Graduate Pay Is Rising. Training Isn’t.

Summary: McKinsey, BCG and Bain are raising US starting salaries for the first time since 2022, to $120,000 for undergraduates and $200,000 for MBAs. Higher graduate pay sharpens a harder problem for consulting: AI is automating the work through which junior consultants used to learn.

Consulting is paying graduates more just as AI takes away the work they used to learn on.

The Financial Times reports that McKinsey, BCG and Bain are raising US starting salaries for the first time since 2022. For 2027 recruits, base pay will reach $120,000 for undergraduates and $200,000 for MBAs.

The rises range from 4% to 9%, according to student adviser Management Consulted. BCG moves furthest because it had trailed its two rivals by $2,000. From next year, all three pay the same.

It ends a long freeze. After the Covid hiring boom left firms overstaffed, starting salaries and first-year bonuses were held flat for three years. At the time, we read that pause as a sign that consulting was rewiring itself.

The rewiring has not stopped. It has moved on to who firms hire, and what happens to those people once they arrive.

Paying more to attract graduates doesn’t solve how you develop them.

Why Graduate Pay Is Rising Now

McKinsey, BCG and Bain are raising graduate pay because they are competing for the same graduates as Big Tech and the AI labs.

Namaan Mian, chief operating officer of Management Consulted, told the FT that Big Tech has moved past its lay-offs and is hiring again. He added that AI labs have become viable landing spots for new graduates, which was not the case three years ago.

Demand is part of the picture too. Consulting revenue growth is picking back up, in part driven by work helping clients implement AI. Source Global, a research firm, expects sector revenue growth of between 5% and 7% over the next few years.

Mian told Bloomberg the timing is a signal in itself: “You don’t raise base pay if you think a downturn is coming. You use a bonus you can pull back next year.”

That is the right reading. A base salary increase is a long-term commitment. Firms that expected to cut would not make it.

Talent Is Still MBB’s Edge

McKinsey, BCG and Bain still treat exceptional talent as their main competitive advantage, and the 2027 pay rise is how they defend it.

BCG receives nearly 2 million applications a year and accepts fewer than 1% of them, according to Alicia Pittman, the firm’s global people chair. She added that BCG continues to expand its global talent base with AI engineers, data scientists, IT architects and deep-industry specialists.

McKinsey was blunter. “We don’t wait for the market to tell us what great talent is worth,” said Blair Ciesil, co-leader of global talent attraction at the firm.

The mix of people inside these firms is already changing. Across the seven largest consulting and accounting firms, AI roles have risen from 1.4% to around 5% of openings, according to Draup data reported by Business Insider, as we set out in our piece on how consulting’s talent model is changing.

The graduate is still part of that model. MBB are paying to make sure the best ones do not go elsewhere.

Fewer Juniors Per Project

AI is reducing the number of junior consultants needed on each project, but McKinsey, BCG and Bain are not cutting their graduate intake.

McKinsey’s North American head, Eric Kutcher, said this month that the firm plans to hire about 12% more new consultants in 2027 than this year, according to the FT.

That complicates the assumption that AI simply means fewer juniors. In my view, it means fewer juniors per project. A strategy project that once needed around 15 consultants can now run with 4 or 5 people working alongside AI tools.

The firms can grow their intake and shrink their teams at the same time, because the work is spread across more projects. It is the same pattern we saw in Accenture’s results, where headcount no longer drives growth in step with revenue.

Not every firm has made the same call. One large implementation firm has told me it has stopped hiring analysts altogether.

AI Is Automating the Training

The research, analysis and presentation work that taught junior consultants their craft is the work AI is automating first.

Firms still need people who can become trusted advisers. But some of the research, analysis and presentation work through which those people traditionally learned is being automated, and that repetitive work was how most of them were trained.

We made this point when we wrote that the consulting apprenticeship model is under pressure. Judgement comes from exposure, repetition, accountability and feedback. Remove the repetition and the rest has to be designed in.

There is a further twist. The output still has to be checked. Partners tell me internal AI output still needs heavy checking before it goes near a client.

So the skill that matters most for a junior consultant is no longer producing the first draft. It is knowing whether the first draft is right.

The skill that matters most for a junior consultant is no longer producing the first draft. It is knowing whether the first draft is right.Ben Appleton, Strat-Bridge

Graduate Pay Leans on Partners

Higher graduate pay puts a new obligation on Partners and Directors, because the work no longer develops junior consultants on its own.

My view is that senior leaders now have to do three things on purpose. Give junior colleagues earlier exposure to clients. Involve them in framing problems, not just solving them. And teach them to challenge an AI-generated answer.

That last one matters more than it sounds. A junior consultant who cannot spot a weak AI output becomes a risk, not a resource.

This is also why AI makes senior consultants more valuable. Their judgement is what the firm is now selling, and passing it on is part of the job.

Make Development Count

Time spent developing junior consultants will only happen at scale if consulting firms count it when they decide who gets promoted.

That takes senior time. It also needs to count when firms assess who deserves promotion. Partner cases are built on sales and delivery, and most partner decisions are made years before the vote. If developing people does not appear in that record, it will be the first thing a busy Principal drops.

It lands hardest on Managers and Principals, who are already absorbing more of the delivery load as teams shrink. We have written about why the manager role is becoming consulting’s toughest job. Asking the same people to rebuild the apprenticeship adds to that.

Otherwise, firms risk recruiting expensive talent into roles with less opportunity to build independent judgement.

What Graduate Pay Means for Hiring

The 2027 graduate pay rise makes the most valuable consulting hire a senior leader who can develop people while changing the way work gets delivered.

The firms that get this right will treat development as part of the Partner role, measure it, and hire senior people who have done it before. That is a different brief from the one most firms hiring senior consulting leaders wrote five years ago.

Raising starting pay is the easy part. Building the next generation of Partners without the work that used to train them is the hard part, and most firms haven’t started.