Major accountancy firm to cut 600 UK jobs | UK | News

A major company has announced that it will lay off 600 people across the UK. According to sources, KPMG explained the situation to employees via video call on Friday, March 27.

The audit team will lose 440 executive assistant roles (mainly comprising qualified accountants at associate executive level), representing approximately 6% of the audit team’s 7,100-strong team. The advisory team will lose 120 positions in the enterprise risk department, with roles advising companies on governance, risk and compliance being most threatened. This represents a loss of approximately 2% for the team. Leadership reportedly pushed for layoffs due to concerns about meeting budget targets. An unnamed staff member told GB News that many consultants do not have project roles, saying: “We’ve had a large staff for about six months and there’s not much in the pipeline yet. We’ve also lost some projects that were generating fairly regular income.”

KPMG blamed low staff turnover and current market conditions for the redundancies: “Current market conditions mean that our attrition rates are very low across certain parts of our audit population, so we are proposing to right-size these areas.”

The company continued: “This is not a decision we take lightly and we will support our employees throughout this consultation.”

Employees at risk of redundancy have been informed and a consultation process will take place until May, when final decisions will be made.

This comes as professional services firms face challenges as demand declines from pandemic-era highs. PwC laid off 175 associate auditors last year, and McKinsey discussed laying off 10% of staff in non-client-facing departments.

Despite the challenges, KPMG’s partners earned more than their industry peers; Earned an average of £880,000 per year in 2025; This represents an 11% increase over 2024.

KPMG also increased its bonus pool for 18,000 employees in the UK and Switzerland by 18% and increased pre-tax profits by 14% to £576 million.