What Firm Leaders Need to Know About the Shifts Reshaping the Equity Table

Typically, CPA and accounting firms have always run on the promise of the partnership track: grind long enough, bring in enough business, outlast enough colleagues, and one day your name goes on the door. But that deal is being quietly renegotiated. Across the firms analyzed in the MYCPE ONE 2025 Equity Partner Evolution Report, the equity table, who sits at it, how they got there, and what it’s actually worth, is shifting in ways that most firm leaders haven’t fully reckoned with yet. This article pulls out four of the most consequential signals from that research. Not the full picture, but enough to tell you whether your firm is ahead of these shifts, behind them, or dangerously unaware that they’re happening at all.

The Succession Gap Is Bigger Than You Think

Only 46% of CPA firms have a formalized succession plan in place. That means more than half the industry is navigating partner transitions, retirements, departures, health events, competitor poaching- without a written playbook. For smaller firms with less than $5M revenue, the numbers are even more sobering.

What’s striking is not just the overall figure, but how dramatically it varies depending on where a firm sits on the revenue spectrum. The gap between the least-prepared and most-prepared segments is not a few percentage points, it’s a chasm. And the firms sitting at the bottom of that range are typically the ones where a single unplanned partner exit could trigger client attrition, revenue disruption, and a talent crisis simultaneously.

The data also flags that 64% of firms now have mandatory retirement policies in place, but policy alone, without a succession pipeline, is just a deadline without a plan. Knowing when your partners will leave is not the same as knowing who will replace them. Many firms have the former without the latter, which is arguably worse than having nothing at all, because it creates a hard deadline without a solution.

The Age of the Equity Table Is Telling You Something

The average equity partner age across the industry sits at 53.6 years, but that headline number masks a more interesting story. Partner age decreases as firm size increases, from 55.5 years at smaller firms down to 52.6 years at the largest. Nearly three years span the size spectrum.

This isn’t a coincidence. It reflects a structural reality: larger firms have built the institutional machinery, defined career pathways, formal admission criteria, and compensation committees that create predictable elevation timelines. Smaller firms still largely depend on founder relationships and informal judgment calls, which naturally skew the equity table older.

“If your equity table average age is north of 55, your promotion pipeline is likely informal, your next generation is probably frustrated, and your succession risk is higher than you realize.”

What does your firm’s equity table age tell you about how structured or unstructured your path to partnership really is? The answer varies significantly by revenue band, and the full report maps exactly where each segment sits.

The Gender Story Is More Complicated Than the Headline

Female equity partner representation averages approximately 25.5% across the industry, a figure that looks modest but steady until you examine how it distributes across firm sizes. Large firms ($50–150M) actually show the lowest female equity percentage at 23.7%, while Early-Mid and Regional firms sit at the top of the range at 26.1%. The pattern is counterintuitive: the firms with the most formalized governance structures and the largest compensation committees are not necessarily producing the strongest gender representation outcomes at the equity level.

The implication is significant. Formalizing governance, moving to closed compensation systems, establishing admission committees, and building structured career frameworks do not automatically produce more equitable outcomes. It can just as easily institutionalize existing imbalances if the criteria and decision-makers remain unchanged. Firms that are actually moving the needle have done something deliberately different in how they structure sponsorship, flexibility, and the definition of “partner-ready.”

The Compensation Conversation Is Changing: Permanently

The shift from open to closed compensation systems is the most structurally significant change happening inside CPA firm partnerships right now, and it is well underway. At the $15–30M revenue inflection point, the majority of firms have already crossed over to closed systems, with compensation committees replacing managing partner discretion as the primary decision-making mechanism.

By the time firms reach the top of the market, the compensation spread between the highest- and lowest-paid equity partners reaches 9.3:1, from roughly $341K at the low end to over $3.1M at the high end. That is not a profit-sharing partnership in any traditional sense. It is an enterprise executive compensation model. And it changes everything about how partnership is perceived, pursued, and valued by the next generation of would-be equity holders.

The critical question for firm leaders is not whether this transition is coming for your firm; it is whether you are managing it deliberately or stumbling into it reactively. Firms that navigate this governance shift well use it as a talent retention and differentiation tool. Firms that don’t tend to lose their best next-gen candidates to competitors who have already made the transition cleanly.

The Equity Table Is Being Reinvented. Is Your Firm at the Table?

STAGE	REVENUE BAND	GOVERNANCE	COMP SYSTEM	AVG.PARTNER COMP	KRY CHALLENGE
Founder-Driven	<$5M	MP decides all	Open/informal	~$420K–422K	Founder dependency
Entrepreneurial	$5–15M	Formula-based	Mostly open	~$526K	First specialization
Institutional	$15–50M	Comp committee	Closed systems	~$644K–776K	Governance overhaul
Enterprise	>$50M	Board/committee	Highly closed	~$815K–960K	Talent at market rates

These four signals, the succession gap, the age profile, the gender distribution, and the compensation governance shift- are not isolated trends. They are interconnected symptoms of a partnership model that is being fundamentally restructured across the US accounting industry. The firms navigating this well share one characteristic: they are making these changes by design, not by default.