Big 4 careers: Tax vs. audit vs. consulting (2024)

Find out whether you should go for tax, audit, or consulting at the Big 4 based on factors like pay and hours.

Hours
Pay
Relationship with clients
Flexibility
Travel
Best for introverts
Variety of work
Exit options
Job stability

But first

Here's a quick refresher on what "tax," "audit," and "consulting" mean.

Tax generally means helping companies prepare tax returns and giving them advice on how to lower their tax burden.
Audit means checking companies' financial statements so people like investors and banks trust the company is performing as it claims to.
Consulting is about helping companies improve their performance or reach their goals.

Tax and audit are on the accounting side of the Big 4 and require that you be eligible for the CPA exam.

You can also learn about what associates and interns in each of these roles do day-to-day:

Big 4 tax associates share what their work is really like
Big 4 junior auditors share what their work is really like
Big 4 junior consultants share what their work is really like

#1 Hours

🏆Tax & Consulting

According to our survey data*, it seems around half of all Big 4 associates – regardless of service line – work over 40 hours a week. However, auditors had it the roughest, with 55% of them working overtime compared to 48-49% in tax and consulting.

Why do Tax associates work fewer hours than their counterparts in Audit when both of them are accounting functions? Here's how a Tax manager explains it.

Don't get me wrong: Tax busy season can get pretty busy as well but from what I hear from audit colleagues their busy season could get pretty intense in that they will find themselves working past midnight on weekends and this could go on for weeks or even months.
It all really depends on the size of the clients but because Big 4 usually have big public companies as their clients and public companies have very strict timelines in terms of when to publish their financial statements, you'll find that this will transfer onto the audit team in terms of the work hours and needing to get things done on time – not to mention the sheer volume of work that goes into auditing a public company and the vast number of transactions that would occur in a company of that size.
As for tax the pressure usually lies in tax return deadlines or even internal deadlines that are set by the company. However I would say that these deadlines are pretty manageable because the scope of the work itself is not ginormous like an audit where you're verifying that the whole financial statements is reasonable. Tax, you take those financial statements and you take the parts that are relevant for tax purposes and make adjustments. I mean there could be a couple of late nights but nowhere near where you're working overtime for weeks and months on end.
– Big 4 Tax Manager

In terms of consulting, the hours vary depending on your team, practice (specialization), and more. However, "busy season" isn't a thing and weekends are generally off-limits.

Tax and audit service lines have these busy seasons where people describe their lives as hell. There are also other busy cycles that coincide with clients’ fiscal year end which can sometimes be different than calendar year end.
Consulting on the other hand, depends on the project. Naturally, the few weeks before the end of the project can be a mad scramble to prepare the deliverable. But generally, we try to get people out of work at a reasonable time.
See Also
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I personally aim for 9-6 work hours for myself and the rest of the team, and it’s been a very long time since we’ve had to work over the weekend to finish a project. The last time we worked the weekend, our senior manager gave us a weekday off to recharge. If a project does end up with longer hours, we’ll institute some plans like one day a week, a team member can leave at 5 pm no questions asked, and the rest of us cover for them. And we take turns throughout the week.
Things like team burnout get taken pretty seriously by leadership so they encourage us to think of ways to address it without impacting the project delivery.
– Consulting manager @EY

*Our survey data covers 1,400+ Big 4 associates between the years 2018 and 2022 in Australia and New Zealand.

#2 Pay

🏆 Consulting

Consulting pays the most.According to Big 4 Transparency (a website where Big 4 employees anonymously report their salaries), consulting pays around $10,000-$12,000 more at the intern and associate level.

	Audit & Tax	Consulting
Intern	$68,125	$78,000
Associate	$70,000	$82,500

The pay discrepancy might seem strange given that the Big 4 started out as accounting firms – in which case, shouldn't accountants be worth more to them than their consultants?

Not from a client's perspective at least! The difference in payboils down to how much clients are willing to pay for each type of service.

Every company needs to comply with tax laws and regulations, and audits are a legal requirement for companies – mainly public companies but also certain types of private ones too. So companies pay for tax and audit services mainly to avoid getting in trouble with the government. Getting audited or making sure they file their taxes properly aren't activities that help them make any money, so they avoid paying any more for these services than necessary.
On the other hand, companies pay for consulting services because they want to. Companies that hire consultants generally believe that the consultants can help solve a problem for them – and maybe even help them make more money in the long run. That's why they're willing to pay consultants more than tax and audit professionals.

#3 Relationship with clients

🏆Consulting

Whether you have a positive relationship with clients will affect your day-to-day job satisfaction and this is where consultants have it the best.

As we mentioned above, companies hire consultants because they actually want to – and this usually means they'll treat you better than the accountants they hire.

Consultants are usually more accepted compared to auditors, so clients are usually very nice to us. This means, for instance, they feed us good food and pay for everything when we're on-site!
– Tech consultant @ PwC & formerly Deloitte

Clients generally aren't a huge fan of auditors because auditors point out mistakes in their work and therefore make more work for them. Tax falls in between – if you're in a tax consulting role that lets you advise clients on how to save on taxes, you'll usually have a better relationship with them than say if you were just filing their tax returns.

#4 Flexibility

🏆 Tax

While Big 4 jobs are in general quite flexible (in audit, tax, and consulting), this flexibility isn't always guaranteed due to the nature of client work.

In the world of audit work, your schedule can be pretty unpredictable because:

Your clients don't always give you the information you need at the best time. For example, imagine it's the end of a busy week, and just as you're getting ready to enjoy your weekend, a client sends over a big pile of documents late on Friday. This means you'll need to spend your weekend going through them, instead of relaxing or doing personal things.
There are times when specific tasks need to be done at inconvenient times. For instance, if you're auditing a company that has a factory, you might need to physically count their inventory to make sure it matches what's on their records. If the factory operates every day, the only time to do this without interrupting their operations might be on a holiday when the factory is closed. So, instead of enjoying the holiday, you'd be at the factory working.

Consulting has become more flexible since COVID, but there will still be clients who request your presence on-site for their projects, which will limit your flexibility in terms of where and when you do your work.

#5 Travel

🏆 Consulting

In tax, you're generally free to work from home or at the office. Consulting and audit work requires more travel to client sites – but for totally different reasons.

For auditors, travel often means driving out to factories or warehouses in remote areas. A common task for auditors is to physically count inventory, which is why they need to be on-site at these locations.
In consulting, on the other hand, the travel can be more varied and more exciting. Consultants often work on projects that require them to meet with clients or teams in different cities or even countries. For example, many consultants around the world are being flown to Saudi Arabia.

So if you like traveling for work, consulting is the best choice. For some consultants, it's even the thing they love most about their job!

The best part of my job was getting to travel to client sites and explore a new area.
– Former junior consultant @ Deloitte

#6 Best for introverts

🏆 Tax

Both audit and consulting work involve more teamwork and interactions with clients. If you prefer to work independently, you might want to consider tax.

[Audit] work is based in a team environment and is usually at the client side. If you love being around people, this is great for you, and especially if you're an extrovert. But it gives you less flexibility in how you want to get your work done since you're expected to be always in a team environment at the client side for a set number of hours, let's say from nine to five. This may or may not take a toll on your energy levels, especially if you're hopping around the city going to different client sites or even traveling to less glamorous parts of the world such as factories or mining sites.
On the flip side, for tax, you have a set workspace in the office where you're free to, you know, make it comfy. You could decorate a little bit, have some pictures, you could have your favorite mug, you could even have an extra monitor. You also have an idea of how your day will go, such as a set commute every day, your lunch breaks, when your meetings are going to be, and having that comfort of going to that same workspace every day enables you to sort of plan your day and have a routine that you could stick to
– Big 4 Tax Manager

#7 Variety of work

🏆 Consulting

A part of the allure of the Big 4 comes from the fact that they serve big-name clients across different industries – which should give new hires exposure to many fields. However, that's often not the case.

As we discussed in , consulting is the only service line that allows you to explore different industries.

Out of the accounting services, tax offers a bit more variety than audit.

The third reason to choose tax is for its variety of work and its type of clients. For starters, everyone needs to get their taxes done, whether they are individuals or corporations, so you can only imagine the vast variety of types of work and clients you might get. Whereas for audit, the type of clients are more limited since companies that require audit are usually large public companies that have really strict regulations or for medium to large private companies that require audit for a specific purpose such as for lenders or investors.
Since the type of work you do for audit is very structured, there isn't much flexibility or diversity in how you go about auditing a financial statement because the key purpose is to ensure that it's reasonable for key stakeholders. As for tax, I don't even know where to start because there's so many different types of work out there. The most common type of work you'll probably hear about is corporate tax compliance, and it's basically doing tax returns for any size company, whether they're small, medium, large, whether they're private or public. You can even do personal tax compliance, which is tax returns for individuals.
And in the case of Big 4, there are usually high net worth clients. Aside from tax compliance, what I believe is a fun part of tax is tax consulting, and this is basically when clients come to you for advice to minimize their taxes, which ultimately impact their bottom line. There are also other types of tax consulting work such as for M&A transactions where you could conduct tax due diligence. There is also restructuring projects where you help the client plan for the most efficient tax structure.
– Big 4 Tax Manager

#8 Exit options

🏆 Consulting

You'll have good exit options regardless of whether you do Audit, Tax, or Consulting. Recruiters will start reaching out to you even before your first year is up. Consulting will have a wider range of exit options simply because it's less specialized. Audit and tax will automatically give you lots of options within the field of accounting but not necessarily much beyond that.

#9 Job stability

🏆 Audit & Tax

Because companies need audit and tax services no matter what, those jobs don't go anywhere – even whenthe economy is bad. By comparison, consulting is more likely to be affected by economic downturns.

Consulting work exposes firms to more fluctuation in revenues, which can be particularly damaging in a slower economy, compared with auditing, which is a mandatory expense for public companies.
– Wall Street Journal

Consulting is also more vulnerable to changes in client demands. As a junior consultant, you don't need to worry about this as much, as you're not a specialist yet, but it can still affect how many junior consultants firms hire and whether they do things like deferring your start date.

Clients are still working with consultants to pour more investment into building out their tech capabilities, for example, further applying artificial intelligence throughout the business. But they also have slowed theirmergers-and-acquisitions activityand need for related support such as due diligence.
“Client demand isn’t shrinking, but it’s certainly changing shape, so they need more experts in one field and need fewer in another,” said Fiona Czerniawska, chief executive of consulting-industry analyst Source Global Research....
Consulting is also particularly prone to layoffs because clients increasingly expect specialized skills and experience with certain tools and data, unlike 20 years ago when consultants more freely moved from one area to another, Czerniawska said. “Firms don’t have much choice except to lay people off from one area when they might be recruiting in another because the services they’re delivering are becoming more specialized,” she said.
– Wall Street Journal

What next?

While the points we've brought up are good to consider, the most important thing is to do what you find most interesting. The more interested you are in something, the more likely you'll enjoy it and be good at it.

If you're not sure what you like, try them all out if you can! That's what internships are for. If you're still on the hunt for a promising one, check out all the internships we have in accountingandconsulting!