US Consulting Added Firms Twice as Fast as It Added Jobs

The American consulting industry added 135,737 businesses between 2019 and 2024. It added 349,538 jobs. Those two numbers sound like the same story, and they are not.

Establishments in the management, scientific and technical consulting sector grew 50.0 percent over those five years. Employment in the same sector grew 23.5 percent. The industry added firms at roughly twice the rate it added jobs, and the average American consulting firm is now materially smaller than it was before the pandemic.

The fragmentation, in one number

Average establishment size across the sector fell from 5.48 employees in the first quarter of 2019 to 4.51 in the first quarter of 2024, a decline of 17.7 percent.

The figures come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, which counts jobs covered by unemployment insurance rather than sampling them, and so captures small employers that survey-based series tend to miss. The industry code is NAICS 5416, which the Census Bureau defines as management, scientific and technical consulting services and which includes environmental, scientific and IT advisory work alongside management consulting. All figures are private-ownership, first-quarter counts.

Q1	Establishments	Employment	Employees per establishment	Avg weekly wage
2019	271,216	1,485,600	5.48	$1,952
2021	309,661	1,551,987	5.01	$2,079
2023	386,153	1,825,410	4.73	$2,364
2024	406,953	1,835,138	4.51	$2,442

Source: BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, NAICS 5416, private ownership, Q1 of each year. Indexed to Q1 2019 = 100. Method: each series divided by its own Q1 2019 value.

The divergence is not a pandemic artifact that reversed. The two lines separate in 2021 and keep separating through 2024. Between 2023 and 2024 in particular, employment was close to flat, rising 0.5 percent, while establishments grew another 5.4 percent. In the most recent year of data, the sector added firms and barely added jobs at all.

Growth is concentrated, not broad

The national 23.5 percent figure also conceals a wide spread between states. Among the 26 states with at least 15,000 consulting jobs in 2019, growth ranged from 53.7 percent to 3.4 percent, and only 13 of those 26 beat the national rate.

Rank	State	2019 jobs	2024 jobs	Growth
1	Colorado	32,112	49,362	+53.7%
2	Indiana	19,706	30,102	+52.8%
3	Washington	30,076	41,726	+38.7%
4	Utah	15,114	20,803	+37.6%
5	Florida	116,316	159,451	+37.1%
22	Ohio	34,488	38,518	+11.7%
23	California	204,621	226,494	+10.7%
24	Arizona	24,851	27,418	+10.3%
25	Maryland	43,744	47,791	+9.3%
26	Minnesota	30,224	31,259	+3.4%

California is the detail worth pausing on. It employs more consultants than any other state, 226,494 of them, and it grew at less than half the national rate. The national total rose because mid-sized states expanded quickly, not because the established consulting centres did.

We tested whether cheaper states simply grew faster, and the answer is a qualified no. The correlation between a state's 2019 average weekly wage and its subsequent growth is negative but moderate, and splitting states at the median wage produces average growth of 25.9 percent for the cheaper half against 23.2 percent for the more expensive half. That 2.7 point gap is too small to carry an explanation. Cost is not what separated Colorado from Minnesota.

Why smaller firms change the tooling question

A sector reorganising into smaller units has a predictable operational consequence. The work that large firms distribute across a staffing pyramid gets recombined into single people.

In a firm of five, nobody's job is building the deck. The person who sold the engagement runs the analysis, writes the recommendation, formats the slides and proofreads them. Deliverable production stops being a delegated task and becomes an overhead on the only billable person in the room.

That is the demand that has pulled consulting presentation maker tools into a real product category rather than a feature of general presentation software. The buyer is not a design department. It is a principal deciding whether to spend Thursday evening formatting.

An ex-McKinsey consultant who tested five AI presentation tools on real client decks landed where most practitioner reviews land: layout and first-draft structure are largely solved, and deciding what belongs on the slide is not.

The products competing here include Gamma, Prezi AI, SlidesAI, Alai, NextDocs, 2Slides, STORYD and Matik. For a small firm the differentiators are unglamorous and worth checking before committing: whether the tool exports genuinely editable PowerPoint, whether charts stay bound to a source spreadsheet when the model gets revised, whether it can match a client's existing template, and what its terms say about training on uploaded material.

What the data does not say

Establishment counts include registered businesses, which capture consultants who incorporated alongside other employment. Some portion of the 50 percent growth in firms is therefore side practices and single-member entities rather than operating businesses with staff. The employment series is not affected by this, since it counts payroll jobs.

Nor does five years of quarterly data distinguish a structural reorganisation from an extended cyclical one. Independent consulting expands when corporate hiring tightens, and part of what this data shows may be that mechanism rather than a permanent change in how advisory work is organised. The 2025 and 2026 figures will separate those readings.

What holds up regardless is the arithmetic. The industry has substantially more firms than it did in 2019, only moderately more people, and a smaller average firm.

Common questions

Is the consulting industry shrinking? No. Both employment and establishments grew. Employment grew 23.5 percent over five years, which is healthy; establishments simply grew twice as fast.

Does a smaller average firm mean the big firms shrank? Not necessarily. The average falls when many small firms are added even if large firms are unchanged. This data cannot separate those.

Which states added the most consulting jobs? In percentage terms Colorado and Indiana, both above 52 percent. In absolute terms Florida added the most among large states, 43,135 jobs.

Why does NAICS 5416 include scientific and IT consulting? It is a federal classification covering advisory services broadly. Management consulting is a subset, and BLS does not publish a strategy-consulting-only series at this level of geography.

Cover image generated with AI for illustrative purposes.