Revenue at the big consulting firms kept growing through 2025, but at McKinsey, for the first time in a long time (at least as I’ve been following these firms), headcount went the other way.

BCG closed the year at $14.4 billion, up 7% from $13.5 billion and its 22nd consecutive year of growth, according to the firm’s April 2026 announcement. Over roughly the same stretch McKinsey went from about 45,100 people at the end of 2023 to about 40,000 by May 2025. Fortune reported that decline of more than 10% as the largest in the firm’s history, and McKinsey attributed it to normal attrition and performance reviews rather than layoffs.

Only BCG discloses its numbers, and the strategy firms are a fraction of the Big Four’s size

There are many kinds of consulting firms, and the ones in the chart below are not all in the same business. The Big Four accounting firms (Deloitte, PwC, EY, and KPMG) and Accenture, which often gets lumped in with them but is not one of the four, report revenue for everything they do: audit, tax, technology implementation, outsourcing. The strategy and operations practices inside them, the parts that compete with McKinsey, BCG, and Bain, are probably much smaller than the headline numbers suggest.

Of the three strategy firms, only BCG publishes its numbers. Its 2025 results were $14.4 billion in revenue, up 7%, with 33,500 employees and more than 40% of revenue from AI and tech services.

McKinsey stopped. Its last disclosure was for 2023, at $16 billion and 45,100 people, and its report for 2024 dropped both figures. Headcount has since been reported at about 40,000. The $16 billion still quoted everywhere is that 2023 number.

Bain publishes no revenue. Forbes estimates $7.5 billion. Its press releases say 19,000 people; its externally assured sustainability report says 17,519 for 2025, after a 5% drop in 2024. The $14 billion in Wikipedia’s infobox cites that same Forbes profile, which says $7.5 billion.

Most recent published revenue and headcount at nine consulting firms, October 2026

One caution on headcount: BCG’s 33,500 counts everyone, including engineers, data scientists, and support staff, so a firm-to-firm gap of a thousand people usually reflects two different definitions rather than a real difference. I go through all of this firm by firm in the McKinsey vs BCG vs Bain comparison.

For scale, the chart puts them next to the firms that do file, each at its latest fiscal year: Deloitte at $74.5 billion, Accenture at $74.2 billion (of which $36.9 billion is consulting), PwC at $60.2 billion, EY at $57 billion, KPMG at $39.8 billion for the year to September 2025, and Oliver Wyman at $3.6 billion. BCG is about a fifth the size of Deloitte or Accenture. The strategy firms sit at the top of the pricing pyramid and nowhere near the top of the revenue one.

Every firm over-hired after 2020 and has been correcting since, each in its own way

Firms over-hired during the post-2020 boom, and the correction has been running for about three years.

McKinsey’s version was quiet. Five thousand fewer people over eighteen months, no announced layoff, and a lot of performance management that never had to be called anything else.

Accenture said the quiet part out loud. In the fiscal 2025 fourth quarter the company started a six-month “business optimization program” and took a $615 million charge, with another $250 million expected in the following quarter. That second charge came in at $308 million, mostly for severance, when the program finished. The stated talent strategy was to invest in upskilling, and then:

exiting people in a compressed timeline where reskilling is not a viable path for the skills it needs

That’s a public company explaining, in a press release, that people who can’t be retrained for what it now sells are on their way out.

The Big Four took it out of the entry level instead. Consultancy.uk reported in September 2025 that PwC cut its UK graduate intake from 1,500 to 1,300. Marco Amitrano, PwC’s UK chief, tied the decision to the market rather than to AI:

At PwC, our entry-level numbers are lower this year, reflecting the wider slowdown in investment, hiring and deal-making.

Asked about technology in the same piece, he was more careful: “Innovation in AI is certainly reshaping roles. For now, the development of new tools and the parallel investment in skills are offsetting more serious disruption.” None of the MBB firms has said anything that direct, and “for now” is the qualifier to watch.

None of this has shrunk the Big Four or Accenture overall. Accenture ended fiscal 2026 with about 814,000 people, up from about 779,000 a year earlier, and Deloitte now puts its own count at nearly 500,000. PwC counted 369,945 people at the end of June 2026 in its Global Annual Review, up from the 364,000 it had a year earlier, and KPMG grew 1.8% to 276,030 in fiscal 2025. EY went from 406,209 to 415,182. The Americas lost 4.9% of their people, while EY’s global entities grew 12.3%; that group includes its Global Delivery Services organization, the shared teams that do work for member firms around the world.

The growth is AI work, and traditional consulting is growing slowly

The growth the firms describe is AI work, and they say so.

BCG’s headline number is that AI and tech work is now more than 40% of its revenue, with AI services up 25% in 2025. EY says “sales from AI services grew by 49%” in fiscal 2026, while its total revenue grew 4.7%. Accenture’s fiscal 2025 results reported $5.9 billion in generative AI new bookings for the year, out of $80.6 billion in total new bookings.

What gets less attention is what’s happening to everything else. Over Accenture’s fiscal 2026, which ended in August, consulting revenue grew 3% in local currency to $36.88 billion and managed services grew 6% to $37.30 billion, so the running-your-systems half of the company is now the bigger one. A year earlier consulting was ahead, $35.11 billion to $34.57 billion. Consulting did pick up late in the year, growing 7% in local currency in the fourth quarter, the same as managed services.

At all four of the Big Four, tax grew faster than the main consulting or advisory business. PwC’s Advisory revenue rose 3.0% like-for-like at constant exchange rates, against 6.3% for Tax and Legal Services. At Deloitte, Technology & Transformation grew 2.5% and Strategy, Risk & Transactions 4.4% in local currency, against 5.8% for Tax & Legal. EY’s Consulting grew 4.4% against 6.0% for Tax, and KPMG’s Advisory grew 2.9% against 7.5% for Tax & Legal in fiscal 2025. The one advisory line that outgrew its firm’s tax practice was EY-Parthenon, EY’s strategy and transactions arm, which grew 7.4% to $6.8 billion, the fastest of EY’s four service lines.

The deals point the same way. In May 2026 Bain invested in the OpenAI Deployment Company, a venture OpenAI launched with $4 billion to deploy AI inside large companies. McKinsey and Capgemini invested too, and the venture’s first purchase was Tomoro, a 150-person applied-AI consultancy. Bain also bought JJC FinTech, a London firm for client-lifecycle and anti-money-laundering work, in February 2026. McKinsey has been selling: its in-house investment arm, MIO Partners, with about $26 billion under management, is moving to Neuberger Berman, and it sold its PriceMetrix wealth-benchmarking unit to Crisil in September 2025. BCG has announced no acquisitions since 2022. Accenture, for comparison, paid $4.175 billion in June 2026 for three cybersecurity firms.

The pyramid is getting thinner at the bottom

The economics of a strategy firm depend on the ratio of juniors to seniors. A partner sells the work, a manager runs it, and a large group of analysts and associates does the analysis at a billing rate well above what they cost.

McKinsey CEO Bob Sternfels described the direction on Harvard Business Review’s IdeaCast in January 2026:

I often get asked, “How big is McKinsey? How many people do you employ?” I now update this almost every month, but my latest answer to you would be 60,000, but it’s 40,000 humans and 20,000 agents.

He went on to say that “Little over a year and a half ago, that was 3,000 agents and I originally thought it was going to take us to 2030 to get to one agent per human. I think we’re going to be there in 18 months and we’ll have every employee enabled by at least one or more agents.”

The pay data points the same direction. Poets&Quants reported in January 2026, citing Management Consulted’s salary report, that “For a third consecutive year, starting consulting salaries at both the undergraduate and MBA entry levels have remained largely unchanged.” MBA base salaries sit at $192,000 at McKinsey and Bain and $190,000 at BCG. Undergraduate hires start around $112,000 in base with total packages in the $137,000 to $140,000 range. Entry pay has now been flat for three consecutive years, which is not what a business does when it is competing hard for the next analyst class.

The sharpest objection to all of this came from inside McKinsey. Debasish Patnaik, the senior partner who leads QuantumBlack, the firm’s AI arm, pointed out that banks are cutting junior analyst classes by as much as two-thirds while sourcing roughly 62% of their AI talent from those same cohorts. Fortune carried his comment in June 2026:

Banking is an apprenticeship business. Today’s junior analysts become tomorrow’s managing directors. Senior judgment cannot be manufactured laterally.

He was describing banks, but consulting runs on exactly the same apprenticeship, and nobody has explained where the 2035 partners come from if the 2026 analyst class is half the size.

[PAUL: your take here. You did the analyst job at McKinsey and the knowledge-expert job at BCG. Which parts of that work do you think a model genuinely absorbs, and which parts were only ever learnable by doing them badly in front of a manager for two years?]

I’ve written separately about what AI does well in knowledge work and why McKinsey’s knowledge investment put it in a decent position for this.

Entry pay has been flat for three years, senior pay has not

Entry-level pay has stopped moving, and senior pay hasn’t.

MBA hires at the Big Three start at $190,000 to $192,000 in base and undergraduate hires at around $112,000, and neither number has meaningfully changed since 2023.

Above that level things get much larger. I covered the full picture in a separate breakdown of strategy consulting compensation built on the Charles Aris study of 795 current consultants, including what people earn at each level, what exit offers look like, and how much of partner pay is base salary versus profit sharing. If you’re trying to understand titles and promotion timing rather than pay, the analyst-to-partner role guide maps how the firms name each level.

Joining still pays, but the long-term career case is weaker than it was

Nothing has broken on pay. Firms are still handing six figures to twenty-two-year-olds and seven figures to partners, and Clayton Christensen’s prediction that the industry would be disrupted from below has not aged well.

Structurally, though, three things have changed since I’d have given this advice five years ago. Entry-level classes are smaller, so getting in is harder. The work a first-year does is changing, and nobody can tell you what it will be in three years. And McKinsey, at least, is recruiting a different profile. Fortune reported in January 2026, citing the interview-prep company CaseBasix, that “some candidates would be asked to work with the company’s AI tool as part of a final round AI interview.” The tool is Lilli, McKinsey’s internal AI system. Sternfels told HBR’s IdeaCast that the firm is “going back to liberal arts degrees” to get “a little bit more creativity.”

If you’re deciding, my take is that consulting is still one of the best two-to-four-year training programs available for structured problem solving, client work, and communication, and that it’s a worse bet than it used to be as a decade-long career plan. Those are two separate questions. I’ve written about how to build the skills with or without joining a firm, and about what the job actually looks like day to day before anyone romanticizes it.

I think the thing that’s great about working at these consulting firms is that their work is constantly adapting to the frontier of where the economy is, and right now that’s AI. While these firms may not set you up to crush it in a fast-paced tech career or founding a startup, they will give you a unique lens into how organizations are adapting to this new technology. And I’d argue that this is the real work of this AI-driven transformation that we’re in, and one that’s probably going to take many more years than AI accelerationists are predicting.

It’ll be interesting to follow the upcoming recruiting years and also continue to follow hiring trends around entry-level employees. I study work trends, and one thing I’ve noticed is that everyone predicting things about AI has been spot on about the technology, but absolutely wrong in terms of employment numbers. I think at least for the next couple of years consulting is a very strong career to work in. And it’s always been my advice that a two year stretch at these companies can be game changing.