Who Owns PwC?

The PwC name was created in 1998 when Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand merged, but both predecessor firms traced their roots to nineteenth century London accountancy. Samuel Lowell Price opened an accounting practice in London in 1849. Edwin Waterhouse joined the practice in 1865, and the firm eventually became Price, Waterhouse & Co. Separately, William Cooper founded Cooper Brothers in London in 1854. Across the Atlantic, William Lybrand and partners established Lybrand, Ross Brothers & Montgomery in Philadelphia in 1898.

Cooper Brothers merged with Lybrand's US practice and the Canadian firm McDonald, Currie in 1957 to form Coopers & Lybrand. Price Waterhouse grew into one of the largest accountancy partnerships in the world through the twentieth century, auditing industrial clients on both sides of the Atlantic and building a strong consulting practice.

By the 1990s, the six largest accounting firms, known as the Big Six, were consolidating. Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand agreed to merge in 1997, and the combined firm launched as PricewaterhouseCoopers on July 1, 1998. The deal created the largest professional services firm in the world at the time and reduced the Big Six to the Big Five. The collapse of Arthur Andersen in 2002 after the Enron scandal left the Big Four structure that remains today: Deloitte, PwC, EY, and KPMG.

PwC sold its consulting arm to IBM for $3.5 billion in 2002, largely because new independence rules after Sarbanes-Oxley restricted audit firms from consulting for audit clients. The firm rebuilt advisory services over the following decade, acquiring Booz & Company in 2014 and rebranding it as Strategy&, which became PwC's global strategy consulting business.

In the 2020s, the network invested heavily in technology. PwC committed more than $1 billion to its Next Generation Audit platform, which applies AI and cloud-based delivery to audit work, and announced roughly $1.5 billion in ongoing AI investment in FY2025. For the twelve months ended June 30, 2025, the network reported record gross revenues of $56.9 billion, up 2.9 percent in US dollars over the prior year.