The 2026 Barclay Simpson Salary Survey & Recruitment Trends Guide: Internal Audit, Assurance & Controls

Barclay Simpson has been producing market reports across the areas we recruit for since 1990. For the 2026 edition of our Salary Survey and Recruitment Trends Guide for the internal audit, assurance and controls market, we surveyed both employers and compliance professionals to gather their views on the issues affecting their industry and profession.

This includes trends affecting permanent jobs and contract jobs, as well as wider developments shaping the internal audit, assurance and controls market, such as artificial intelligence and equality, diversity and inclusion. We also examine current salary trends and provide the latest salary ranges for job roles across the internal audit profession.

Internal audit permanent jobs market

Momentum has continued to prove elusive in the internal audit recruitment market over the last 12 months, with hiring activity and demand remaining largely unchanged from our previous annual Salary Survey report.

Some sectors and disciplines were busier in 2025 and early 2026, while others remain more subdued but overall it is a relatively muted period for internal audit jobs.

“Recruitment in early 2025 was reasonably active, although hiring predictably tailed off in the typically quieter summer months. Unusually, this slowdown continued into the end of the year, with the late budget doing little to help,” says Steve Driver, Head of Internal Audit at Barclay Simpson.

“Currently, businesses are reluctant to hire due to broader economic uncertainty, much to the frustration of many Heads of Audit and team leaders. However, pent-up demand is ready to be unleashed when conditions improve.”

There were also some redundancies across internal audit over the last year, which tends to be rare in audit, particularly within financial services. This has meant greater candidate availability, although employers are still struggling to find people with niche areas of expertise.

“Within both business and IT audit jobs, most of the demand is for specialists,” says Jack Pyle, Principal Consultant at Barclay Simpson.

“Across financial services, for example, the sought-after skills are in areas like cyber security, financial crime, infrastructure and model risk. Fewer firms are looking for generalists.”

67% of internal audit employers intend to hire additional staff in 2026

Our consultants are reporting particularly elevated demand across IT audit jobs, as employers look to grow their in-house teams and shift away from relying on external services. This trend was evident across many of the financial services industries that we cover, including banking, insurance, and asset and wealth management.

Technology now underpins far more of the day-to-day than it did even a few years ago. That shift has pushed organisations to build on-site audit capabilities, so that professionals are close to the systems they are providing assurance on.

Within asset and wealth management specifically, auditors with private credit experience are highly in-demand. The private credit market has grown from just $40 billion (£29 billion) assets under management in 2000 to $1.7 trillion today — and it is expected to more than double in size to $4.5 trillion by 2030.

Top barriers to hiring

Looking ahead to the remainder of 2026, employers’ hiring intentions have improved since our last report. Our latest Employer Survey revealed that two-thirds (67%) of organisations say they will likely recruit for additional staff this year — up from 59%.

More than half (55%) of respondents said that staff shortages are affecting the performance of their internal audit teams. Of these, 9% said the impact was significant.

“There are signs that hiring activity will improve in 2026,” says Paul Hundley, Senior Consultant of Internal and IT Audit at Barclay Simpson.

“Organisations can only sit tight for so long. At some point, audit plans need to be delivered and that requires people on the ground with the right skills and experience to do it.”

Despite it being an employer-led market at the moment, a whopping 97% of organisations said finding skilled talent in today’s market is challenging — 28% claim it is ‘very challenging’.

The most commonly cited factor is salary expectations, with 72% of employers mentioning this as an impediment. A lack of technical and regulatory knowledge among candidates was a problem for 55%, followed by office location (32%), poor cultural fit (32%) and remote working policies (32%).

Candidate confidence, meanwhile, has dropped. In our last report, 15% of professionals said they were ‘not at all’ optimistic about the current state of the jobs market. This has risen to 20% — and is up considerably from 7% in 2022.

The proportion of candidates who are ‘very confident’ has also fallen year on year from 29% to 17%. This figure was the same across business auditors, technology auditors and internal controls specialists.

When asked to list the biggest challenges to securing a new role, the most commonly cited answer among candidates was a lack of jobs being advertised (54%). Nearly 40% also mentioned they were hesitant to move from their current role, emphasising the sense of uncertainty that exists within today’s job market.

Contract jobs in internal audit

The internal audit, assurance and controls contract recruitment market has remained subdued over the last 12 months. Indeed, hiring activity declined further in 2025, continuing a downward trend that began in 2023.

We have seen a substantial drop in the number of contract jobs becoming available, although it is worth noting that our Employer Survey revealed a year-on-year increase in organisations using interim support overall.

The most-cited day rate for internal audit contractors is £500-599 (Down from £600-699 in 2024)

In 2024, more than a fifth (21%) of employers told us they do not use contractors, temporary workers or co-sourcing arrangements – a figure that now stands at just 12%. This could indicate a broader underlying change in how organisations are accessing interim resource.

“Some larger businesses are more actively filling temporary roles themselves, meaning fewer roles hitting the market,” says Andrew Whyte, Associate Director and Head of Interim at Barclay Simpson.

“Alongside ongoing demand for interim resource, we have also seen increased interest in co-sourcing and outsourced internal audit models, particularly where a statement-of-work approach offers greater flexibility than day rate or fixed-term solutions.”

For organisations seeking additional co-sourcing and outsourcing support, Barclay Simpson provides these services through BSS Audit, our internal audit consulting business.

On the whole, the reasons why organisations use interim resource remain the same, with ‘leveraging subject matter expertise’ and ‘specific projects’ the primary goal for 46% and 31% of respondents, respectively.

Notably, the proportion of employers citing specific projects has more than doubled year on year, suggesting that teams are finding themselves under-resourced when audit plans extend beyond business-as-usual activity. This is perhaps unsurprising, given that redundancies have been an unfortunate reality for some departments.

There has also been a considerable rise in candidates on fixed-term contracts (FTCs). In 2024, less than a fifth (19%) of respondents to our Candidate Survey listed FTCs as their most recent type of arrangement, while half were on ‘inside IR35’ day-rate agreements. Today, FTCs are the most common set-up, with 41% of candidates on them, and 35% on ‘inside IR35’ contracts.

Interestingly, contractor preferences are also changing. Last year, ‘inside IR35’ agreements were the most popular arrangement among candidates (30%), but they are now the least popular (17%). Conversely, FTCs have jumped from least to most favoured (23% to 45%, respectively).

FTCs have traditionally been unpopular among candidates because they do not offer either the long-term job security of a permanent role, nor the financial incentives of traditional contracting.

AI in internal audit recruitment

Last year, the UK Government announced a number of major reforms aimed at driving growth, creating jobs and boosting British businesses by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI).

OECD estimates suggest that AI could improve productivity in the UK by up to 1.2 percentage points every year over the next decade, second only to the US in the G7. Increasing AI adoption within organisations could also unlock as much as £140 billion in annual economic output.

In this, our 2026 Internal Audit, Assurance and Controls Salary Survey Guide, we explore how AI is influencing the profession, both in the day-to-day operation of teams and across internal audit recruitment.

Hiring limited for AI-focused auditors

While auditors are expected to have some familiarity with AI, including generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, there is not yet a large amount of hiring for specialist audit roles within the field.

“Employers assume a basic level of exposure, but outside of the large banks, which already have dedicated AI teams, we’re not seeing AI-focused recruitment at most organisations,” says Jack Pyle, Principal Consultant at Barclay Simpson.

“AI is likely to feature increasingly within audit plans, however. There’s just uncertainty around where it will sit and how extensively it will be deployed.”

When properly implemented, it is expected AI will save professionals time in a number of areas. Audit teams at banks are already using it to analyse large datasets more quickly, as well as aiding with tasks such as drafting audit reports.

That said, the output of AI systems must itself be reviewed and audited, which creates the need for additional oversight and assurance. Predicting how AI will ultimately reshape hiring demand for auditors therefore remains difficult until its use becomes more widely spread across departments.

Auditors sceptical of AI in recruitment

AI may be taking the world by storm, but it appears that both organisations and candidates much prefer the human touch when it comes to hiring.

Our surveys show that 70% of internal audit professionals believe recruitment processes are worsened by the use of AI. In fact, when asked what impact it has, the most popular answer (42% of candidates) was that AI neither makes recruitment processes more efficient nor more effective.

Employers are also sceptical. Seven out of 10 don’t currently use it in their processes at all, with 76% agreeing that it makes recruitment neither more efficient nor more effective. Just 3% of organisations believe it does both.

Among the minority of organisations utilising AI in their audit recruitment, it was most commonly used to screen CVs and shortlist candidates (55%), provide interview support such as transcriptions (50%) and write targeted job ads (35%).

However, more than a third (36%) of employers see AI as a threat to their recruitment processes. The biggest concerns centred around the integrity of information provided on CVs (82%), the quality of candidate sourcing and selection (49%) and AI-enabled impersonation of candidates (43%).

Whether these fears are justified remains to be seen. What we do know is that while candidates expressed reservations about organisations using AI when hiring, 44% admit to using it themselves to improve their chances of securing a role.