Having spent several years training as an accountant, now is the time to think about your earning power. What kind of salary can you expect? Is the highest number always the best? Ed Heffernan crunches the numbers.  

As a newly qualified accountant coming out of a training contract in 2022, you will no doubt have a lot of questions about what lies ahead. For some, money will be top of the agenda. 

If you’re one of them, it’s hardly surprising. You have, after all, worked hard and sacrificed a lot. It’s only fair to be compensated correctly for the value of your time — nobody wants to be short-changed.

So, what’s the going salary for a newly qualified accountant? How can you benchmark your salary against the ‘going rate’ out there? What information is accurate and what can you rely on? 

What are salary surveys really saying?

Most salary surveys give average pay rates or ranges. Depending on the sample size, however, the average figure can be skewed, and often won’t give you a true reflection of the actual base salary. Sometimes (more than you might imagine) the numbers are not based on surveys, but on sentiment. 

For fun, we tracked the base salaries of newly qualified Chartered Accountants in Dublin over the last six months (yes, that’s what we regard as fun here at Barden!) and created some real-time data points. 

We do this every year, but this time around we noticed a few anomalies. Instead of grouping the six months of data as normal, we broke it down into Q4 2021 and Q1 2022, just to see if there was any noticeable shift in numbers over the past six months. 
What we found surprised us!

The results

• A median salary in Q4 2021 was €55,000 (the same as it had been for several years previous). This median shifted from €55,000 to €58,000 in Q1 2022. This is the most dramatic shift in median base salary we have ever seen, and it has occurred in an incredibly short timeframe.
• €60,000 salaries were outliers in Q4 2021, but have become increasingly common in Q1 2022. It is worth noting that group accountant type roles in Plc teams have held steady across the market at €57,000 in Q1. Roles offered at €60,000 have tended to be either more niche roles in larger teams or roles with an internal audit or heavy stat element.
• We have seen evidence of base salaries at some companies going as high as €65,000. These are very much outliers, however. We’ve only seen them in larger lessor environments and one telco in Dublin. To include these figures would distort the broader market norms. Hence, we have left them out of this data set.

Outside Dublin, you would typically apply a 10 percent reduction on-base +/- 2.5 percent depending on location.  

The caveats

There are two big caveats you must consider before taking in the rates listed above:

• Base salary is only a part of total compensation (i.e. base plus package). Sometimes, people will get paid a higher base for the same job at a different company. Why? It could be that one company offers additional benefits and the other doesn’t. It could be because one role involves a lot of travel and the other doesn’t. Equally, it could be that one company finds it harder to attract accountants than another – or it could be down to a whole host of other variables. When it comes to base salary, just make sure you’re not comparing apples with oranges.
• It should not be “all about the base” in your first few moves post-qualification. You may not have prepared a set of accounts yet or a month-end management pack. In fact, there are probably a lot of areas in which you have yet to gain practical experience. Your first few years post-qualification should really be about getting good experience working with great people while also getting paid fairly at the same time.

It’s not really about your base salary right now. It’s about what your base salary will be in ten years’ time and for the twenty or thirty years after that. Earning follows learning, not the other way around.

Ed Heffernan is the Managing Partner at Barden.