Ten years ago, private equity barely touched UK accountancy. Today it owns a meaningful slice of the profession's top end — and the wave is still building. Here's the map.
The attraction is structural, not fashionable. Compliance revenue recurs by law: accounts must be filed and tax must be returned in good years and bad. Client relationships are sticky and switching is rare. The sector is deeply fragmented, which is exactly the setup buy-and-build strategies exist for. And a generational succession wave means a steady supply of willing sellers.
The playbook is consistent. Buy a substantial platform firm, invest in shared infrastructure — technology, back office, compliance — then bolt on smaller firms whose founders want an exit. Each acquisition gets cheaper to integrate than the last, and the combined group commands a higher multiple than any firm did alone. It's the arithmetic driving the whole market. (We've explained it properly in Buy-and-Build Economics.)
Institutional consolidators need scale to move their numbers. A £2m-fee firm in the East Midlands is simply too small to matter to a platform trying to deploy hundreds of millions — the diligence costs the same, the impact rounds to zero.
Which leaves the long tail: thousands of strong independent firms between £500k and £5m of recurring fees, with ageing founders, real profits and no institutional buyer paying attention. That segment is where the Practice Group operates — the same consolidation economics, applied where the competition isn't.
Consolidation is neither a threat nor a rescue — it's a market forming around you. It means you now have options your predecessors didn't, and the firms that engage with the question early, while they're strong, get materially better outcomes than the ones who wait. Our comparison of succession routes is the place to start.
Sources: industry surveys and reported transactions, 2024–2026 (ICAEW; Farrer & Co; reported deal coverage).
