Most managing partners have a sense of where their firm stands. They know their revenue per partner, they track turnover, they have opinions about billing rates and advisory growth. What they often lack is the context to know whether their numbers are good, average or quietly falling behind.
That context is exactly what benchmarking survey data can give you.
A few things that the INSIDE Public Accounting Practice Management Survey data reveals may surprise you:
Advisory growth is real, but the gap is widening. Advisory revenue has grown from 22% of firm revenue in 2008 to 32% today. This is a structural shift, not a trend. But firms above $50 million now generate more than 43% of revenue from advisory, while firms under $5 million have actually fallen back to 19%. The direction is the same. The distance between firms is growing.
Your billing rates may not be keeping pace with inflation, even if they look healthy. Between 2021 and 2022, cumulative inflation ran nearly 13% while partner billing rates grew roughly 3% in nominal terms. Firms that felt confident about their pricing exited that period with meaningfully lower real revenue per hour than they realized. The report examines 20 years of inflation-adjusted billing rate data, and the findings are worth sitting with.
Turnover just hit a 20-year low, but not by accident. After peaking at 15.9% across all firms in 2022, turnover fell to 11.8% in 2025, the lowest figure in the entire dataset. The firms that recovered fastest had retention infrastructure already in place before the disruption arrived.
The billable hour isn’t going away, but the firms leading the shift aren’t waiting. Charge hour billing still accounts for 67% of revenue across all firms. But firms above $75 million now generate 39% of revenue through value billing and fixed fee models. A number that has been climbing steadily for six years.
Revenue per partner has nearly doubled since 2008 but recent softening at larger firms is worth watching. The all-firm average climbed from $1.33 million to $2.58 million over 17 years. Firms above $75 million, however, saw a pullback in 2024 and 2025 after peaking at $4.01 million. Whether that’s a temporary correction or something more structural is a question the full report addresses directly.
These are not predictions or projections. They are 17 to 20 years of real firm data, broken out by size tier, tracked over time and analyzed against the economic forces shaping the profession.
If you want to know how your firm compares, and more importantly, what the firms outperforming their peers are actually doing differently, IPA’s data can help you uncover all of the trends. You can order our recently published trends report at: IPA Insights | Quarterly Accounting Industry Insights & Trends
