How to Get an Internship at Grant Thornton 2026-2027
Grant Thornton runs winter, summer, and fall internships across tax, audit, and advisory. See what is open now, what each team does, and what the firm actually publishes about eligibility.
Live Grant Thornton internship openings
84 open internships · 7 shown · every requisition confirmed open on Grant Thornton's own board · checked July 28, 2026
- Tax Intern Bachelor's/Master's · San Francisco · Summer 2027 · $42.50/hr
- Tax Intern Bachelor's/Master's · Plainview, NY · Winter 2027 · $40/hr
- Tax Technology Intern Bachelor's/Master's · Bellevue, WA · Summer 2027 · $40/hr
- Audit & Assurance Intern Bachelor's/Master's · Bellevue, WA · Summer 2027 · $40/hr
- Audit & Assurance Intern Bachelor's/Master's · Minneapolis · Winter 2027 · $37/hr
- Audit and Assurance Intern Bachelor's/Master's · Cleveland · Winter 2027 · $37/hr
- Strategic Assurance and SOC Services Intern Bachelor's/Master's · New York · Summer 2026 · $40/hr
What You Should Know About Grant Thornton Internships
- The winter internship is the one people miss. Grant Thornton runs three terms, and more of what is open right now is winter than summer. A January start puts you inside busy season, which is when audit and tax teams do the work they actually hire for.
- Grant Thornton publishes far less than its competitors. No GPA, no required major, no credit-hour rule, no interview format. Your recruiter and the requisition are the only reliable sources.
- Pick one of three paths. Tax, audit and assurance, or advisory. The firm treats these as separate applications with separate teams, and switching later is harder than choosing well now.
Grant Thornton Internships at a Glance
| Question | Verified answer |
|---|---|
| What is open now? | 84 internships, checked July 28, 2026. Winter 2027 leads at 43, then Summer 2027 at 35. |
| Which terms exist? | Winter (January to April), summer (June to August), and fall (September to December), nationwide. |
| Who can apply? | Undergraduate and graduate students. That single line is the entire published eligibility rule. |
| Are internships paid? | Yes, but only 21 of the 84 openings list a figure. Those run $37 to $44.13 an hour, concentrated in expensive metros. |
| What is the process? | Grant Thornton does not publish one. No assessment, round count, or interview format appears on any official page. |
When Do Grant Thornton Internship Applications Open?
Grant Thornton publishes its terms but not its dates. Winter internships run January through March or April, summer June through August, and fall September through December, all nationwide. There is no published open date, no deadline, and no statement that review is rolling.
That absence is the actionable part. With no published window, the firm routes students to a person rather than a date: its own guidance is to get to know your local recruiter. Emailing before a requisition appears is normal here, not pushy.
Our own data shows a cycle well underway. Of the 84 openings today, 43 are Winter 2027 and 35 are Summer 2027, so the firm recruits roughly a year to eighteen months ahead. If you are mapping a longer runway, the Summer 2027 internship application timeline covers how the wider cycle moves.
What Internships Does Grant Thornton Offer?
Grant Thornton presents exactly three student paths, and they are separate applications: tax, audit and assurance, and advisory. Technology, data, and cyber work is real here but lives inside those three rather than beside them, so apply to the parent path and specialise within it.
Tax
The firm's largest practice and its widest set of specialisms. The firm's own specialty areas are federal tax split between corporate and partnership work, state and local tax covering credits and incentives, income and franchise, unclaimed property, sales and use, and controversy support, plus international tax including transfer pricing, tax technology and transformation, human capital services, and private wealth services for business owners and family offices. Federal teams work with the firm's Washington National Tax Office on technical positions.
Best proof: a project where you handled real rules and real data, plus comfort with automation and dashboards, since the firm markets tax analytics and visualisation as core to how it delivers.
Audit and Assurance
The path where the firm publishes the most detail about the actual work. Interns sit on live financial statement audit engagements for private companies, public companies, and public sector clients, under a senior associate who formally assesses their performance. Sub-practices include digital audit, employee benefit plan audits, strategic assurance and SOC services, capital markets and IPO readiness, ESG, and digital assets.
Best proof: evidence you can be trusted with detail under a deadline, and enough data literacy to be useful, because the firm tests full populations of data rather than samples.
Advisory
The broadest path, and the one most open to non-accounting majors. The firm distinguishes CFO advisory, business consulting, risk advisory covering cybersecurity and privacy, forensics and anti-money laundering, technology modernisation, transaction advisory covering buy-side due diligence and exit planning, artificial intelligence, and outsourcing. Advisory interns are described as working alongside senior partners rather than in a separate intern track.
Best proof: one problem you scoped and solved with a measurable outcome. Consulting-adjacent coursework helps less than a project someone actually used.
Tax
The work. Tax at Grant Thornton is not one job. A federal tax intern works corporate or partnership positions, often against technical guidance from the firm's Washington National Tax Office. State and local work is a different discipline again, spanning credits and incentives, income and franchise tax, unclaimed property, sales and use, and controversy support. International teams handle transfer pricing and cross-border structuring. The firm is explicit that it sees tax as a technology problem as much as a rules problem, and markets automation, analytics, and personalised dashboards as how it delivers the work.
Who fits and what to show. Accounting and finance students dominate, but the firm publishes no required major for interns. What travels is evidence you can hold a rule and a dataset in mind at once: a class project where you worked real filings, a research memo where you took a position and defended it, or automation you built that saved someone time. A junior colleague in transfer pricing describes building Power BI models and rolling out documentation software, which is a fair picture of where the work is heading.
Currently open, and preparation. Tax is where the volume is, including both terms: Tax Intern in San Francisco lists $42.50 an hour for Summer 2027, and a Winter 2027 Tax Intern in Plainview lists $40. There is also a dedicated Tax Technology Intern opening if the software side is what interests you.
Audit and Assurance
The work. Audit interns join live engagement teams rather than shadowing them, and the firm is direct that there is no grunt work and that interns take on real associate work. A senior associate runs the engagement from planning through completion and formally assesses interns on it. What separates this audit practice from the description you would expect is the technology: the firm tests full populations of data instead of sampling, uses its own ledger analytics and predictive models, applies AI to document review, and has trained models on past auditor judgments to surface things like embedded leases. It even correlates linguistic cues in earnings calls to restatement risk.
Who fits and what to show. Accounting is the natural major, and the firm's own full-time audit postings ask for accounting, economics, finance, or mathematics. Show that you are careful with detail under time pressure and that you can work with data rather than around it. Familiarity with the difference between testing a sample and testing a population will let you ask a genuinely good question in an interview.
Currently open, and preparation. Both terms are live and the geography is broader than you might assume, with openings in Minneapolis, Cleveland, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Phoenix, Wichita, and Appleton alongside the coastal offices. Examples include a Summer 2027 Audit & Assurance Intern in Bellevue at $40 an hour and a Winter 2027 opening in Minneapolis at $37.
Advisory
The work. Advisory is where a student who does not want to be an accountant can still work at an accounting firm. The firm separates CFO advisory, business consulting, risk advisory, technology modernisation, transaction advisory, artificial intelligence, and outsourcing. Risk advisory alone contains cybersecurity and privacy, forensics, and anti-money laundering. Transaction advisory covers buy-side due diligence, exit planning, and value creation. Technology work runs on named platforms, so an intern here may be closer to Microsoft, Oracle, ServiceNow, Anaplan, or OneStream than to a ledger.
Who fits and what to show. This is the path with the least published gatekeeping and the widest range of backgrounds, and the firm's own advisory language leans on breadth of backgrounds and specialties. Bring one problem you scoped, the constraint you worked inside, and the outcome you can put a number on. If you are technical, name the platform you actually used.
Currently open, and preparation. Advisory has the fewest current openings, so treat the specialist assurance roles as the nearest read on how these teams hire. A Strategic Assurance and SOC Services Intern opening in New York lists $40 an hour. Because postings here are thinner, emailing university recruiting about advisory specifically is worth more than refreshing the board.
How Hard Is It to Get a Grant Thornton Internship, and What Does It Pay?
Grant Thornton publishes no acceptance rate, applicant count, or cohort size, so anyone quoting one is guessing. What it does publish is a claim worth testing in an interview: smaller teams, no silos, and more access to leadership than a larger firm, with broader client exposure as a result.
On pay, be careful with any single number. Only 21 of the 84 current openings list a figure at all. Those that do run from $37 an hour in Minneapolis and Cleveland to $42.50 in San Francisco and $44.13 in Arlington, which tracks cost of living rather than seniority. The remaining openings publish nothing, so the figure that matters is the one on your requisition.
The firm also publishes no GPA, no required major, and no credit-hour or CPA-eligibility rule for interns. Guides quoting a five-year track are citing a brochure it has since replaced.
How Do You Apply for a Grant Thornton Internship?
- Choose your path first. Tax, audit and assurance, or advisory are separate applications with separate teams. Decide before you write anything, because a single generic application reads as indecision.
- Pick your term deliberately. Winter runs January through roughly April and puts you inside busy season. Right now more winter openings are live than summer.
- Widen your geography. Openings sit in St. Louis, Wichita, Appleton, Southfield, Milwaukee, and Cincinnati as well as the coasts. Applying only to gateway cities cuts most of the inventory.
- Email university recruiting rather than waiting. The firm's own advice is to get to know your local recruiter. With no posted deadline, that contact is the closest thing to one.
- Verify the requisition is open. The firm's retired job board still ranks in search results and its expired postings look live. Confirm on the current system before you invest.
- First-years and sophomores should apply to Empower instead. A virtual one-day program for students pursuing an accounting degree, with 2027 registration open. It is the firm's published route in before you are eligible for an internship.
Grant Thornton posts no deadlines, so tracking is the whole game.
Save every open requisition across tax, audit, and advisory, watch for new ones in offices you would actually move to, and keep your recruiter follow-ups in one place.
How Should You Prepare for a Grant Thornton Interview?
Start by accepting what is not knowable. The firm describes no assessment, no round count, no recorded video stage, and no final-round event anywhere. Ask your recruiter for the format and prepare against the answer.
What the firm does publish is the competency set it uses to select students for its own growth program: clear communication and relationship building, problem-solving that brings people together, and community leadership. Prepare one specific story for each. The firm also repeats a positioning claim across its material about smaller teams and direct access to leadership, so an answer showing you want breadth and responsibility early lands better than one about brand.
One credibility detail: the firm operates as two entities. Grant Thornton LLP is the licensed CPA firm doing audit work; Grant Thornton Advisors LLC delivers tax and advisory. Knowing which your role sits in is a cheap way to sound prepared. For the stories themselves, the behavioral interview preparation guide covers keeping them specific.
Frequently Asked Questions About Grant Thornton Internships
Is it hard to get a Grant Thornton internship?
The firm publishes no acceptance rate, so no honest number exists. What is knowable: 84 internships are open across three paths and dozens of cities, and the firm competes for students partly on broader client exposure than a larger firm offers.
Do Grant Thornton interns get paid?
Yes. Of the 84 openings today, 21 list a rate, from $37 an hour in Minneapolis and Cleveland to $44.13 in Arlington. The rest publish nothing, and the pattern tracks cost of living rather than team. The figure that counts is on your requisition.
When do Grant Thornton internship applications open?
The firm publishes terms but no dates. Winter runs January to April, summer June to August, fall September to December. With no stated deadline or rolling policy, email university recruiting and monitor for new requisitions rather than wait.
What's the easiest way to get a Grant Thornton internship?
Widen your geography and take the winter term seriously. Most applicants aim at summer in a handful of large cities, while the current openings are weighted toward winter and spread across mid-market offices. Being genuinely willing to intern in Wichita in January is a real advantage.
Does Grant Thornton run a winter internship?
Yes, and right now it is the bigger cohort: 43 of the 84 current openings are Winter 2027 against 35 for Summer 2027. Winter runs roughly January through April, which places you in busy season alongside the teams doing audit and tax work at their peak.
What is Grant Thornton Empower?
Empower is the firm's virtual one-day program for freshmen and sophomores pursuing an accounting degree. Registration for 2027 is open. It is not an internship application, but it is the published route to meeting recruiters before you are eligible for one.
Which Internship Guides Should I Read Next?
- Deloitte internship guide for the closest comparison on audit, tax, and consulting at a larger firm.
- IBM internship guide if the technology and advisory side interests you more than the accounting.
How Simplify Can Help
Grant Thornton publishes no deadlines, splits hiring across three paths, and posts openings in offices most students never search. Simplify lists every current opening with its pay and requirements, tracks your applications, autofills forms, and builds the resume versions each path needs.
Three paths means three different resumes.
Tax, audit, and advisory reward different evidence. Build a version per path that leads with the project, filing, or measured outcome that team actually asks for.
