Accenture has over 700,000 employees worldwide, so while this salary review is fairly comprehensive, it only pertains to US employees, and there are probably many practices left out.
You can find the US Accenture Managing Director’s compensation here, which includes a thorough explanation of each compensation category.
The data presented below is from a 2019 voluntary online survey (fishbowl) of Accenture employees after their end of year raises and promotions and confirmed against online salary aggregators (LinkedIn, Indeed, Glass Door, etc.).
They all depend on the accuracy of responses, but they correlate pretty well with each other.
Before we review the numbers, let’s take a look at the job levels.
Accenture job levels
Accenture has multiple layers of job levels within its consulting practice. As you can see below, it starts at level 1 – Executive leadership and goes down to level 13 – New Associate or Assistant. Read about the levels of Managing Directors here.
Career level designations:
- Executive Leadership
- Global Leadership (MD)
- Senior Leadership (MD)
- Leadership (MD)
- Associate Director or Principal Director
- Senior Manager or Senior Principal
- Manager or Principal
- Associate Manager or Associate Principal
- Consultant, Team Lead, or Specialist
- Senior Analyst
- Analyst
- Associate
- New Associate or Assistant
Accenture Base Salaries
The Accenture salaries listed below only include base salaries, which excludes the other Accenture compensation categories of cash and equity bonuses and various other grants.
Managing Director Salaries
As expected, the base salaries for Accenture Managing Directors are the highest.
The Fishbowl Survey puts the average salary for Managing Directors at $272k, with the LinkedIn survey coming in at $270k.
However, MD salary ranges can be very high, especially when working from L4 MD down to L1. The LinkedIn survey ranges from $225k to $386k.
These results are pretty typical for L4 – L3, but I suspect the salaries for L2 and L1 are much higher.
Principal Director and Senior Manager Salaries
The next two levels, L5 (Associate/Principal Director) and L6 (Senior Manager), are within 10% of each other, with L5 averaging $210k and L6 average $190k.
Typically, the L5 position is for employees who aren’t on the “Managing Director” path and are happy staying in L5. Senior Managers can plateau for a while but usually need to move to L5, L4, or out of the company.
Glassdoor shows the average Senior Manager salary at $184k, inline with the fishbowl surveys.
However, when you break it down to the organizational unit, you’ll notice a large discrepancy in Senior Manager salaries.
The highest average of $228k belong to the Strategy organization, as expected, and quickly goes down to the $ 150k’s for internal organizations.
Accenture Manager Salaries
Accenture Managers (L7) average $148k for base salary in the fishbowl survey, while the Payscale average is $132k.
Just as with other levels, there’s a large variance between organizations and cities regarding managers.
As expected, the high cost of living cities have the highest salaries (San Francisco, NYC, Boston).
Atlanta snuck in at the top, but the survey data shows half of the responses are from the Strategy group, pushing up the averages. When strategy is taken out, Atlanta L7 average goes down to $145k.
Sacramento only had one survey response, so don’t refuse to move there just because they have the lowest average!
Accenture Consultant Salaries
Accenture L9 or Consultants had the highest number of responses, making sense because there are so many, and they’re hungry for more money!
The fishbowl survey put their average salary at $110k, while Comparably.com shows the average at $119k.
Typically, consultant salaries range between $100k – $124k depending on the city, San Francisco and NYC at the top end of the range.
Additionally, I wanted to look at the average salary by gender, which shows a nearly equal match between Male and Female, with a big jump in those choosing Other.
Accenture Analyst Salaries
Accenture analysts (L11) usually are college hires or those with just a couple of years of experience. The fishbowl survey shows their starting average salary at $77k, which is much better than my $42k when I started in 2004!
Payscale shows the average Analyst salary at $79k.
As expected, there’s variance across cities and the organizational unit, but let’s take a look at another interesting survey question: College Grad or Experienced Hire.
The survey lists “Homegrown,” but unless someone is born into Accenture, it’s safe to assume these are recent college grads.
The average for “Experienced Hire” is $81k, while the average for “Homegrown” is $77k.
While the experienced hires are brought in at a slightly higher rate, it shows Accenture doesn’t typically regard experience from other companies as overly valuable.
As an Accenture employee, you know they like to bring them fresh and train them in Accenture ways.
Although the results are based on volunteer surveys, the correlation between the various sources helps build confidence in the numbers.
The fishbowl survey info is super valuable, so a big thanks to the anonymous person who runs that survey! Here’s the breakdown of survey answers by level.
