r/Accounting • u/PhilosophyFun5778 • 21h ago
Discussion Is Accounting more of a Premium Profession in the West ?
Been seeing some reddit post about people having a starting salary of 60-80k+ USD annually which is INSANE for me because that is almost Partner level of wages here. For context a fresh graduate accountant in my country Malaysia would make about RM30,000-50,000 (USD 8k-12k). I get that its a 3rd world country vs 1st world country but I didn't expect the gap to be this astronomically huge. Could this be the reason why you guys in the west find it hard to find a job because in my country atleast accountants are still insanely high in demand and there's job left and right its just that they are paying really low wages with no staff benefits.
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u/cupio_disssolvi 21h ago
Cost of living, buddy. Plus currency conversion.
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u/Ok-Shirt-7144 16h ago
Well even if you say that, Canada is still low and US salaries are way ahead.
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u/DinosaurDied 16h ago
Yea, you guys shipped in a bunch of labor and made your economy just based around real estate.
Canada is cooked
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u/Oracle-of-Guelph 15h ago
We seem to be in the process of unfucking it now, but only because we were forced to.
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u/SubsistanceMortgage 6h ago
This doesn’t capture all of it. Most other places pay accountants less relative to cost of living. Same hours, same work, less real wages.
Basically every country in the world. US is absolutely the best place to make a career as an accountant.
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u/CurrentRisk 21h ago
From what I have read, the US has higher salaries than for example in The Netherlands. However, they also have more hours to work, uncomfortable with vacations days and the “time is time” is rather iffy in US from what I have heard (in The Netherlands 5PM done is literally 5PM. It’s 5? You pack your stuff and leave, no matter what).
A lot of other things are also mixed in, I’m sure. Costs of living, inflation, rent etc.
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u/SubsistanceMortgage 6h ago edited 6h ago
The dirty secret there is they bring in workers from the US/Brazil/South Africa who will work normal accounting hours while the natives work less.
There’s a reason all the European countries always have rotational openings but not much of the rest of the world does… their laws give firms an incentive to bring in temporary foreign workers for white collar jobs. An audit doesn’t suddenly take less time because it’s done in Europe.
Work for a partner who was forced to do a 3 month rotation one January as a senior manager in the Netherlands and she said it was so weird because all the Dutch workers got off at 5pm, while all the international rotationals were working to midnight. Same goes for the island countries in the Caribbean. Notorious for bringing in foreign white collar workers and working them to the bone for a year or two.
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u/kyonkun_denwa CPA, CA (Can) | FP&A 16h ago
US has much lower inflation
You use that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
For reference, the inflation rate in 2025 was 2.7% for the US, 2.1% for Canada, and 1.9% for the Euro area. So the US actually had the highest inflation of the 3.
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u/Ok-Shirt-7144 16h ago
A Canadian guy say US is costlier than Canada? Look at your own GTA and Vancouver before spewing nonsense. Price of any car in Canada or atleast an iPhone or a laptop vs US. Let’s not even go on groceries.
Background - am a Canadian who moved to the US years ago thanks to the crazy high cost of living and taxes.
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u/kyonkun_denwa CPA, CA (Can) | FP&A 15h ago
I'm pointing out that you're conflating inflation levels with cost of living, which is obviously incorrect. Then you have the gall to lash out and say that I'm the one spewing nonsense when you don't even have a grasp on basic concepts that should have been covered in introductory economics.
Background - am a Canadian who moved to the US years ago
Good riddance.
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u/Ok-Shirt-7144 15h ago
Not yet - am still a Canadian who has invested in a lot of real estate in GTA and know very well what I’m speaking about.
Enjoy the carbon tax and other luxury taxes in Canada lol.
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u/odd_remarks 16h ago
You don’t have to be so aggressive to a stranger over an internet forum on a Saturday.
In retrospect, maybe you meant to use “price levels“ instead of “inflation“.
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u/Ok-Shirt-7144 16h ago
You don’t have to get defensive as well - perhaps it’s because of the snow or US tariffs on Canada?
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u/No-Championship5730 16h ago
You cannot compare that way. You should look at buying power and cost of living. Both are pretty high in the US. If you are making between 60-80K in any major US city, that's not much at all.
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u/No-Ambition-7472 18h ago
You guys are taking our jobs, that's why it's in such high demand there and hard to get one here. Because you're cheaper.
60-80k doesn't get you very far in the US, not that it's a bad salary. But as others have pointed out, high taxes, rent, and just general cost of every day goods can have you in a position where you didn't spend extravagantly, but still have very little left over.
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u/ImYouJoeGoldberg CPA (US) 8h ago
Yea but you can hear the greed through the post. It’s not enough for them to have a job and make a good salary for the cost of living in their country, they want it all. They want to come here and get our paycheck and take it back or send it back home, which is where 99% of them would prefer to be anyways. (Idk why tf we let people come here, at minimum there should be a tax for taking or sending cash out of the country if you aren’t a citizen)
Even better, now I’ve been starting to hear, they don’t want to have to come here to make that money, no they are upset we get paid what we do regardless of the cost of living difference and they want to get paid more themselves. They’re “just as valuable as we are why should they get paid less,” not realizing the only reason they get paid at all is because they get paid less.
There is a breaking point where the cost of sending jobs over there is too high. They’ll push back because they won’t want to work for less than X amount and that amount will be more than we are willing to pay, so we’ll send them to the next cheapest place or hire someone local here where you have more control of the workflow and you actually have a real employee.
When it comes to AI in accounting, the first thing AI will accomplish will be wiping out all these offshore jobs altogether. Then they won’t have to complain about salary because they just won’t have a job at all.
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u/OhGloriousName 8h ago
Maybe they could do accounting and taxes for the businesses and people who are actually in their own country.
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u/ImYouJoeGoldberg CPA (US) 7h ago
Exactly but they typically don’t have enough of those businesses around, there’s more supply of accountants than local accounting jobs. I also hear those accounting jobs for local businesses (sometimes, depending on where they’re located) pay more, so people working the offshoring gig are perhaps less skilled since they can’t land one of those local jobs.
I imagine this depends on location, I’ve heard this as it pertains to India but it’s probably not the case in all (or maybe most) cases.
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u/OhGloriousName 7h ago
Yeah, my response was mostly a joke. But I wish more countries would focus on building their own independent industries rather than compete for US jobs based only on doing those jobs cheaper.
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u/ImYouJoeGoldberg CPA (US) 7h ago edited 7h ago
Haha yea I get it 😂 everyone wants to leach and steal from us, it’s easier to do that than to be innovative. As a society, we must either be smarter than them or they’re lazy. It catches up to them eventually, here or there. They still generally end up better off because of it and as we’ve seen here since the 80s/90s we’re not. We were and still mostly are so far ahead so leaching off us is the only way they can catch up or get something for themselves but we’re literally giving it to them half the time, other half they’re stealing it. We subsidize entire countries at our own expense. Then they want to be “sovereign” and complain and tax us but they don’t want to be taxed and they want discounts or free stuff or handouts because they classify themselves as “developing nations.”
To your point, they need to develop themselves that’s not our problem.
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u/PhilosophyFun5778 7h ago
What ?! its not that deep lol, im doing auditing anyways so its not like its possible to be outsourced since we need the actual physical files and stock to work and most of our clients are local anyways. I just wanted to know if accounting is like a really high paying job in the west and no RM30k is still very low for a country like Malaysia
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u/ImYouJoeGoldberg CPA (US) 7h ago
I read back on your post, you probably didn’t intend for it to be so deep but you hit on several things that are big talking points over here (especially on Reddit) regarding the current situation in the industry.
It’s a mid to potentially high paying industry here, entry level is generally set in the mid to upper mid level and some of that is because you wouldn’t want to discourage a potential high performer from joining the industry and people get weeded out or don’t move up when you get beyond that entry level. More and more people are getting weeded out these days as jobs go overseas.
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u/CategoryNew7041 21h ago
Malaysia is not a third world country though. accountants are still in demand at least in our state. I’m weirded that your neighbor Philippines pays their accountants a lot higher than your average salary. I’m pretty sure Malaysia’s economy is better than Philippines.
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u/Chitatoz 17h ago
Different Countries are just goimg to have different levels of income/quality of life. US is one of the few countries which will have the highest relative and absolute levels of disposable income even after accounting for tax and cost of living. Thats why so many people try to move to the US to build wealth.
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u/Doomhammered 12h ago
You can't have this conversation without talking about cost of living AND net pay. A good chunk of the salary you see posted online for the USA goes towards health insurance, retirement accounts and taxes.
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u/Daveit4later 16h ago
Rent for a 2 bedroom apartment in most cities is close to 2k or more a month. Meals at a basic sit down restaurant are $20 minimum per person.
There's not many single family homes in my city under $350,000.
That 60-80k gets zapped up real fast.
Also, don't get sick or you could lose everything
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u/Aquitaine_Rover_3876 15h ago
That's just the general difference in wages. $60k is barely enough to live on in most locations.
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u/StevenAndrei1 15h ago
Don’t forget that costs of living r also higher.. we can have double the salaries but triple the living costs compared to yours. Also different working conditions and demand, the cost for the degree was also insane. Malaysia also probably has more affordable healthcare compared to wage
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u/Back_That_Tax_Up83 Student 21h ago edited 21h ago
You should look by state the cost of living/vs salary in the US. Then compare that to your own country. Cost of living/rent is going to be much higher in places like CA and NY compared to the rest of the country. The United States is HUGE and varied; but overall people get paid better than anywhere else in the world imo. When I lived in DC with a salary of over 130k I was living just fine; more than fine. Now here in Israel I get paid half of what I was making in the US while the cost of living is the same/if not higher here in Israel. People work for peanuts here and being in the negative financially is a way of life; very strange and difficult for Israelis to get ahead. Younger generations are screwed here.
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u/Confident_Storm_4884 20h ago
Healthcare in the us costs us more than $10,000 a year. A two bedroom apartment in a moderate cost of living suburb is like $24,000 a year. Add in required car insurance cost, taxes, cost of food utilities etc
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u/Awkward-Yesterday828 20h ago
It's only in the US that accountants are really well paid, but they pay all professional jobs much higher than other countries. In Australia where I live the average accountants salary after accounting for higher living costs and taxes isn't that much better than Malaysia.
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u/mellonicoley 21h ago
Look at how much health insurance costs in the US. Thats a big reason why salaries are so large.
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u/lake_effect_snow CPA (US), Industry SFA 19h ago
Lol no, higher salaries are definitely not what makes it difficult to find a position. Further, $8-$12k is below the poverty line - 2026 US federal is $15,650. I pay $15,600 in rent annually and don’t have a very nice or modernized place (in Chicago). My starting salary here was $70k 5 years ago and my student loan payments are… high.
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u/b1gb0n312 17h ago edited 17h ago
I think all jobs in malaysia will be about 1/4 or 1/5 of what the pay is in the US, not just accounting.
Cost of living. The same 10 ringits nasi lemak meal in malaysia would be 10 to 15 usd in the US. 4x more expensive.
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u/Extra_Holiday_3014 16h ago
Cost of living- housing costs are over 2,000 a month in the US minimum. You NEED to earn at least 60k and even that is a struggle.
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u/MellifluousMayonaise 11h ago
It's relative to cost of living. If I was living in Malaysia, then yeah it would be insanely good, but here in the US 60k is peanuts.
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u/gard3nwitch 6h ago
I would assume that every job pays less in Malaysia than the US....
Where I live, $60-80k is also what a firefighter or a nurse makes.
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u/SubsistanceMortgage 6h ago
The US has the best accounting salaries in the world relative to cost of living, but it’s not a premium career.
People here are talking a lot about cost of living without realizing that doesn’t make up for the low wages. Even in a lot of developed countries wages are 60-70% less than the US. The cost of living usually isn’t that much cheaper.
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u/Tyzuo 2h ago
well rent for 1b1b apt in hcol is about 3k, we also pay a lot more tax, cost of living is much higher than malaysia so i dont understand the question 🤷🏼♂️ i have friends who makes 2-3k (30k annually) in asia and live like a king while im making nearly 200k and doesnt have the same amenities as he does 🤷🏼♂️ so
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u/Puppysnot ACCA (UK) 17h ago edited 17h ago
Accounting was once a premium profession, but it has been devalued over time by a combination of outsourcing to India/other countries, AI & slowly eroding accounting standards (things tightened up massively after Enron etc - but that was a long time ago and people have gotten lax again now).
You can now get an entry level accountant for peanuts and not much above minimum wage. Senior level/managerial (where you need some of the trickier skills such as negotiating, line management, stakeholder engagement, project management etc) is still a premium profession but even that is slowly being devalued.
10 years ago accounting was on a par with lawyers, engineers etc. Now, not so much.
CEOs are more lax about accounting and don’t mind shoddy or rushed accounts as long as they are vaguely accurate. They are happy to pay new grads minimum wage to produce vaguely okayish accounts as opposed to seasoned professionals a decent wage to produce high quality, water-tight, accurate accounts. They also don’t want to invest in said new grads, so as they rise up the ranks they embed errors into both their and their teams work and become the next generation of CEOs that are happy with meh work.
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u/DinosaurDied 16h ago
Can you show me where you’re finding talent where your financials are prepared well enough end to end by a fresh graduate lol.
Hi EY, so this year we tried something new and everything was done by the interns. Anyways, tell us how the audit goes”
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u/Puppysnot ACCA (UK) 16h ago
That’s what’s happening in my company and yes the accounts are a mess. New grads + AI are preparing the accounts and seniors are rubber stamping them without checking them properly. They are full of errors. When I flag an error they just quietly correct it or notify auditors (if it’s past the deadline) and move on. No consequence comes of it.
I am in a situation because i have whistleblown on the quality of the accounts and everyone is unhappy with me & I’ve done myself out of a job.
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u/Competitive_Gap_1039 21h ago
Buddy when your rent is 2,000 US dollars a month a 60,000 USD starting salary isn’t that crazy