CPA Salary in Texas 2026,
$80,920 Median | BLS Data by City

Texas accountants and auditors earn a median $80,920 a year, $38.91 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, with the middle half between $65,560 and $103,760 and a full range of $53,380 to $132,040. Licensed CPAs sit toward the upper part of that band; the figure covers the whole occupation, licensed and not.

Midland at $100,890, and it is not close — Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands follows at $85,090, then Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos at $83,120, Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington at $82,620 and Odessa at $80,260. Oil and gas revenue accounting, joint-interest billing and severance tax work in the Permian Basin command a premium that the big metros do not match.

The Texas State Board of Public Accountancy licenses CPAs and sets the education, examination, experience and ethics requirements. Texas historically required 150 semester hours including specified accounting and business coursework plus qualifying experience under a licensed CPA; the state has since added an alternative pathway combining a bachelor's degree with a longer supervised experience period. Confirm the current rule with the Board directly before planning coursework, because Texas is one of the states actively revising it.

No. Texas has no personal income tax and no local income tax, so the whole of a Texas accountant's salary — $80,920 at the median — is subject only to federal tax. Texas does levy a franchise tax on business entities above a revenue threshold, which matters to CPAs running their own practice but not to salaried accountants.

Yes, and the metro data shows why. The unlicensed end of this occupation clusters near the $53,380 tenth percentile, while manager and controller roles that require the licence sit at the $103,760 seventy-fifth percentile and beyond. In Texas the licence also unlocks the energy-sector specialisations — reserve reporting, joint-interest billing, severance tax — that make Midland at $100,890 the highest-paying metro in the state for this occupation.

Because Permian Basin operators need a specialised skill set in a labour market with barely any local supply. Oil and gas accounting is its own discipline — revenue distribution across working and royalty interests, joint-interest billing between operators and partners, severance tax and local property tax on production, reserve-based reporting — and it is not taught in most accounting programmes. Midland's $100,890 metro median and Odessa's $80,260 show the premium is specific to the operator side rather than to the region generally.

SOC 13-2011 is Accountants and Auditors, which is a close but not exact match for CPA. It pools licensed CPAs with unlicensed staff accountants and internal auditors, so the $80,920 median understates what a licensed CPA in public practice earns and overstates the entry-level bookkeeping-adjacent end. Use the $103,760 seventy-fifth percentile as the more realistic marker for an experienced licensed CPA in Texas.

The licence first, industry second, busy season third. Public accounting in Texas pays overtime-heavy compensation through the January-to-April cycle that lifts effective annual earnings above the base figure, and the move from public practice into a corporate controller seat in Dallas-Fort Worth or Houston is the classic path from the median of $80,920 to the $103,760 seventy-fifth percentile. Industry specialisation — energy, healthcare systems, real estate — is what carries the last stretch to $132,040.