Accountant Salary in Texas: Pay by Experience, City & Take-Home

An accountant in Texas earns a median salary of $80,920 a year, which works out to about $38.91 an hour, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2025). Most accountants in the state land between $53,380 at the lower end and $132,040 for the top earners. Texas has no state income tax, so more of that gross pay stays in your pocket than it would in most states.

How Texas accountant pay compares to the national median

The national median salary for accountants is $83,680, per BLS OEWS 2025. Texas sits just under that at $80,920, a gap of $2,760, or roughly 3.3 percent below the U.S. figure. On paper that reads like a small discount, but the headline number tells only half the story.

Put the two medians side by side and the $2,760 difference is small enough that it should not, on its own, decide where you work. A 3.3 percent gap is well within the range that a single negotiation, a metro move within Texas, or one promotion can erase. The bigger forces are the no-tax advantage on the back end and the metro you choose on the front end, both of which can swing your real pay by more than the national gap.

Texas levies no state income tax. In states that do, an accountant earning the national median can lose anywhere from 4 to 9 percent of gross pay to the state alone. A Texas accountant at $80,920 keeps every dollar the federal government and FICA don’t claim. That changes the comparison from “slightly below average” to “competitive once the paycheck clears,” especially against high-tax states. The mean wage in Texas runs higher than the median at $90,370, which signals a cluster of senior and specialized accountants pulling the average up well past the midpoint.

Statewide, BLS counts 116,470 accountants employed in Texas, one of the largest accounting workforces in the country. That depth matters when you’re job hunting. More employers and more openings mean more bargaining power at the negotiating table and shorter gaps between roles.

Accountant salary in Texas by experience level

Experience is the single biggest driver of pay for accountants. A first-year staff accountant and a controller-track senior with a CPA and fifteen years behind them are doing different jobs at different price points. The percentile spread from BLS OEWS 2025 maps cleanly onto a career arc.

The jump from entry to median is steep. An accountant moving from the 10th percentile at $53,380 to the 50th at $80,920 adds $27,540, a 52 percent raise that usually arrives over the first five to eight years as you pick up a CPA license, take on tougher close cycles, and move from data entry into analysis and review. The climb from median to the 90th percentile is another $51,120, and that one is gated. Reaching the top decile almost always means a CPA, a specialty like tax or audit, and either a management title or a hard-to-staff industry like oil and gas or technology.

One thing worth flagging for early-career readers: the 25th percentile at $65,560 is a realistic two-to-three-year target, not a stretch. If you’re sitting well below it after three years with a degree, that’s a signal to either renegotiate or test the market rather than wait for a standard raise cycle.

It helps to see the spread in hourly terms too, because a lot of staff-level accounting roles still quote rates. The entry figure of $25.66 an hour and the senior figure of $63.48 frame the full range. The middle 50 percent of Texas accountants, from the 25th to the 75th percentile, earn between $65,560 and $103,760. That band of roughly $38,200 is where the typical career lives, and it’s wide enough that two accountants with the same job title can be separated by a $30,000 pay gap based on credentials, industry, and how aggressively they’ve negotiated. The lesson is that “accountant” is not one salary; it’s a ladder, and the rungs are far apart.

The gap between the median ($80,920) and the experienced 75th-percentile figure ($103,760) is $22,840. In practice that step is where the CPA license, three to five additional years, and a shift from preparing the numbers to reviewing other people’s work start to pay off. Many accountants stall just below it because they keep doing the same scope of work year over year. Breaking through usually means taking on the close, owning a reporting area, or stepping into a supervisory role, all of which signal to an employer that you’ve crossed from staff to senior.

Accountant salary by Texas metro

Where you work inside Texas moves your pay more than most people expect. The five largest metro areas by accounting employment show a spread of roughly $19,000 between the top and bottom, per BLS OEWS 2025.

Houston leads at $85,090, about $4,170 above the state median. The energy sector is the reason. Oil, gas, and midstream companies headquartered there pay a premium for accountants who understand joint-interest billing, revenue recognition for commodities, and complex partnership structures. Austin follows at $83,120, lifted by a tech scene that competes for finance talent against software engineering budgets.

Dallas-Fort Worth posts a median of $82,620 and, importantly, the largest accounting workforce in the state at 37,450 jobs. If raw volume of openings matters more to you than the top median, DFW is the deepest market in Texas. San Antonio sits at $78,650, just below the state figure, and El Paso trails the pack at $65,990, roughly $19,100 below Houston. El Paso’s lower median tracks its lower cost of living, so the gap on paper shrinks once rent and groceries enter the math.

The practical takeaway: if you can work remotely for a Houston or Austin employer while living somewhere cheaper, you capture the high metro median against a lower cost base. That arbitrage is the single most effective pay lever available to a Texas accountant who isn’t tied to a desk.

Look closer at the employment counts and the picture gets sharper. Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston together hold 65,850 of the state’s 116,470 accounting jobs, more than half the entire Texas workforce. That concentration means the two metros set the tone for pay across the state, and it’s why their medians ($82,620 and $85,090) bracket the statewide $80,920 so tightly. Austin, with 12,480 jobs, punches above its size on pay because its tech employers benchmark finance salaries against software-engineering budgets rather than traditional accounting scales.

San Antonio at $78,650 and El Paso at $65,990 anchor the lower end, and both numbers track local cost of living more than any shortage of demand. El Paso’s $65,990 median is roughly the same as the statewide 25th percentile, which tells you the local market skews toward staff and early-career roles rather than the controller and CPA-heavy mix you find in Houston. If you’re early in your career and cost of living is your priority, San Antonio and El Paso stretch a paycheck further. If you’re chasing the top of the ladder, Houston and Austin are where the senior-band jobs concentrate.

Take-home pay after taxes in Texas

Gross salary is the number on the offer letter. Take-home is the number that hits your bank account, and in Texas the two are closer together than almost anywhere else because the state takes nothing. The table below breaks down federal income tax, FICA (Social Security and Medicare), and state tax across the four career checkpoints, using 2026 tax-year estimates for a single filer taking the standard deduction.

At the median, an accountant grosses $80,920 and keeps $65,313, about $5,443 a month, for an effective tax rate of 19.3 percent. The state-tax column is zero at every level, which is the whole point of working in Texas. A senior accountant at $132,040 nets $101,002 and still hands over nothing to Austin.

Here’s the comparison an AI overview won’t run for you. Take that same Texas median earner, $80,920 gross, and drop them into California. After California’s state income tax, the same salary nets roughly $61,761 instead of the $65,313 a Texan keeps. That’s a gap of $3,552 a year, money a California accountant never sees, going to state coffers on an identical paycheck. Over a ten-year stretch at the median, that’s more than $35,000 in pure tax difference, before you even account for California’s higher housing costs.

The effective tax rate climbs as you move up the table, which is the federal system working as designed. An entry-level accountant at $53,380 loses about 15.8 percent to federal tax and FICA combined, netting $44,929. By the median, the effective rate is 19.3 percent. At the experienced 75th-percentile level of $103,760, it reaches 21.6 percent for a net of $81,381, and the senior 90th-percentile earner at $132,040 pays an effective 23.5 percent and keeps $101,002. None of that climb comes from the state, since every state-tax cell reads zero. The progression you see is entirely federal brackets and the FICA wage base, so the same gross salary would carry an identical federal bite in any state. What separates Texas is the absence of the second layer.

Which brings up the number that actually matters: net pay minus local housing. A $65,313 take-home in San Antonio, where housing is cheaper, buys a very different life than the same take-home in a pricey coastal market. Before you compare two offers, subtract your realistic annual rent or mortgage from the net figure in this table. The remainder is your real spending power, and it’s the only fair way to weigh a Houston job against an out-of-state one. Run your own numbers through the Texas paycheck calculator, and when tax season comes, software like TurboTax can handle the federal-only return that Texas residents file.

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How to earn more as an accountant in Texas

The pay percentiles above aren’t fixed slots. Here are the concrete moves that push a Texas accountant up the table, ranked by how reliably they pay off.

• Get the CPA license. In Texas this is administered by the Texas State Board of Public Accountancy. It’s the clearest single dividing line between the median and the experienced ($103,760) and senior ($132,040) tiers. Most firms tie automatic raises and promotion eligibility to passing the exam.
• Target the energy sector in Houston. Houston’s $85,090 median reflects oil-and-gas demand. Learning joint-interest billing and production accounting opens doors to the metro that pays the most in the state.
• Specialize in tax or audit. Generalists cluster around the median. Specialists in international tax, SALT, or technical audit command premiums and are the ones most likely to reach the 90th percentile.
• Move from private industry into public accounting, or the reverse, deliberately. Public accounting builds your resume fast in the early years; jumping to a corporate controller track later often opens up the higher senior bands.
• Add a credential that the CPA doesn’t cover. A CMA for management accounting, or a CFE for fraud examination, signals a specialty. Self-paced courses through platforms like Coursera are a low-cost way to build the financial-modeling and data skills that move you toward financial-analyst-level pay.
• Negotiate against the metro median, not the state one. If you work in Houston or Austin, anchor your ask to the $85,090 or $83,120 local figure, not the $80,920 statewide number. Employers know the difference; make sure you do too.
• Use the depth of the DFW market. With 37,450 accounting jobs, Dallas-Fort Worth gives you the most realistic shot at a competing offer, and a competing offer is the fastest legitimate raise there is.
• Aim past accounting entirely. The financial-analyst and advisory roles below both pay roughly $18,000 more at the median in Texas. If your goal is the six-figure mark, building toward one of those titles can be a faster route than grinding up the accounting percentiles, since you start from a higher base median.

Stack two or three of these and the math compounds. An accountant who earns the CPA, moves into a Houston energy role, and benchmarks against the $85,090 metro median rather than the statewide figure can realistically cover the distance from the median to the experienced band in a few years. Each move on its own is worth a few thousand dollars; together they are the difference between the 50th and the 75th percentile, which in Texas is a $22,840 swing in gross pay and roughly $16,000 more in your pocket after federal tax.

Job outlook for accountants in Texas

Texas employs 116,470 accountants, per BLS OEWS 2025, making it one of the deepest accounting labor markets in the United States. That scale is its own form of job security. The mix of corporate headquarters, energy companies, a fast-growing technology corridor in Austin, and steady population growth keeps demand for accounting and finance staff consistent across the business cycle.

The largest concentrations sit in Dallas-Fort Worth (37,450 jobs) and Houston (28,400), with Austin (12,480) growing quickly off a smaller base. For job seekers, the practical signal is that you have more than one viable metro to target, and the option to relocate within the state without leaving its tax advantages behind. To see live openings and pay ranges by employer, a board like ZipRecruiter lets you filter by metro and title.

Related and higher-paying roles in Texas

Accounting is a launchpad. Two adjacent finance roles pay meaningfully more in Texas, and the skills overlap enough that a CPA-track accountant can pivot into either with the right additional credentials.

A Financial Analyst in Texas earns a median of $99,150, which is $18,230 MORE than an accountant in Texas. A Personal Financial Advisor earns a median of $99,160, or $18,240 MORE than an accountant in the state, per BLS OEWS 2025. Both gaps are large enough to justify the cost of an additional certification or a deliberate move into analysis or advisory work.

Frequently asked questions

Sources: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) 2025; 2026 federal tax-year estimates for take-home figures. Last updated 2026. See our methodology.