CPA Salary in Illinois 2026,
$80,230 Median | BLS Data by City

The published Illinois median for accountants and auditors is $80,230 a year, $38.57 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, with the middle half between $66,290 and $102,270 and a full range of $54,510 to $131,990. BLS does not publish a CPA-only wage row, so read the licensed tier as sitting in the upper part of that distribution rather than at its centre.

Springfield at $86,440, ahead of Chicago-Naperville-Elgin at $82,360, then Peoria at $79,540, Decatur at $76,720 and Bloomington at $76,510. Springfield's lead comes from state government finance and audit posts, which pay on public schedules in a metro where housing costs a fraction of the Chicago collar counties.

Two bodies are involved. The Illinois Board of Examiners evaluates your education, approves you to sit the Uniform CPA Examination and issues the certificate once you pass. The Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation then issues the licence to practise once the experience requirement is met. Holding the certificate without the IDFPR licence does not permit you to practise public accounting in Illinois.

Only mildly — 4.95% applies from the $54,510 tenth percentile to the $131,990 ninetieth alike, and no Illinois city adds a wage tax. What matters far more professionally is Illinois's pass-through entity tax election, which is a routine part of advising closely held Illinois clients and a technical area that reliably moves a practitioner up the range.

Yes, and the state figure is the reason it is hard to see. The $80,230 median blends licensed CPAs with a large unlicensed accounting workforce that Illinois's deep Chicago market supports in volume. The licence is what makes the $102,270 seventy-fifth percentile and the $131,990 ninetieth reachable, and with the national CPA candidate pipeline shrinking, licensed practitioners in Chicago are in a stronger position than the headline suggests.

Volume at the bottom. Chicago supports one of the largest accounting workforces in the country, and much of it is staff and support accounting rather than licensed practice — a $54,510 tenth percentile in a market this size pulls the median down. States with smaller, more licensed-heavy accounting populations post higher medians without paying their senior people any better; Texas at $80,920 and Wisconsin at $79,400 sit right alongside Illinois.

It is not one. SOC 13-2011 is 'Accountants and Auditors' and BLS makes no licensure distinction inside it, so every figure on this page describes licensed and unlicensed practitioners together. Illinois's two-step credential makes the distinction sharper here than in most states, and any inference about CPA-specific pay has to come from where in the distribution licensed work sits, not from the median itself.

As uncaptured hours. Illinois public accounting runs a compressed January-to-April cycle in which sixty-hour weeks are standard, and OEWS records annual wages without reference to hours worked. A Chicago audit senior at the Illinois median of $80,230 and a corporate accountant at the same figure are not on the same effective hourly rate. Many Illinois firms now pay busy-season overtime or bonuses, which OEWS also does not capture as a separate item.