Why Is Houston One Of The Best Cities...For Accountants?

Accountants. The name bores some and frightens others, worried that they’re about to either sit through a boring lecture, get audited, or something in between.

The world of accounting gets something of a bad rap, and even if not everyone is as interested in finance and numbers as the pros might be there’s still something to be said for the important role accountants serve in modern society - and, perhaps more interestingly, where they choose to set up shop.

Over the last year or so, a number of accounting-related publications like Insider Monkey, NASBA.org, and the blogs for educational sites Rogers CPA Review and CPA Exam Hub have done studies and polls on what CPAs all over the country feel like the best city to set up shop as accountant is, and Houston was frequently cited as a favorite.

This might come as news to a lot of you Houston residents. It’s fair to say the city is known for a lot; it’s involvement in the early days of NASA, a pretty darn good basketball team, a number of popular musicians, actors, and artists that have called the city home, or even serving as the home to a large number of technology companies, American or otherwise. But all of these things actually help contribute to why Houston is considered a prime destination for CPAs of any experience level, freelance or otherwise.

One of the most commonly-cited reasons for Houston being a good city for an accountant is due to that high level of businesses in the area. The Big Four accounting firms (PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited, Ernst & Young, and KPMG) all call Houston home, which offers an exceptionally high rate of employment opportunity for CPAs of any experience level in the city. Alongside the Big Four, a surprisingly high number of smaller firms have sprung up to help funnel talent into and out of the city, offering CPAs looking to get their feet wet a chance to start out in a major market before trying their hand with the Big Four.

Furthermore, there’s a lot of constant business in the area. A large number of energy companies, including private, commercial, and federal, are headquartered in the greater Houston area, all of which employ a large number of accountants. This opens up career opportunities above and beyond what might be offered in even similar-sized cities, and is a strong influencing factor on accountants flocking to the area.

Of course, the opportunities aren’t totally accounting-related. Houston was named the #1 city in America in 2008 by Kiplinger, primarily due to its high rate of employment across many different industries, comparatively low cost of living, and strong business opportunity to either work in-house or freelance for a lot of pretty major companies.

This could go on for a while, but at the end of the day, it’s safe to say that Houston could very quickly become known for being an accounting paradise on top of everything else. When you look at other big cities, there’s a lot worse things to be known for, right?