About Certified Public Accountants
A Certified Public Accountant (CPA) holds a state-issued license to practice public accounting. CPAs pass the four-section Uniform CPA Examination and meet the issuing state’s education and experience requirements. Beyond tax, CPAs perform audit, attestation, and year-round advisory work.
The CPA license is administered at the state level by 55 jurisdictions (the 50 states plus DC, Puerto Rico, US Virgin Islands, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands). Although the underlying examination is uniform, individual state Boards of Accountancy set their own education and experience requirements. The standard pathway is 150 semester hours of college coursework, passing all four sections of the Uniform CPA Examination, and one year of supervised work experience.
For tax work specifically, CPAs often combine return preparation with year-round bookkeeping, financial-statement compilation or review, payroll administration, and tax planning. They are the typical choice for closely held businesses that want a single professional handling both the books and the returns. CPAs who specialize in tax may also pursue the AICPA’s Personal Financial Specialist credential or maintain admission to the IRS’s Practitioner Priority Service.
The directory lists 220 CPAs nationwide. Use the state grid above to filter to your state, or read our CPA explainer for the full background on what the credential authorizes.
Recommended: a deeper background read on tax-professional credentialing →
Long-tail searches this directory supports
Each state page for Certified Public Accountants has its own URL, its own metadata, and its own credential-specific narrative — designed to surface for queries like “cpa tax preparer in [state]”, “find a cpa near me”, and “CPA vs CPA [state] tax help.” The directory does not chase keywords; it organizes credential data the way taxpayers actually search.