McKinsey Competitors 2026: Who Publishes Real Numbers

The rule that put a firm on this page

A firm appears here when two things hold. It sells advisory work to senior management, and a figure of its size exists in public: on its own domain, or in a filing its listed parent must make. That second condition is what makes the table checkable by you in about ten minutes.

The condition also removes firms that plainly compete. Kearney, Roland Berger, L.E.K., AlixPartners and Strategy& all bid against McKinsey. None of them publishes a revenue or headcount figure we could read on its own site on 30 September 2026, so none gets a row. Their absence measures our access, and it says nothing about their quality.

What is deliberately missing is a rank. Every result on this query that we could measure is an aggregator company card, and their competitor sets are built from web traffic similarity or from user reviews. Those six pages run from 62 to 1,409 words, with a median of 456. Not one of them quotes a number the firm itself published.

A ranking would also require the one thing nobody releases: who was on the shortlist and who won. Section nine of this page says what that leaves out.

Nine McKinsey competitors and the scale each publishes itself

Read the fourth column before the second. A revenue figure for a year ending in May sits next to one for a year ending in September, and adding them together would produce a false total.

Three of the nine publish nothing about revenue: McKinsey, Bain and, on its own pages, Oliver Wyman. Two of those three are private partnerships with no filing duty, and the third reports through a listed parent instead.

Revenue per person, and what the spread actually measures

Two published numbers make a third. Divide the revenue by the headcount and the business model appears, because a partnership selling partner time and an organization selling delivery capacity land in different places.

BCG: $14.4 billion divided by 33,500 employees gives $429,851, so roughly $430,000 per person. PwC: $56.9 billion divided by 364,000 people gives $156,318, so roughly $156,000. Accenture: $70 billion divided by 799,000 people gives $87,609, so roughly $88,000. Each of those three pairs comes from one page, and each page is in the ledger above.

Two cautions belong with the arithmetic. The three fiscal periods differ, and PwC reports gross revenues including client reimbursable expenses while BCG labels its figure simply as annual revenue. So the spread is a structural signal rather than a precise multiple.

The spread still tells an applicant something concrete. At roughly $430,000 per head, BCG staffs small teams on short strategy questions. At roughly $88,000 per head, Accenture staffs large teams on long build and run programs. Both firms show up on the same client, and frequently in the same year.

Accenture's consulting quarter against BCG's published year

One comparison makes the scale gap legible. Accenture's release for the quarter ended 31 May 2026 reports $18.72 billion of revenue, split into Consulting at $9.33 billion and Managed Services at $9.39 billion. New bookings for the quarter were $19.32 billion, of which Consulting took $10.26 billion.

Now divide: $9.33 billion against BCG's published $14.4 billion year gives 0.648, so about 65 percent. One quarter of one Accenture segment is roughly two thirds of BCG's whole published year. Multiply back to check: $14.4 billion times 0.648 is $9.33 billion.

That comparison has a real limit, and it belongs here. Accenture's Consulting line covers technology advisory and systems work that no strategy partnership sells, so the two figures describe different baskets of work. The comparison sizes the organizations, and it does not say the work is the same.

For an applicant the practical reading is about volume of hiring rather than prestige. Accenture's fact sheet counts approximately 799,000 people. BCG counts 33.5k. A rejection at one of those firms has a different arithmetic behind it than a rejection at the other.

Oliver Wyman, the rival whose size sits inside a 10-K

Marsh & McLennan's 10-K, filed 9 February 2026, describes Oliver Wyman in one sentence with two numbers: "It employs over 7,200 colleagues and generated approximately 13% of the Company's total revenue in 2025." The same filing states that "Consolidated revenue in 2025 was $27.0 billion, an increase of 10%, or 4% on an underlying basis."

Multiply the two published figures: $27.0 billion times 0.13 is $3.51 billion, so roughly $3.5 billion of 2025 revenue. That product is ours, and we flag it as ours, because the filing publishes a percentage where a reader wants a dollar line. The reportable segment in the filing bundles Mercer with Oliver Wyman, which is why the dollar line is absent.

The same paragraph lists the firm's specializations: Actuarial, AI Transformation, Climate and Sustainability, Customer Innovation and Growth, Finance, Risk and Restructuring, Mergers and Acquisitions, and Performance Transformation. Read that list next to a strategy practice page and the overlap is obvious in financial services and in restructuring.

The lesson generalizes past this one firm. When a rival sits inside a listed group, the filing is the primary source, and it is more precise about scale than any marketing page.

Where McKinsey and its competitors overlap, name by name

McKinsey publishes the shape of its own coverage even while withholding its size. Its industries page listed 24 industry destinations on 30 September 2026, each at a how-we-help-clients URL. Its capabilities page listed 13 named capabilities on the same day. Our McKinsey firm overview counts both lists and records a discrepancy with the site navigation.

Set that against what the rivals publish about their own coverage. BCG's about page states "16 industries and 20 capabilities served, supported by 9 specialty businesses". Deloitte's revenue release names Strategy, Risk & Transactions and Technology & Transformation as its two consulting businesses, and reports SR&T growth of 4.4 percent in local currency. PwC reports Advisory separately at US$24.3 billion, up 4.5 percent. EY names Consulting and EY-Parthenon as distinct service lines and reports that more than 15,000 of its people worked on AI projects in FY25.

Two conclusions follow for anyone choosing where to apply. First, the strategy label is a subset inside the four accounting networks, and its revenue line is published at that subset level by PwC and by Deloitte. Second, a candidate comparing a strategy offer at Deloitte with one at BCG is comparing a business unit with a firm.

Our page on MBB firms covers the three way comparison in detail. This page stays on the wider field.

US sponsored hiring volume, employer by employer

One public file puts numbers on how much each of these firms hires in the United States for sponsored roles. The Department of Labor publishes Labor Condition Application disclosure data by employer, and the fiscal 2026 file through 30 June 2026 records 1,032,735 determinations in total.

Certified filings for the firms on this page, from that file: Ernst & Young U.S. 5,494, Deloitte Consulting 2,633, Accenture 1,488, Boston Consulting Group 671, PwC Advisory 629, McKinsey 455, Bain 111, Oliver Wyman 22. The counts cover the three quarters from 1 October 2025 to 30 June 2026.

Three limits keep this honest. The file covers sponsored roles only, so it measures a slice of hiring rather than all of it. The filing carries a job title and a city, with no client and no sector. And the wage on the record excludes bonus, signing and equity.

What the file does carry is the filed salary, the city and the prevailing wage level. Our McKinsey salary page reads the bands out of the same file, and our consulting salary guide compares firms on that basis rather than repeating the numbers here.

How to use this table when you apply

The list becomes useful when you run it against your own situation in order.

1. Pick the scale that matches the work you want. Roughly $430,000 of revenue per head means small teams and short strategy questions. Roughly $88,000 means large teams on long programs. Both are real careers with different daily shapes.
2. Read the rival's own practice page before the interview. BCG names 16 industries and 20 capabilities. Deloitte names two consulting businesses. The page tells you which words the firm uses for the work.
3. Check the filing count for your target city. An employer with 22 certified filings in nine months runs a different US hiring cadence than one with 5,494.
4. Ask the recruiter what the table cannot tell you. Headcount by office, team size on a typical engagement, and the split between strategy and delivery are all absent from every source above.
5. Apply to more than one of the nine. The case format is close enough across these firms that preparation transfers, and the published hiring volumes differ by two orders of magnitude.

Five things no McKinsey competitors list can tell you

Win rates first. No firm publishes how often it wins a competitive proposal, and no client publishes the shortlist. Any claim that one firm beats another on pitches is unsourced by construction.

Revenue for McKinsey, Kearney and Roland Berger next. All three are private and none publishes. Figures that circulate for them come from aggregators that estimate, and we do not print estimates dressed as facts.

Third, the fiscal periods do not line up. Deloitte closes 31 May, PwC and EY close 30 June, KPMG closes 30 September, Accenture closes 31 August, and BCG shows an annual figure with no period label. A sum of those numbers would mix years.

Fourth, headcount by practice. Not one of the nine publishes how many people sit in its strategy practice, which is the number an applicant actually wants.

Fifth, freshness. EY's FY2026 revenue and Accenture's full fiscal 2026 results were both unpublished on 30 September 2026. When they land, the rows above will be a year out of date, which is why each row carries its period.

Preparing for several of these firms at once

The nine firms above run different processes, and the analytical bar they test converges. That makes preparation portable in a way the firm names suggest it is not.

Our drills grade one structure, one calculation or one synthesis at a time and return a scorecard in seconds. The weights behind the scorecard are published on our method page, and they belong to us: a structure answer scores Coverage 45, Separation 25, Depth 20, Concision 10. We wrote those weights. None of the nine firms on this page publishes a rubric.

Two limits, stated plainly. The tool teaches no firm specific content, so it will not tell you how a Deloitte interview is sequenced. And our assessment simulators are not running: the /assessments page says 0 of 6 simulators are live, in those words, on the page. What exists today is the drills and the graded scorecard, open without an account.

If you want the step after this list, the sensible one is a single firm read in depth. Start with the McKinsey firm overview, which counts what the firm publishes and names what it withholds.