The Only Client-Retention Number the AICPA Actually Publishes

The draft of this article opened with a statistic: the AICPA estimates it costs 11 times more to bring in a new client than to keep one. It had a second AICPA figure too — 44% of clients want additional services from their firm.

I went looking for both. No AICPA document contains either number. Not in the benchmark surveys, not in the practice-management material, not anywhere I could reach. They have the AICPA’s name on them and no AICPA behind them.

So let me give you the one client-retention figure the AICPA actually publishes, because it is more useful than the invented ones.

Ten percent

From the AICPA PCPS / CPA.com 2024 Client Advisory Services Benchmark Survey — 206 US firms, open for thirteen weeks from 1 May:

Median client turnover rate: 10%.

One client in ten, every year. At a 300-client firm that is thirty relationships walking out annually, most of them quietly, and the replacements have to be found, courted, onboarded and taught how your firm works before they bill a dollar.

The same survey has two other numbers worth sitting with. Hourly billing has collapsed from 53% of firms in 2018 to 10% in 2024. And 39% of firms still do not offer business-insights services at all.

Put those together and the shape of the profession is clear enough. The billable hour is finished. What replaces it is advisory work. And advisory work does not come from strangers.

The relationship is the precondition, not the reward

This is the finding I would put in front of any firm owner deciding where to spend the next marketing dollar.

Brickman, Hiebl, Quinn and Warren, “Accountants as SME advisors: relevance lost?”, Journal of Accounting & Organizational Change 20(6), 2024. Peer-reviewed, built on twenty interviews. Their conclusion, in their own words, is that external accountants can use their intimate client knowledge and long-standing and trustful relationships to engage in non-compliance work — the advisory, higher-margin end.

And the flip side, which is the part that matters: newer firms cannot, because “a long-standing and trustful relationship is absent.”

You cannot sell advisory work into a compliance relationship. The trust has to be there first, and trust is built out of contact, and contact is the thing a firm stops making the moment the return is filed.

What the profession says it is worried about instead

The AICPA CPA Firm Top Issues Survey — 629 respondents, fielded 20 April to 22 May 2026 — asks firms what their biggest problems are, broken out by firm size.

Client retention and client relationships do not appear in the top issues at any firm size. Not at sole practitioners, not at the largest firms.

I like this one because it is an absence, which means it cannot be spun. Technology is on the list. Staffing is on the list. Ten percent of the client base leaving every year is not on anybody’s list of top issues.

April is your December

Here is the practical piece, and it is the one thing in this article your competitors have definitely not thought about.

Every card company in America is built around one week in December. For a CPA that timing is close to the worst available. December is when you are heads-down on year-end planning, the client is distracted by their own holiday, and your card is the ninth one on their desk in the same week.

April 16 is the CPA’s December.

The client has just handed you the most stressful, most personal paperwork of their year. They have signed something with real consequences on the strength of your judgment. It is over. They are relieved. And the mailbox is completely empty, because nobody sends cards in April.

A thank-you card that arrives the week after the deadline does three things a December card cannot. It arrives alone. It refers to something specific that actually happened between you. And it lands at the exact moment the client feels the value of what you did — which, eight months later in December, they will have entirely forgotten.

The same applies to the extension deadline in October, and to the business clients whose year-end is not December.

Who else should get one

Your referral sources, and specifically the attorneys and financial advisors who send you work.

Cerulli’s U.S. Advisor Metrics 2025 found that 13.9% of financial advisors’ new clients come from centers of influence — which, from their side of the table, means CPAs like you. One new client in seven for them, coming through professional relationships. That traffic runs both directions and it is worth maintaining deliberately rather than hoping it renews itself.

Most firms have maybe fifteen names on that list. Fifteen cards a year is not a program, it is an afternoon.

What it costs

Federal survey data says mail sent to someone with a prior business relationship is read at 64%, against 36% for mail to strangers (USPS Household Mail Survey FY2025). Your client list and your referral list are both the 64% column.

For 250 cards the whole bill — cards, envelopes, imprinting, shipping, postage and about four and a half hours of somebody’s time — comes to roughly $830. I break that down line by line, including the part where I tell you not to buy our most expensive option, in the full cost article.

Against 10% annual turnover, on a client base where the profitable work depends on a relationship being already in place, that is not a marketing decision. It is maintenance on the asset.