CPA Salary in Virginia 2026,
$93,290 Median | BLS Data by City

The published Virginia figure is $93,290 a year, or $44.85 an hour, per BLS OEWS May 2025, with a band from $60,000 at the 10th percentile to $156,730 at the 90th and quartiles at $74,250 and $123,510. That is 11.5% above the national median of $83,680. The row is SOC 13-2011, Accountants and Auditors — the whole occupation, not CPAs specifically.

Because Northern Virginia is missing from the table. The Washington metropolitan area is published by BLS as a multi-state metro covering parts of Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia, so accounting employment in Arlington, Alexandria, Fairfax and Loudoun contributes to Virginia's statewide figure but appears in no Virginia metro row. With Richmond topping the published table at $84,220 against a state median of $93,290, the arithmetic makes the omission unmistakable.

The Virginia Board of Accountancy, which is an independent board rather than part of the Department of Professional and Occupational Regulation that handles most Virginia occupational licensing. It licenses CPAs on the basis of education requirements, the Uniform CPA Examination and qualifying experience, with continuing professional education for renewal. The licence governs use of the CPA title and attest work; it is not required to work as an accountant.

In Northern Virginia, on the arithmetic — though this page cannot show it directly. Among published metros Richmond leads at $84,220, then Charlottesville $81,530, Virginia Beach-Chesapeake-Norfolk $79,450, Lynchburg $78,990 and Winchester $77,660. The state median of $93,290 sitting above all of them is the clearest possible evidence that the unpublished Northern Virginia market pays substantially more, driven by federal government and federal contracting work.

In Virginia it is close to a defining one. Federal contract cost accounting and compliance — the rules governing what contractors may charge the government and how they must account for it — is a genuine technical specialism with a large employer base concentrated in Northern Virginia and almost nowhere else at that scale. It is stable, statutorily driven rather than cyclical, and it is a substantial part of what sits at the $123,510 seventy-fifth percentile.

Large enough to make this the clearest case on the site. Virginia's state median is $93,290 and its highest published metro is Richmond at $84,220 — a gap of nearly eleven percent in the wrong direction. A state median can only exceed all its published metros if substantial employment lies outside them, and Virginia's is: the Washington metropolitan area is published as a multi-state metro, so Northern Virginia's accountants are counted in Virginia's state total and in the Washington metro, but not in any Virginia metro row this site can display. Since Northern Virginia is both the state's largest professional labour market and its best paid, the effect is to make every published Virginia metro table systematically incomplete.

The federal government and everything attached to it. A location quotient of 1.23 across 47,100 accountants reflects federal agency accounting and financial management, the audit of federal programmes, and — most distinctively — the cost accounting and compliance function inside the federal contracting industry. Government contractors operate under detailed cost accounting standards governing what may be charged and how it must be documented, and complying with them requires accountants in numbers no ordinary commercial sector needs. That work is concentrated in Northern Virginia, it is stable because it is driven by statute rather than by the business cycle, and it is largely invisible in this page's metro table.

Read the state figure, not the metro table, if Northern Virginia is in your plans — and seek employer-specific information, because the state median averages the federal contracting market with Lynchburg. If you are working in Richmond, Hampton Roads or the Shenandoah Valley, read the metro figure and treat the state median as inflated relative to your market. Either way the specialism that pays in Virginia is federal: contract cost accounting, government financial management, and the audit and compliance work around them. The CPA licence from the independent Virginia Board of Accountancy opens the public practice half of that; the contract accounting knowledge opens the rest.