Beginning your career at a public accounting firm is a huge accomplishment. However, the real challenge is avoiding the accounting burnout that is well-known for professionals working long-term at a public firm.
Learn why this accounting burnout occurs, how to avoid it, and how to grow a public accounting career that excites you and satisfies your goals.
Summary
To prevent and overcome accounting burnout caused by factors like heavy workloads and long hours, public accountants should prioritize personal time, set professional boundaries, leverage automation, and take intentional control of their careers through upskilling and strategic role adjustments.
Why Does Accounting Burnout Happen?
Public accounting can be stressful and demanding for several reasons.
- Busy Seasons: Sometimes, busy season can sprawl over more than just a single season, making the intense hours and tight deadlines seem more like the norm than temporary.
- Heavy Workloads: Busy season or not, there’s no shortage of work in public accounting. And when the extensive work comes up against strict deadlines, the stress can be intense.
- Long Hours: To complete all the work before deadline, 50+ hour weeks are not uncommon for public accountants, especially at the staff level.
- Demanding Managers: If your leadership team is overbearing rather than supportive, it can make your public accounting work feel that much more difficult to manage.
- Learning Curve: Inherently, there is lot to learn in the world of public accounting. No matter how much you already know, you will likely face a steep learning curve when taking on a new role.
Top 5 Tips to Avoid Accounting Burnout
Overcoming burnout isn’t easy, especially when you feel pressure to perform at your best and excel in your public accounting career. But these tips can help you overcome public accounting burnout—or better yet, avoid it before it happens.
1. Prioritize Time for Yourself
Especially when you’re trying to prove yourself within a role, it can be tempting to avoid using your paid time off, running to a doctor’s appointment during the workday, or doing anything that you think might make it seem like you’re not a hard worker.
But this couldn’t be farther from the truth. Taking your allotted PTO is not lazy and is vital to your ability to thrive without accounting burnout. Take vacation days when you need them, enjoy that time off, and come back refreshed and ready to do your job. If you are on a team that frowns upon using PTO, you’re on the wrong team and it’s time to ask to be moved to another one.
2. Disconnect on Your Days Off
When you take time off, don’t work! This may sound like a given, but it’s easy to keep checking your messages, finishing up a quick project, or just thinking about what’s waiting when you get back to the office. Instead, be intentional about disconnecting from your work, email, and screens. When you come back, you will be more refreshed and productive.
Part of this means proactively planning for your PTO:
- Block out time on your calendar.
- Let your colleagues know that you’ll be out of office and not connected to your computer.
- Set and complete work goals before you start PTO.
- Delegate responsibilities for the time when you’re out of office.
3. Take Control of Your Career
If you find yourself in a role that’s not interesting, not fulfilling, or for any reason not in line with your career goals, change it!
Set your career goals—ideal salary, industry, specialization, etc.—and make plans to get there. Earn accounting certifications and leverage continuing professional education (CPE) to upskill in the areas you want to grow your career. Just because you feel accounting burnout in one role, doesn’t mean that you can’t find a fulfilling career within another team, organization, or area of accounting.
4. Set Professional Boundaries
Learning to say “no” is challenging, but it’s an important skill to develop over the course of your career.
Setting professional boundaries does not make you look bad or lazy, while saying “yes” to everything can cause accounting burnout and burden you with an unsustainable workload.
Remember: it’s better to do a smaller amount of great work than a large amount of mediocre work. If you’re being asked to pick up more work, you need to consider if it is something that you can realistically balance. If you can’t, and the project goes wrong, you will look much worse than if you had just said no to the task in the first place.
When setting a boundary with your manager, respectfully communicate everything that is on your plate and explain why you can’t fit another client or project into your schedule. Your team will appreciate the honesty because they would rather staff someone who has availability than someone who will quit because of burnout.
5. Use Automation When It Makes Sense
You can save lots of time and add breathability to your workload by responsibly leveraging technology in accounting.
Many accounting software programs include automation tools that run basic calculations, organize data, and perform other time-consuming tasks. And with AI accounting tools, as long as they're used responsibly and approved by your organization, this efficiency can be boosted even more, giving you back the space to work on other, higher-level tasks.
Take Control of Your Accounting Career
Public accounting can be a wonderful, fulfilling, and very fruitful career path. But if you face accounting burnout when you’re still building your career, it’s time to set boundaries and take intentional steps to regain your joy and motivation in the profession.
Start by learning more about where you want to take your career, and set goals to get there. Learn more about job satisfaction for accounting professionals in Becker's free 2026 Accounting Salary Guide.
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