The weird anomaly of remote accounting jobs right now

You’ve read about the accountant shortage already—and maybe even in a certain newsletter.

You know about the dip in accounting majors and the innovative efforts to attract new students. You know about the aging workforce and the surprising reasons accountants leave their jobs.

But another, seemingly conflicting phenomenon has been building at the same time, at least according to ZipRecruiter and other employment marketplace data.

Remote accounting jobs are thriving, according to ZipRecruiter’s chief economist, Julia Pollak. On the employment marketplace’s platform, available remote accounting roles jumped from around 8% in 2019 to almost 20% in 2023, per CNBC. And a similar trend has popped up elsewhere: FlexJobs, a remote work marketplace, ranked accountant as its No. 1 most popular and searched-for job title in the US in 2024.

Accountant shortage? We don’t know her.

But, at least at ZipRecruiter, the figures actually confirm the shortage, Pollak explained. The phenomenon also highlights how other struggling occupations might grapple with workforce challenges.

“It's precisely in fields like accounting, where there are tremendous workforce challenges—a wave of retirements taking place, an aging workforce, and a shrinking pipeline of new talent, with fewer and fewer Americans majoring in accounting each year—that employers most value those recruitment and retention benefits,” Pollak explained.

In general, postings for online jobs have fallen around 30% over the year, Pollak told CFO Brew. “Most categories are falling, and then there are a couple of categories that are not. And those are the ones that piqued our interest and attention,” she continued. “They’re not falling, and that’s interesting. There’s clearly a huge demand for that skill.”

The future of remote work. Even if the popularity of remote accounting jobs has a relatively neat explanation, the paradox of the field’s popularity amid a broader shortage should ultimately serve as a call to arms to anyone looking to attract or retain accountants. There’s an overlooked tool in your arsenal that involves sweatpants.

The growing desire for remote accounting jobs also hints at the future of remote work, Pollak said. After a pandemic-era surge and consequent stabilization after, she expects “starting this year, we’ll actually see incremental increases in remote work.”

That increase won’t necessarily happen across the board, she added, but “it will be led by industries and occupations like accounting where the workforce challenges are the most acute.”

“There are many, many fields that are in a similar bind but can’t resort to remote work,” she added. “For the ones where companies can, I think you’ll see a tipping point where that becomes the expectation among workers, and the only way to go because it’s very difficult to recruit talent under any other conditions.”