India’s top audit and consulting firms are increasingly expanding beyond the metropolitan hubs, as fast-growing promoter-led companies and small and mid-sized businesses in smaller cities drive demand for their services ranging from tax and succession planning to mergers and acquisitions and digital transformation. The shift is prompting the Big Four—EY, KPMG, PwC and Deloitte—to set up offices and deepen their presence in what they see as the next major growth market.
Cities such as Jaipur, Coimbatore, Mysore, Bhubaneswar, Jamshedpur, Kochi, Chandigarh, Trivandrum and Gandhinagar are emerging as key markets, with businesses looking to professionalize operations, scale through acquisitions and adopt enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, according to industry executives.
“We have opened offices in non-metro cities because we realized that there are firms there with revenue of over ₹200-500 crore and want to grow 10x in size…They want services in M&A, tax and even ERP solutions,” Debasish Mishra, chief growth officer for Deloitte South Asia, told Mint. For instance, in Bhubaneswar, the capital of Odisha, Deloitte employed 2,000 people when it started operations there in 2023, and the headcount is now 5,000.
Typically for the Big Four, their maximum clients are based out of New Delhi, financial capital Mumbai and tech mecca Bengaluru, and the partners with thousands of employees across tax and consulting services are bunched into these cities.
“We have also seen demand for tax services offered on our platform that we developed with the use of AI (artificial intelligence). These are specially for clients who may not be able to afford customized solutions,” said Mishra.
Over the last couple of years, audit and consulting firms have built AI platforms, on which services such as tax advisory is offered, and clients can access them without paying as much as having a team of consultants sitting in their office.
Those seeking the Big Four’s consulting services in the smaller cities include promoters in the jewellery industry, ferro alloys and even global capability centres (GCCs).
Metros still account for the bulk of their business, but executives see the balance gradually changing. “While 80% of our business still comes in from metros, we will witness a shift as businesses scale in non-metros,” said Mishra of Deloitte.
The new growth engines
Senior partners in the Big Four told Mint that growth in SMEs, many of which are from the non-metros, are some of the “big clients” now.
Data of the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) SME platform shows that the equity turnover on the platform had surged to ₹39,471 crore in the financial year 2026 from just ₹5,207 crore in FY22.
GCCs pitching tent in India is another reason behind the spurt of audit firms looking beyond the main cities. According to a study by consulting firm Zinnov and IT industry body Nasscom, India had 2,117 GCCs employing total 2.36 million professionals and reporting $98.4 billion in cumulative revenue in FY26.
“The GCC market has grown at a revenue compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of approximately 9.9% and a talent CAGR of 6.2% since FY2021,” the Zinnov-Nasscom GCC Value Orbit report said.
The adoption and adaptation of agentic AI into businesses—wherein the technology can run systems and come out with plans without needing any prompts, and therefore directions—has also helped the Big Four penetrate into the smaller hubs.
“Today, agentic AI allows us to offer consulting and tax services in non-metros, whereas earlier one would have to have partners and teams fly down,” said Vivek Prasad, partner and chief commercial officer at PwC India.
PwC also seeing demand come in from the smaller cities for tax and risk expertise, succession planning, regulation and cyber security. “Tier-2 and -3 cities are central from the demand standpoint, as many potential clients are promoter-run businesses who now want to scale and transform their operations,” said Prasad.
Rival EY’s non-metro offices include Coimbatore, Trivandrum, Gandhinagar, and Ahmedabad, among others. “Over the last few years, we have strategically expanded our presence across both traditional business hubs and emerging tier-2 and tier-3 cities,” said EY in an email response to Mint. “These cities are becoming engines of growth, attracting fast-growing enterprises across industrial, consumer and emerging sectors, fuelled by deep entrepreneurial energy and ambition.”
KPMG did not respond to Mint‘s queries on the matter.
Talent advantage
Interestingly, for these large consulting firms, it is not just the availability of talent in these smaller cities, but also the employees’ willingness to stay back in their home turf has led to a hiring spurt.
“In a city like Jaipur, there is a good pool of chartered accountants, while we find tech talent who are from Mysore and do not want to relocate to a larger city,” said a senior partner in one of these top four firms who did not wish to be named. “And the compensation is often at par with what one would expect in the larger cities.”