McKinsey, Bain – and BCG, collectively known as MBB – are the gold standard of management consulting jobs. Deloitte, EY, PwC, and KPMG – collectively known as the Big Four – are the silver standard. What do they have in common? They’re both subjecting their junior recruits to brutal pay cuts. Kind of.
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It’s more complicated than that. Compensation for entry-level consultants has risen in recent years, just not by very much – and generally far below the US inflation rate since 2020.
Figures in the tables below are taken from careers coaching firm Management Consulted. The final row of each table, detailing the “real decline” after adjusting for inflation, was calculated by the change in pay from 2020 to 2026 accounting for the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for inflation in the USA.
Undergraduates and masters’ degree students who went into consulting this year found themselves with a rough draw. In real terms, their compensation was overwhelmingly down on their colleagues who joined in 2020. The situation was worst at PwC, where graduate compensation had been fixed at $102k since the pandemic. The equivalent pay this year with an adjustment for inflation would be around $127k, a figure 24% higher than today’s.
Only McKinsey paid its undergraduate and masters graduate hires better than they did in 2020, adjusted for inflation – all the MBB firms were more generous than their Big Four peers, in fact.
Unfortunately, the situation was not much better for graduates of MBA and PhD programs who went into consulting. Compensation was again lower across the board, with only EY paying a higher rate than it did in 2020 adjusted for inflation. The worst decline was at KPMG, where real pay was down by 13%.
What’s driving the pressure on consultant pay? Among other things, Artificial Intelligence (AI). Accenture, for example, commenced a $865m restructuring project in September last year specifically targeting employees that could not be “retrained for the age of artificial intelligence”, in the words of the Financial Times.
The biggest AI evangelists, however, are at McKinsey & Co. The firm confirmed to Business Insider last week that it employed around 25,000 AI agents to work alongside its 40,000 flesh-and-blood human beings. 18 months ago, it employed only a few thousand. In another 18 months from now, it planned to have one AI agent per employee.
Additionally, the Financial Times noted last week that McKinsey was restructuring its recruitment tests by asking junior aspirants to use an AI assistant called Lilli in its tests for business school graduates. The use of Lilli appears to be mandatory.
There are other factors at play beyond AI. In 2025, government spending on consultants came under fire both in Canada and the USA, a market worth more than US$75bn annually.
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