The Accountants 2025: 500 fewer jobs as recession bites
ANALYSIS: NBR’s fourth annual series assessing the size and shape of NZ’s largest accounting firms shows a significant contraction in client spend.
WATCH: NBR explores the state of the NZ accounting industry.
Hamish McNicol and Kate McVicarMon, 07 Apr 2025
Key points
What’s at stake: The country’s 14 largest accounting firms collectively shed more than 500 jobs on the back of 2024’s economic recession.
Background: The firms’ collective revenue only grew about 2% to an estimated $2.09b in the 2024 financial year, with some of the largest firms recording declines in revenue of more than 5%.
Key players: Deloitte, PwC, KPMG, EY, BDO, BakerTillyStaplesRodway, Findex, Grant Thornton, Moore Markhams, Nexia, RSM, Acclime, William Buck, McCulloch & Partners.
Professional services firms live and die by how busy their clients are.
So much so that, at EY, for instance, the firm reckons its revenue growth tends to track above whatever New Zealand’s gross domestic product is.
As we know, the country went into recession last year. Annual growth for 2024 was
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What’s at stake: The country’s 14 largest accounting firms collectively shed more than 500 jobs on the back of 2024’s economic recession.
Background: The firms’ collective revenue only grew about 2% to an estimated $2.09b in the 2024 financial year, with some of the largest firms recording declines in revenue of more than 5%.
Key players: Deloitte, PwC, KPMG, EY, BDO, BakerTillyStaplesRodway, Findex, Grant Thornton, Moore Markhams, Nexia, RSM, Acclime, William Buck, McCulloch & Partners.
