Sources for statistics on accountants, including membership numbers for accountancy bodies in the UK and globally.
Members of UK accountancy bodies
Key Facts and Trends in the Accountancy Profession
Latest edition of the Financial Reporting Council’s annual survey of the profession, published in August 2023. Includes the following statistics for the six UK Chartered Accountancy bodies and the Association of International Accountants:
- Number of members in the UK and the Republic of Ireland
- Number of members worldwide
- Sectoral employment of members worldwide
- Female members worldwide
- Age of members worldwide
Some membership statistics for the Association of Accounting Technicians are also provided.
An archive of previous editions are available through the FRC website.
Historical Statistics - ICAEW Members
Headline membership statistics have often been included in the ICAEW annual report.
The ICAEW published annual and quarterly updates on member statistics between 1986 and 2008. The ICAEW Library & Information Service holds copies of the update - see Library holdings: Member statistics for further details.
Further statistics were published in the annual editions of the Official ICAEW Directory of Firms and the Official ICAEW List of Members until these publications ceased in 2012, including:
- Members by work sector (Directory of firms, List of members)
- Members by age and gender (Directory of firms, List of members)
- Members by UK regions (List of members)
- Members by worldwide regions (List of members)
For further details of the ICAEW Library & Information Service holdings of these volumes - see Library holdings: ICAEW directory of firms and Library holdings: ICAEW list of members
Members of the world's professional accountancy bodies
A world survey of the accountancy profession was published in the January 2018 edition (Issue 6170) of The Accountant and provides membership numbers for 123 professional accountancy organisations in 146 countries. A Europe edition of the survey, containing membership numbers for the European accountancy bodies included in the survey, is available on the Accountancy Europe site. Please see the full edition of The Accountant for figures for other regions.
Previous surveys were published in the March 2014 edition (Issue 6124) and the December 2009 (Issue 6073) edition of The Accountant and also provide membership numbers for professional accountancy bodies in a number of countries.
The ICAEW Library & Information Service holds a complete run of 'The Accountant' up to January 2022. To find out more about the availability of issues please see Library holdings: The Accountant.
For information on obtaining copies of individual issues of The Accountant please contact the publishers
Contact the library
Expert help for your enquiries and research.
Can't find what you're looking for?
The ICAEW Library can give you the right information from trustworthy, professional sources that aren't freely available online. Contact us for expert help with your enquiries and research.
Every effort has been made to ensure that the information given in this Research Guide is correct. However, the content of websites changes frequently and users should satisfy themselves that the information they contain is suitable for the purposes for which they wish to use it. We would be grateful to receive notification of any broken links at library@icaew.com.
ICAEW accepts no responsibility for the content on any site to which a hypertext link from this site exists. The links are provided ‘as is’ with no warranty, express or implied, for the information provided within them. Please see the full copyright and disclaimer notice.