employers with at least one matching posting in this sample.

Coinbase · Datadog · Fivetran · Gusto · Mercury · Applied Intuition · Betterment · Braze · Carta · Cognition · Databricks · Duolingo · Figma · GitLab · MongoDB · Notion · Redwood Materials · Roblox · Scale AI · Stripe · Twilio · Vercel

Next

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