Top 15 Largest Consulting Firms in the World by Number of Employees

Written by Ricky Nave in Money Maps & Rankings

There are many types of consulting firms, but for the purpose of this article I will define a consulting firm as a company that provides unregulated white collar services to other businesses.

White collar means I am excluding companies that provide physical services (e.g. facilities management services or catering services).

Unregulated means I am excluding investment banks (e.g. Goldman Sachs), commercial banks (e.g. Chase), insurance companies, stock brokerages, real estate brokerages, etc.

I’m also excluding so-called “professional employer organizations” (PEOs) because PEOs have HUGE numbers of employees, but they don’t actually exert any management control over their employees. Instead, the employees of a PEO are actually employees of other companies that have simply outsourced their W2 paperwork to the PEO. That means the employees are of a PEO are not really consultants at all.

Now with that out of the way, here are the 15 largest consulting firms in the world, as measured by number of employees:

1. Accenture (733,000 Employees)

Accenture is a technology-focused consulting company that reported having 733,000 employees globally as of August 2023. During the 12 months before that, the company generated $64.1 billion in total revenue. Roughly 47% of that revenue came from North America.

The table below summarizes Accenture’s revenue by the industry of its clients:

Industry Group% of Revenue
Products30%
Health & Public Service21%
Financial Services19%
Communications, Media, and Tech16%
Natural Resources14%

2. TCS (616,000 Employees)

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is an IT-focused consulting firm based in India. Their revenue in 2023 was $29 billion, and they currently have 616,000 employees worldwide.

Unlike most consulting firms, TCS is publicly traded (on the Indian NSE stock exchange). That means there is more information available about the revenue and profits of TCS than is available for most consulting firms.

3. Deloitte (457,000 Employees)

Deloitte is an accounting and finance focused consulting firm with about 457,000 employees worldwide.

4. Concentrix (440,000 Employees)

Concentrix is a customer experience consulting conglomerate. The company offers outsourced customer support, product design consulting, marketing consulting, and strategy consulting.

5. EY (395,000 Employees)

Ernst & Young (EY) is another accounting and finance focused consulting firm with about 395,000 employees globally.

6. PwC (364,000 Employees)

PricewaterhouseCoopers is an accounting-focused consulting firm that has fortunately opted to use the acronym PwC instead of asking people to remember the full word salad name.

Unlike most businesses, PwC is not actually a single company. It’s a network of local member firms, each of which is owned by the partners of that member firm.

PwC had 364,000 employees and generated about $53 billion of revenue in 2023.

7. Capgemini (357,000 Employees)

Capgemini is a French multinational IT-focused consulting firm with about 357,000 employees worldwide. In 2023, the company’s top line revenue was 22.5 billion Euros (about $24.4 billion US dollars).

8. Cognizant (347,000 Employees)

Cognizant Technology Solutions is an American multinational technology-focused consulting company. The company has about 347,000 employees worldwide and generated $19.4 billion of revenue in 2022.

The company’s business model focuses on providing IT services using offshore talent in India.

9. Teleperformance (335,000 Employees)

Many people may not consider Teleperformance a consulting company since its primary service is call centers, but the company meets my definition of consulting firm laid out at the beginning of this article.

The company employs 335,000 people and provides call centers, customer support services, debt collection services, business process outsourcing, and outsourced technical support. Total revenue in 2022 was $8.6 billion.

10. Infosys (329,000 Employees)

Infosys is an Indian multinational technology consulting company. The company employs about 329,000 people worldwide and generated $19 billion of revenue in 2023.

11. KPMG (273,000 Employees)

KPMG is one of the “big 4” accounting firms (the others being Deloitte, EY, and PwC — all of which are also on this list). KPMG employs about 273,000 people around the world and generated over $36 billion of revenue in 2023.

12. Wipro (250,000 Employees)

Wipro is an Indian multinational technology consulting company with 250,000 employees. The company generated $11 billion of revenue in 2023.

13. HCL Technologies (219,000 Employees)

HCL Technologies (HCLTech) is another Indian multinational IT consulting firm with 219,000 employees. The company generated $12.8 billion of revenue in 2023.

14. NTT Data (195,000 Employees)

NTT Data is a Japanese multinational technology consulting firm with 195,000 employees worldwide. The company’s top line revenue in 2023 was approximately $30 billion.

15. IBM (>150,000 Employee Consultants)

Most people don’t think of IBM as a consulting company, but well over half of the company’s employees work in the company’s consulting division, and consulting services made up 31.6% of the company’s total revenue in 2022. That’s $19.1 billion of consulting revenue with over 150,000 consultant employees.

These IBM consultants help companies to implement, support, and maintain IBM’s hardware and software products.

What happened to McKinsey and BCG?

McKinsey and BCG have reputations and revenues that are much larger than many of the companies on this list, yet they have many fewer employees. McKinsey only has 45,000 employees, and BCG only has about 30,000 employees. Yet McKinsey brought in $16 billion of revenue in 2023, and BCG brought in just under $12 billion. That means BCG (30,000 employees) had more revenue than Wipro (250,000 employees).

If you’re interested in a broader perspective on the U.S. services industry, check out this list of 17 U.S. service industries over $300 billion.

Ricky Nave

In college, Ricky studied physics & math, won a prestigious research competition hosted by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, started several small businesses including an energy chewing gum business and a computer repair business, and graduated with a thesis in algebraic topology. After graduating, Ricky attended grad school at Duke University in the mathematics PhD program where he worked on quantum algorithms & non-Euclidean geometry models for flexible proteins. He also worked in cybersecurity at Los Alamos during this time before eventually dropping out of grad school to join a startup working on formal semantic modeling for legal documents. Finally, he left that startup to start his own in the finance & crypto space. Now, he helps entrepreneurs pay less capital gains tax.

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