Ceed blog

Bill rate. Pay rate.

2026-10-01T13:00:00-07:00

Today, 1 October 2026, New Jersey’s new rules on who counts as an independent contractor become operative. For most firms that sell their team’s time the date lands on a change that already happened, quietly, one hire at a time. The second person to log an hour to a client is often not an employee. Gusto counted in April that more than four in ten solopreneurs paid at least one contractor in 2025, about $72.3 billion between them, and our own home page says Ceed is for a firm “from the day a second person logs an hour to your client.” This post is about that day, and about the two numbers it creates.

The first is the bill rate, what the client pays for the hour. The second is the pay rate, what the person who worked the hour is paid for it. The gap between them is the firm’s margin, and in 2026 it has to cover more than it used to: a client who pays in forty days, a contractor the law says must be paid in thirty, a set of rules that decide whether the contractor is a contractor at all, and a file that a buyer, an auditor or a state agency will one day ask to see. We run a security consultancy, YSecurity, which describes itself as more than 45 operators who ran security at Apple, Robinhood and the NSA, and the question of how each person who logs an hour is paid, from which hours and at what rate, is the question Ceed was built to answer for us first.

One line before the rest, because it matters: none of this is legal or tax advice. The rules differ by state and change often, and the right person to ask before you change how you pay anyone is your accountant or your attorney.

The partner left. The firm called.

Start with where the senior contractors came from, because in 2026 the answer is the top of the profession. On 24 April KPMG cut about 10% of its US audit partners, about 100 of some 1,400 partners and managing directors, after an early retirement programme fell short, Accounting Today reported after the Wall Street Journal. The firm’s statement: “Our audit business is strong, and this action reflects our ongoing commitment to sustaining audit quality and leading the profession into the future.” In May it cut about 400 advisory jobs as a “strategic realignment to ensure skills and capabilities are aligned with future demand”.

FT Exclusive: KPMG is cutting about 10% of its audit partnership in the US, after years of failed attempts to urge the least productive partners to retire early.

@FT, Financial Times · 23 April 2026 · 241 likes · View on X

The reaction was not about KPMG. Robert Sterling’s post the same evening reached 485,000 views, and the line people passed around was about seniority.

KPMG is laying off 10% of their audit partners…
I’ll be blunt: If you work in front of a computer, your job isn’t safe.
It doesn’t matter how senior you are (KPMG’s partners literally own the company).

@RobertMSterling, Robert Sterling · 23 April 2026 · 2,279 likes · View on X

In London the same thinning happened at the promotion line. City AM reported on 27 April that EY UK made “only 34 promotions in 2025, a drop of nearly 70 per cent since 2022,” and Deloitte made “60 promotions last year, down from 124 at its peak three years earlier.” James Ransome of the recruiter Patrick Morgan told the paper he was “seeing a clear shift away from the traditional ‘job-for-life’ equity partnership model”, and a Companies House analysis in the same piece counted 346 equity partners among KPMG’s 833 and 606 among Deloitte’s 1,356. The Financial Times reported that KPMG and EY had moved some UK equity partners into salaried roles. Amanda Goodall, who tracks layoffs for a large audience, added the UK detail from KPMG’s internal announcement on 27 March: “440 roles in audit with the majority being assistant managers.”

The consulting firms thinned their middle too. McKinsey went from about 45,100 people at the end of 2023 to about 40,000 by May 2025, and Bob Sternfels explained the shape in January: “We can grow in this part, the client-facing side, and we can shrink in this part and have aggregate growth.” Accenture booked about $865 million of business optimization costs in fiscal 2025, which it said “includes severance”, and Julie Sweet described the logic plainly: “where we don’t have a viable path for skilling, sort of exiting people so we can get more of the skills in we need.” Accenture reports its fiscal 2026 results today. TheStreet reported in April that Deloitte had cut paid time off by five to ten days, frozen its pension after 2026 and halved paid family leave from sixteen weeks to eight.

Ceed blog

Bill rate. Pay rate.

The partner left. The firm called.

Not so solo.

Markup is not margin.

Paid in thirty days. By law.

Today, in New Jersey.

The rest of the map.

The file they will ask for.

The other side of the invoice.

One set of hours. Two rates.

What the books say.

Three conversations about who does the work.

Questions.

Fewer hours. Same margin.

Who is asking. And how often.

Faster work. Smaller invoice.

Faster inside. Worse outside.

What the giants did. Out loud.

Whose hour is it. Read the contract.

A new line. On the cost side.

Some hours fall. Some rise.

One email. Four answers.

The hours stay. The price is yours.

What the books say.

Three conversations about what speed costs.

Questions.

Ten rows. One engagement.

Before the first row. The agreement and the money.

One minute a day. From Slack.

The moment it crosses. Or the morning after.

Computed from the agreement. Shares included.

Margin this morning. Bookings against it.

One set of hours. Payouts and commissions.

Closed means closed. Who can reopen it.

After the last row. The ledger and the spreadsheet.

Seats, tiers, meters. Or 0.1%.

What we changed on the comparison page.

What the books say.

Three conversations about the field.

Questions.

The agreement said 40 hours. The month said 47.

Forty hours sold. Forty-seven delivered.

A change notice, ready to go.

Do the hours roll over?

Correcting it after too long.

Prove the hours.

What the books say.

The agreement as rules, not a PDF.

Three conversations about the document.

Questions.

The rate was set on day one. The client grew.

The client that doubled.

The 40 percent raise.

The invoice nobody re-read.

Eating hours is a price cut made by the wrong person.

What the pricing people say.

What the books say.

Margin per client, this morning.

Three conversations with people who set a price.

Questions.

The client paid late. The invoice was later.

Nine days late, and the wait is growing.

The thread with 657 comments.

Overdue is the norm.

Follow your contract.

Nobody was reading the ledger.

The invoice was late first.

Profitable. Not paid.

What the books say.

The stop loss lives at the hour.

Three conversations with people who run firms.

Questions.

Held. Not hidden.

An alert is a report.

A refused hour disappears.

A held hour waits.

What the person logging sees.

Monitoring is the other design.

Closed means closed.