Is Consulting Right For You? Four Real Numbers, 2026

The occupation you would actually be joining

The federal statistical agency does count this job. It calls consultants management analysts, and its occupational handbook entry, checked 30 September 2026, counted 1,077,100 of them in 2025 at a median annual wage of $101,860. Typical entry education is a bachelor's degree. On-the-job training is listed as none. Those are the coordinates of the career, published and dated.

Almost nothing written about this question uses them. The pages that rank for it offer airport anecdotes and lists of traits, and none of them opens a source. So this page is built from four published figures and from what firms put in writing about the terms of the seat.

The four figures are the headcount and median above, the travel percentage two live entry postings state, the replacement share hidden inside the official growth projection, and the share of an MBA class that takes this route. Each one is quoted with its date in the body. Where nobody publishes a number, which covers hours, attrition and your own odds, the page says nobody publishes a number and names who would hold it.

Where the 1.1 million jobs sit

The single most misleading thing about this career is the word consulting. The occupation is far broader than the strategy firms that dominate the search results, and the statistics prove it. Here is the employer split the Bureau of Labor Statistics published for 2025.

Add the five rows and you reach 83 percent, which leaves 17 percent spread elsewhere. Note the third row. One in seven people in this occupation works for themselves, which is a different job from the one a campus recruiter describes.

Now set the median against an entry offer. McKinsey's current generalist Business Analyst posting quotes a US floor of $112,000. Subtract the national median of $101,860 and the gap is $10,140, which is just under 10 percent of the median. So a first-year seat at one firm starts above the middle of a million-person occupation, and only just. Our consulting salary guide carries the bands by level and firm with their sources.

The travel figure one firm puts in writing

Travel is the complaint that shows up in every account of this job, and it is almost never quantified by anyone with the standing to do so. Two live McKinsey entry postings do quantify it. The Business Analyst listing attached to the Operations practice, checked 30 September 2026, states: "Comfortable with extensive travel, up to 80%". The Business Analyst listing attached to McKinsey Transformation states the same line.

The generalist Business Analyst posting from the same firm states no percentage. It describes places instead: the ability "to travel to and work in varying environments that may be challenging and/or not accessible (e.g., factories, hospitals, mines)."

That difference is the useful finding. There is no travel rate for consulting. There is a travel rate per posting, and the practice-attached roles are the ones that name it. The Bureau of Labor Statistics goes only as far as this: "Because they must spend a significant amount of time with clients, analysts travel frequently."

If you want to know your own number, read the posting you intend to answer rather than a page about the industry. Our McKinsey Business Analyst page sets those four listings side by side.

The conditions that decide whether consulting is right for you

McKinsey maintains a page listing the essential functions every client service colleague must be able to perform, checked 30 September 2026. It is written in the language of employment law rather than recruitment marketing, which makes it the most honest description of the work available anywhere.

Read as a list of demands, it says the job requires you to:

1. "Work in-person, in-office, or at our clients' locations (each team's schedule and locations will vary)."
2. "Structure and organize ambiguous problems, tasks, and information, and be able to act independently."
3. "Use data, facts, and logical reasoning to make rational decisions against tight timelines."
4. "Comprehend content (e.g., email, articles, spreadsheets) and synthesize into a clear and communicable format."
5. "Give and receive frequent mentoring and targeted feedback."
6. Tolerate "prolonged periods of sitting, standing, or walking" and travel to "factories, hospitals, mines."

Item two is the one candidates underweight. Acting independently on an ambiguous problem is the whole job at the entry level, and it is the opposite of the structured graduate schemes many applicants are comparing it against. Item five is the second. Frequent feedback in both directions is listed as a function, so having your work rewritten and taking that well is a stated requirement rather than a cultural quirk.

The firm's own recruiting copy is blunter still. Its generalist posting says "You are the kind of person who thrives in a high performance/high reward culture", and asks for the "ability to work or attend meetings outside of traditional business hours or take on projects with limited or no notice at times."

Why 88 percent of the openings are replacements

This is the figure that changed how we read the career, and it comes straight out of the official projections. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects 10 percent employment growth from 2025 to 2035, an increase of 109,200 jobs. It separately projects about 94,100 openings per year, on average, over the same decade.

Do the arithmetic in that order. Openings of 94,100 a year across ten years give 941,000 openings. Net growth over the decade is 109,200. Subtract and you get 831,800 openings that are not new jobs. Divide 831,800 by 941,000 and you get 88.4 percent, so call it roughly 88 percent.

The agency says why: many openings "result from the need to replace workers who transfer to different occupations or exit the labor force." People leave this occupation in very large numbers, and the growth headline conceals it.

Two ways to read that, and both are fair. Leaving is normal here, so entering does not commit you to a life. And entering means joining a population that mostly does not stay, which is worth knowing before you build an identity on it. Our page on consulting exit opportunities covers where people go afterward.

A one-year plan that ran for twelve

Since no firm publishes attrition, the closest thing to evidence on staying is a first-hand account. McKinsey published one from a named Seattle partner in March 2023, and it is useful precisely because it started as a short plan.

He was a year from a physics doctorate when he decided against academia. In his words: "So I decided to learn how to live in a business environment via a year of consulting before moving on to a job I was excited about. This led me to McKinsey." Twelve years later he was still there.

He also describes the entry problem candidates worry about most. "Once I got to McKinsey, I felt like I had imposter syndrome. Many of my colleagues had gone to business school and had been running cases for years - and I was an academic."

Treat that as one person's experience and nothing more. It is first-hand, it is signed, and it is published by his employer, which makes it promotional by construction. What it does corroborate is a documented hiring rule. The Yale School of Management career office wrote on 22 August 2026 that "students from a variety of functional and industry backgrounds are welcome and hired into generalist roles. Only after working a few years do consultants specialize."

The mobility is real on the way in too. INSEAD's 2024 employment statistics record 72 percent of that class changing sector, country or function, and 19 percent changing all three. Consulting took 41 percent of Tuck's Class of 2025.

Four tests of whether consulting is right for you, in order

Interest in business decides nothing here. These four questions are each answerable from published material rather than from introspection, which is what makes them worth running.

1. Open the posting you would actually answer and read its travel and hours clauses. If a percentage is stated, that is your number. If none is stated, the job description names the environments instead, and both tell you something concrete.
2. Set the pay against the right comparison. Compare a first-year band with your realistic alternative offer. The occupational median of a million people is the wrong yardstick for one firm's entry seat. The consulting career path page shows what the next rungs pay.
3. Read the essential functions list as a contract. Six items, published. If acting independently on ambiguous problems under a tight clock reads as a description of a bad week, that is the daily unit of the work.
4. Test the work rather than the idea of it. Structure one case, run the arithmetic, write the recommendation, and see whether the hour was satisfying or merely survivable.

Test four is the only one that gives you new information about yourself, and it costs an hour.

What nobody publishes about whether consulting is right for you

Four questions have no honest answer, and the pages that answer them anyway are quoting surveys of volunteers.

Weekly hours. No firm publishes a number. The Bureau of Labor Statistics goes as far as "Some work more than 40 hours per week", which is close to useless. McKinsey's Denmark page says "long hours are not an uncommon requirement at varying points during a client-project cycle" and gives no figure. That same page does publish a project length, "typically 2 to 4 months", which shapes your calendar more than any hours estimate.

Attrition and average tenure. Not published by any firm we have read. The 88 percent replacement share above is the closest public proxy, and it covers the whole occupation rather than one firm.

What a firm looks for in personality. We refuse this one on principle. Firms publish interview structures, and McKinsey publishes the four themes of its personal experience interview. None of that is a personality profile, and treating it as one is how candidates end up performing.

Your own odds. No firm publishes an acceptance rate for an entry role, and the Yale career office writes that full-time demand is outright "unpredictable", driven by predicted client work, intern return rates and internal transfers.

Testing the work before you commit to it

The cheapest real test is one worked case with a graded result. Our free case structure drill is the one to start with, because structuring an ambiguous problem independently is item two on the essential functions list above.

The scale it grades against is ours. No firm publishes a rubric for a case answer, and the weights live in our code and on the method page: Coverage 45, Separation 25, Depth 20, Concision 10. Coverage dominates on purpose, since the failure we see most is a tidy structure that misses the branch the question turned on.

Two things the tool does not do. It teaches no business content, and it does not replace any firm's own screen. Our /assessments page says on the page itself that 0 of 6 simulators are live. What runs today is the drills and the graded scorecard, free, with no account and no email.

One last note on how to use the hour. Do not check whether you can pass. Check whether you enjoyed it. The Yale career office writes that behavioral interviews "assess the willingness of candidates to do the hard work and long hours of a consultant", and a candidate who found the case tedious is answering that question honestly by discovering it now.