Business Data & Benchmarks · United States
Management Consulting Firm Revenue Benchmark
Administrative and general management consulting.
Average Management Consulting Firm Revenue per Year 2022 Economic Census
Combined receipts of management consulting firms with paid employees, divided by the number of those establishments, as published in the 2022 Economic Census.
≈$2,060,000 /year
Average annual gross revenue per employer establishment
106,386
Employer establishments in the United States, 2022
as published $219.1 billion
Combined annual gross revenue of employer establishments, 2022
How this is calculated: about $219.1 billion in combined annual revenue divided by 106,386 employer establishments works out to $2,060,000. This is an average per establishment, and averages get pulled up by large, busy operations, so a typical business may sit below it.
Scope: Administrative Management and General Management Consulting Services (NAICS 541611). The Census category is administrative management and general management consulting, which excludes specialized consulting such as marketing or environmental. Employer establishments only: owner-operated businesses with no paid employees are not in these figures.
There is nothing to hold in inventory and almost nothing to depreciate, so the payroll share here is high for a professional practice. Revenue arrives in engagements rather than transactions, which makes the year a firm books very different from the year it invoices.
Specialized consulting such as marketing, environmental or IT sits in separate Census categories, so this is general management advice only.
Source US Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census, Summary Statistics (ECNBASIC): ESTAB, RCPTOT and PAYANN by NAICS · Vintage 2022 Economic Census · Calculation BusinessNES · Accessed July 2026
Where these figures come from
Data Source Notice
This product uses the Census Bureau Data API but is not endorsed or certified by the Census Bureau.
Figures above are from the 2022 Economic Census reference year, released by the Census Bureau in 2024 and 2025; markets have moved since.
Employer Establishments at Year Five Industry group
Management, Scientific, and Technical Consulting Services, NAICS 5416, the 2018 starting count compared with the count of five-year-old establishments in 2023.
47.5%the year-five count as a share of the starting count
Across the 2014 to 2018 cohorts, five-year results ranged from 41.7 to 47.5 percent. This benchmark covers Management, Scientific, and Technical Consulting Services, NAICS 5416, as a whole. It is not a survival rate for management consulting firms on their own: they are 106,386 of the 222,321 employer establishments in that group, about 48 percent of it. How this is measured
Payroll as a Share of Revenue Official data
Payroll covers consultants and support staff, the input a practice sells when it sells advisory work.
| Cost line | Share of receipts |
|---|---|
| Annual payroll share of receipts, United States | ≈41% |
Payroll share of receipts, Administrative Management and General Management Consulting Services, United States, 2022 Economic Census.
Approximately 41.0 percent of every revenue dollar in this category goes to annual payroll. As the census defines it, payroll includes wages, salaries, reported tips, commissions and bonuses; it excludes employer-paid benefits, employer payroll taxes, contractor payments and owner compensation. Treat it as one verified anchor, not a full labor cost breakdown. Payroll takes an unusually high share of receipts for any service business.
This is not total labor cost or profit margin.
How to read this number
Position Within Its Comparison Group Computed from official data
Where this category sits among 7 consulting practices in the same 2022 Economic Census release. Ranks and the group median are computed on exact values, before the rounding used above.
| Measure | This category | Group median | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue per employer establishment | $2,059,488 | $2,099,098 | 5 of 7 |
| Payroll share of receipts | 41.48% | 35.71% | 2 of 7 |
| Employer establishments | 106,386 | 10,628 | 1 of 7 |
Position among 7 consulting practices, 2022 Economic Census, employer establishments only.
This category ranks 5th of 7 by average annual revenue per employer establishment. It ranks 1st of 7 by employer establishment count and 2nd of 7 by payroll share. Payroll equals 41.48 percent of receipts here, 5.77 percentage points above the group median of 35.71 percent. A higher or lower position is not a measure of profit or of business quality: the census reports receipts and payroll only.
Compared With Similar Business Types Computed from official data
The 4 categories closest to this one by average revenue inside the same comparison group.
| Census category | Revenue per establishment | Payroll share | Establishments |
|---|---|---|---|
| Administrative Management and General Management Consulting Services (this page) | $2,059,488 | 41.48% | 106,386 |
| Other Scientific and Technical Consulting Services | $2,099,098 | 30.15% | 25,508 |
| Environmental Consulting Services | $2,153,064 | 35.71% | 9,932 |
| Marketing Consulting Services | $1,502,621 | 32.25% | 51,544 |
| Process, Physical Distribution, and Logistics Consulting Services | $2,701,882 | 26.12% | 9,637 |
Nearest categories by average revenue, 2022 Economic Census, employer establishments only.
This category reports lower revenue per employer establishment than Other Scientific and Technical Consulting Services, Environmental Consulting Services and Process, Physical Distribution, and Logistics Consulting Services, and higher revenue than Marketing Consulting Services. It contains more employer establishments than all four of them. Every figure in this table comes from the same 2022 Economic Census release and the same employer establishment population, so the columns are directly comparable.
Beyond the Benchmark BusinessNES analysis
What the census figures leave out about management consulting firms, and what to look at instead.
What the numbers do not show
Consulting receipts say nothing about who did the work. A practice built on a founder's reputation and one built on a delivery team report the same revenue while being worth completely different amounts to a buyer.
The figure also hides the shape of the engagement. Retainers, project fees and success fees arrive on different timelines and carry different collection risk.
Operator lens
- Utilization and rate are the levers on time-based work. Where fees are tied to hours, revenue is billable hours multiplied by price. Retainers, fixed-fees and productized work change that arithmetic, which is why the fee model matters as much as the rate card.
- Billable time remains the core inventory, and the payroll share above reflects that. That makes bench time, the paid hours between engagements, the principal financial risk in a consulting practice.
Questions to ask before starting or buying
- How concentrated is the client list? Ask what share of fees comes from the largest few clients and how long those relationships have run.
- Who owns the relationships? Establish whether clients contract with the firm or with an individual, because the second is not transferable.
- What does the pipeline look like beyond the current quarter? Signed work with start dates is evidence; a list of conversations is not.
- How is intellectual property held? Frameworks, tools and training material are often the most durable assets a consulting firm owns.
- What is the realization rate? Ask what proportion of recorded time is actually invoiced and collected, because the gap between the two is where consulting margin disappears.
Explore More on BusinessNES
More BusinessNES guides and rankings, plus neighboring benchmark pages built from the same verified data.
Sources and Methodology
Every figure on this page is bound to a published source, and each figure's own source line names that source precisely: the 2022 Economic Census for counts, receipts and payroll, and the Census Bureau's Business Dynamics Statistics for the industry continuation benchmark. Where a page shows a sector survival curve instead, that series comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
BusinessNES performs the arithmetic on those published figures and nothing else. Receipts are divided by establishments, and payroll by receipts. The age-five establishment count is divided by the age-zero establishment count for the same four-digit industry group, then repeated across five age-zero cohorts to give a reference and a range. This category's share of its industry group, along with the ranks, medians and nearest peers in the comparison sections, comes from the same published tables. Every one of them is recomputed from the sealed source files at each release and blocks publication if it does not match. Results are rounded and marked approximate. The reference year is 2022 for revenue and payroll; treat every figure as a baseline, not today's market.
Category scope matters: these figures cover Administrative Management and General Management Consulting Services (NAICS 541611), employer establishments only. The scope note near the top of the page explains what that includes and excludes for this business type. Marketing and IT consulting are separate Census categories from general management consulting.
Full method, sources and limits
Spotted an error? Corrections are logged and published. Business data and benchmarks by BusinessNES.