Author: Taylor Warfield, Former Bain Manager and interviewer

Last Updated: October 20, 2026

 

Consulting firms in Austin include all three MBB firms, all four Big Four firms, Accenture, and a growing set of technology-focused shops, with McKinsey, BCG, and Bain all opening offices between 2016 and 2021. This guide covers where each office sits, which industries its Austin teams serve, what consultants actually earn in Texas, and how Austin recruiting works.

 

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Key Takeaways

 

Austin has become a full consulting market in under a decade, with nine major firms now running local offices out of the downtown core.

 

• McKinsey opened in 2016, BCG in 2020, and Bain in 2021, making Austin one of the newest MBB markets in the country

 

• Almost every Austin consulting office sits downtown, most within a few blocks of Congress Avenue

 

• Technology, private equity, healthcare, and semiconductors drive the bulk of local case work

 

• Most tier-2 strategy firms still run their Texas business out of Dallas and Houston, not Austin

 

• Base pay is set nationally, so an Austin hire earns the same base as a New York hire and pays no Texas state income tax

 

• You apply to the firm and rank Austin as a preference, so there is rarely an Austin-only job posting to target

 

Which Consulting Firms Have Offices in Austin?

 

Austin has nine major consulting offices: McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Deloitte, PwC, EY, KPMG, Accenture, and Slalom. All three MBB firms arrived between 2016 and 2021, making Austin one of the youngest top-tier consulting markets in the United States. Nearly every office sits in downtown Austin within walking distance of the Capitol.

 

Firm	Austin office	What the Austin team focuses on
McKinsey & Company	1221 S. Congress Ave.	Technology, energy, private equity, financial services, public sector
Boston Consulting Group	300 W. 6th St., Suite 1800	High tech, consumer and retail, health care, people and organization, digital and AI
Bain & Company	405 Colorado St., Suite 2000	Technology, private equity, healthcare, advanced manufacturing
Deloitte	500 W. 2nd St., Suite 1600	Technology, healthcare, public sector, plus audit and tax
PwC	400 W. 6th St., Suite 3100	Advisory, tax, and assurance for growth companies
EY	401 Congress Ave., Suite 3200	Assurance, tax, consulting, strategy and transactions
KPMG	111 Congress Ave., Suite 1900	Audit, tax, advisory, and the US home of its infrastructure advisory practice
Accenture	323 Congress Ave.	Technology strategy, digital, cloud, and operations
Slalom	600 Congress Ave., 14th Floor	Business and technology consulting for local and national clients

 

Addresses come from each firm's own office pages and from Texas state construction filings. PwC is the one to watch: the firm filed a permit in December 2025 for a 30,000 square foot build-out on the 31st floor of the Sixth and Guadalupe tower, with completion scheduled for August 2026.

 

Why Are So Many Consulting Firms Opening Austin Offices?

 

Firms follow client headquarters, and Austin gained a lot of them fast. There are four reasons the consulting build-out happened here rather than in a dozen other mid-sized cities.

 

Corporate relocations created local clients. Tesla and Oracle both moved their headquarters to Austin, and Dell has anchored the metro from Round Rock for decades. On the 2026 Fortune 500 list, Dell ranked 41st, Tesla 43rd, and Oracle 82nd.

 

The technology and semiconductor base is unusually deep. Samsung, Applied Materials, NXP, AMD, Apple, and IBM all run significant Austin operations. That concentration produces exactly the supply chain, pricing, and digital transformation work that strategy teams sell.

 

The talent pipeline is right there. The University of Texas sits in the middle of the city and graduates thousands of business and engineering students a year, which lets firms staff a new office without relocating everyone from Chicago.

 

The regional economy kept outperforming. According to Opportunity Austin, the region added 27,200 jobs in 2025 for 2.0% growth, the best performance of any of the 50 largest US metros that year. Unemployment sat at 3.7% in January 2026 against 4.3% for both Texas and the country.

 

Venture funding reinforces the pattern. Pitchbook data reported by Opportunity Austin shows Austin-region companies raised roughly $6.5 billion through the first half of 2026, more than double the $2.9 billion raised over the same period in 2025. That capital feeds private equity and growth-stage advisory work.

 

What Do the MBB Firms Do in Austin?

 

All three MBB firms treat Austin as part of a broader Texas system rather than a standalone market. In my experience at Bain, the cluster a small office belongs to matters more than the office itself, because it determines what you actually get staffed on. Each Austin office pairs with Dallas and Houston, so your case work is not limited to companies inside the city.

 

McKinsey Austin

 

McKinsey has been in Austin since 2016 and works with clients in technology, energy, private equity, financial services, and the public sector. The office sits at 1221 South Congress Avenue, on the south side of the river rather than in the downtown cluster where everyone else landed.

 

Texas licensing records give a sense of scale: the firm registered a 17,617 square foot interior build-out at that address with an estimated cost of $1.8 million, completed in mid-2022. Entry-level hiring into McKinsey Austin runs almost entirely through the national Business Analyst and Associate pipelines.

 

BCG Austin

 

BCG established its Austin office in 2020 at 300 West 6th Street. According to BCG's office page, the Austin team concentrates on high tech, consumer and retail, health care, people and organization, and digital and AI innovation.

 

Austin is part of what BCG calls its Southwest System alongside Dallas and Houston. In practice that means BCG Austin consultants staff onto Texas-wide cases and travel across the region regularly.

 

Bain Austin

 

Bain launched Austin in 2021 as its third Texas office and its 13th in the United States. The office is at 405 Colorado Street and, per Bain's own description, serves technology, private equity, healthcare, and advanced manufacturing clients.

 

Bain describes Austin as one of the fastest growing offices in its network, and the partner roster has expanded well past the handful who opened it. Because Bain Austin operates inside the Texas cluster, associate consultants there get exposure to Dallas and Houston staffing too.

 

What Do the Big Four and Accenture Do in Austin?

 

The Big Four firms have been in Austin far longer than MBB and employ many more people locally. Their Austin consulting work leans toward technology implementation, finance transformation, risk, and public sector projects rather than pure corporate strategy.

 

Deloitte occupies two floors at 500 West 2nd Street in the heart of the 2nd Street district. KPMG sits at 111 Congress Avenue and, notably, hosts the US headquarters of its infrastructure advisory practice, which is a genuine specialization you will not find in most regional offices.

 

EY works out of 401 Congress Avenue, and PwC is the largest of the group by local headcount, with roughly 600 people in Austin as of 2025. Accenture rounds out the set from 323 Congress Avenue, focused on technology, cloud, and operations work for the city's software and semiconductor clients.

 

One practical note on pay. Big Four consulting salaries follow national bands with limited geographic adjustment, so an Austin offer will look close to what the same firm quotes in Dallas or Chicago.

 

Which Consulting Firms Do Not Have an Austin Office?

 

This is the part almost every Austin consulting list gets wrong. Most tier-2 strategy firms have not opened in Austin, and if you are targeting them you need to look at Dallas or Houston instead.

 

Oliver Wyman is the clearest example. The firm runs two Texas offices, at 1717 Main Street in Dallas and 500 Dallas Street in Houston, and no Austin location. Kearney, L.E.K., and several other tier-2 firms follow the same pattern of anchoring Texas coverage in the two larger metros.

 

That matters for how you apply. If Austin is non-negotiable for you, your realistic target list is MBB, the Big Four, Accenture, and the technology consultancies rather than every brand you have heard of.

 

If Austin is a preference rather than a requirement, applying to a Dallas or Houston office widens your options considerably. Internal transfers between Texas offices are common at every firm on this list, so a Houston or Dallas start does not close the door on Austin later.

 

How Much Do Consultants in Austin Get Paid?

 

Base salaries at MBB and most large consulting practices are set nationally, so location changes your take-home pay far more than your offer letter. Texas has no state income tax, which is worth several thousand dollars a year at consulting salary levels compared with New York or California.

 

Public salary data for Austin consulting roles is thinner than for New York or Chicago. The most reliable verifiable source is US Department of Labor H-1B filings, which report actual offered base salaries by employer and city.

 

Employer	Median base salary	Filings
Accenture LLP	$135,793	54
Deloitte Consulting LLP	$127,200	127
All Austin employers	$128,668	13,389

 

Source: US Department of Labor H-1B Labor Condition Application filings for Austin, fiscal year 2025. These figures skew toward experienced and technical roles rather than first-year analysts, so treat them as a ceiling reference rather than a starting offer.

 

For MBA-level hiring, the local benchmark is the University of Texas. McCombs reported that its Full-Time MBA Class of 2025 earned an average base salary of $154,053, with an average signing bonus of $34,279 and 80.2% of job seekers receiving offers within six months.

 

Consulting was the top destination for that class at 28% of placements, ahead of technology at 22% and financial services at 19%. School averages blend every industry together, so firm-by-firm MBB salaries are the better reference point if consulting is your only target.

 

How Do Austin Consulting Offices Recruit?

 

You almost never apply to an Austin job posting. At MBB and most Big Four consulting practices, you apply to the firm through its national pipeline and rank Austin as an office preference, and the firm allocates you to a location after you clear interviews.

 

The practical consequence is that your Austin story matters at the preference stage and in your fit interviews, not in your application form. Recruiters ask why Austin specifically, and vague answers about liking the city do not survive follow-up questions.

 

The University of Texas is the strongest local feeder. McCombs reported that 71.6% of its Class of 2025 stayed in Texas, with roughly half of those graduates working in Austin, which tells you how much of the local analyst and associate class comes from one campus.

 

That does not shut out everyone else. Firms fill Austin seats from their national pipelines every year, and candidates from schools outside the MBB target schools list do land Austin offers when their case performance is strong enough.

 

Timing follows the national cycle rather than anything Austin-specific. Full-time applications generally open in the summer before your final year, and internship deadlines cluster from September through January on the standard consulting recruiting timeline.

 

How Do You Land an Offer at an Austin Consulting Firm?

 

Having coached hundreds of candidates through office-specific recruiting, the pattern is consistent: people over-invest in the location story and under-invest in the case. Here are the six things that actually move the needle for Austin.

 

Tip #1: Build a specific reason for Austin, not a generic one

 

Recruiters hear "I love the food scene" from every candidate. Name the client base instead: say you want semiconductor and enterprise software work, and that Austin is where that concentration lives.

 

Tie the answer to something verifiable in your background. A supply chain internship or a hardware engineering degree makes the Austin preference read as strategy rather than lifestyle.

 

Tip #2: Apply to the firm, then rank Austin

 

Do not wait for an Austin-labeled job posting to appear, because at MBB one usually will not. Submit through the standard application and set your office preference during the process.

 

Tip #3: Treat the case as the deciding factor

 

Office preference does not lower the bar. Austin offices run the same interview structure and the same scoring as New York, so your case interview performance is what determines whether you get an offer at all.

 

If you want to get up the learning curve fast, my case interview course walks you through proven strategies in as little as 7 days.

 

Tip #4: Network into the Texas system, not just Austin

 

Austin offices are small, so the number of people you can reasonably reach is limited. Consultants in Dallas and Houston staff the same Texas cases and are often easier to get time with, and a well-written consulting networking email gets replies from both.

 

Tip #5: Put Austin-relevant experience on the resume

 

Technology, private equity, and healthcare experience reads differently in an Austin screen than in a Chicago one. Lead with the projects that match the local client mix, and make sure your consulting resume puts them in the top third of the page.

 

If you want a second pair of eyes before you submit, my resume review service offers unlimited revisions with 24-hour turnaround.

 

Tip #6: Have a real answer for the fit round

 

Small offices care more about culture fit because every hire is a larger share of the team. Prepare your leadership and impact stories to the same standard as your cases, since the fit round carries real weight in a small office.

 

Austin has gone from having no MBB presence a decade ago to hosting nine major consulting offices, and the firms are still adding partners and headcount. If you want to work at one of the consulting firms in Austin, start your case preparation early and build a client-specific reason for the city, because the location preference only helps once you have cleared the interview bar.

 

Frequently Asked Questions

 

Does McKinsey have an office in Austin?

 

Yes. McKinsey has operated an Austin office since 2016, located at 1221 South Congress Avenue just south of the river. The office serves clients across technology, energy, private equity, financial services, and the public sector. Texas state licensing records show the firm built out roughly 17,600 square feet of office space there in a project completed in 2022.

 

Which consulting firms in Austin hire the most people?

 

The Big Four firms and Accenture hire the largest numbers in Austin because they staff audit, tax, technology, and advisory roles alongside strategy work. PwC alone employs roughly 600 people locally and is reported to be Austin's largest accounting employer. MBB offices are much smaller and take only a handful of entry-level hires per class year.

 

Is Austin a good office to start a consulting career?

 

Austin is a strong choice if you want technology, private equity, and semiconductor case work and you value the tax advantage of living in Texas. The trade-off is scale. Austin offices are newer and smaller than Dallas, Houston, or New York, so you will see fewer staffing options and a narrower internal network in your first two years.

 

Do you have to go to UT Austin to get hired by an Austin consulting office?

 

No. UT Austin is the strongest local feeder for both undergraduate and MBA hiring, but every firm also fills Austin seats through its national pipeline. Candidates from other schools apply through the standard process and rank Austin as their office preference. Strong candidates from non-target schools do get Austin offers every year.

 

Do consultants in Austin get paid less than consultants in New York?

 

Base salaries at MBB and most Big Four consulting practices are set nationally, so an Austin hire earns the same base as a New York hire at the same level. Because Texas has no state income tax, Austin consultants keep more of that base. Cost of living in Austin has risen sharply, so the gap is smaller than it was five years ago.

 

When should you apply to Austin consulting offices?

 

Undergraduate and MBA applications for full-time roles typically open in the summer before your final year, with deadlines clustered from July through September. Internship deadlines usually fall between September and January. Experienced hire roles are posted year-round, so check firm career pages directly rather than waiting for a cycle.

 

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