Which Tax Software Should You Learn? Drake Wins the Survey and Shows Up in 33 Postings
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We're tracking 7,877 live tax postings right now, and only 760 of them, about 9.6%, name a professional tax preparation product at all. Among those, the CCH family (Axcess and ProSystem fx) shows up in 640, UltraTax in 112, Lacerte in 73, Drake in 33. Meanwhile the most-cited survey of people who actually prepare returns says Drake is the best-rated tax software in the business and the second most used, and those two pictures barely overlap, which is the useful part if you're deciding what to learn or what to buy. Counts are as of October 2026 and a posting that lists three products counts for each of them, so the numbers overlap a bit.
What tax software do preparers actually use?
The best data is the Journal of Accountancy's annual survey, and the 2025 tax software survey heard from 2,011 AICPA members who prepared 2024 returns for a fee, fielded June 2 through 20, 2025. UltraTax CS led usage at 22.9%, followed by Drake Tax at 16.3%, Lacerte at 15.8%, CCH Axcess Tax at 12.5%, ProSeries at 10.5%, CCH ProSystem fx at 8.3% and ATX at 4.6%. Drake took the highest overall rating at 4.4 on the 1-to-5 scale and the top marks for busy-season updates and support, and it was the outlier on price, with 85.1% of its users liking what they pay and only 8.2% disliking it, while cost was the most common complaint about nearly everything else.
Which tax software do employers name in job postings?
The CCH family dominates. It appears in 640 postings, which is 84% of the 760 that name any preparer product, even though the two CCH products together make up about 21% of the survey. UltraTax, the usage leader at 22.9%, shows up in 112 postings, about 15% of the named-product postings, and Drake sits at 33, roughly 4%, against a 16.3% share of actual preparers. Lacerte is named in 73 postings, ProSeries and ProConnect in 29, and ATX in 2. The overlap matters here since postings tend to read like a list (one asks for 'UltraTax, CCH, Drake, Lacerte, ProSeries, or similar'), so treat the shares as rough, though the direction is hard to argue with.
Why does Drake barely show up in postings?
I can't prove this, but my read is that hiring is the difference. Drake's strength is with small and mid-size practices, and those firms fill seats through referrals, local networks and the partner's cousin more than through a long job description on a board, while the firms posting at volume tend to run the big platforms or write something vaguer. The vaguer part is real: 906 of the 7,877 postings just say 'tax software' or 'professional tax software' without naming anything, which is more than any single product gets except CCH. So the posting data tells you what larger employers write down, and the survey tells you what the people doing the work have on their desktop, and neither is wrong, they just measure different hiring habits.
What about corporate tax departments?
Different world, different stack. In the same 7,877 postings, Thomson Reuters ONESOURCE appears in 526 (6.7%), more than any preparer product except CCH, Corptax in 162, and Alteryx in 207 (2.6%). In-house tax teams are buying provision, compliance and data-prep tools rather than return-prep desktops, and Excel is named in 5,043 of the postings (64%) regardless of which side you sit on. If you're aiming at corporate tax, ONESOURCE and Alteryx are the lines on the resume that match the postings, and the career-ladder side of this shows up in our look at remote tax accountant jobs.
What I'd do
If you're job hunting in public accounting, list the whole family of what you've touched (CCH Axcess, UltraTax, Lacerte, whatever it was) instead of agonizing over one, since a hiring manager is mostly checking that you've worked a full return cycle in a professional package and the switching cost between them is small next to knowing the return itself. Ask what they run in the first screen and be straight about the gaps, because 'or similar' appears in these postings for a reason. If you're picking software for your own firm, read the survey's price numbers before the sales demo, and browse the tax tools in our software directory alongside the broader tool counts in which accounting software employers ask for. And if you want a project that makes you better at either side, build a prior-year versus current-year comparison sheet that flags every line that moved more than 10%, which is half of what review is anyway, and then see how much of it you can hand to an AI assistant using what we covered in where AI fits in the tax workflow. Live roles are on the remote tax jobs page.
Frequently asked questions
What is the most used professional tax software?
In the Journal of Accountancy's 2025 survey of 2,011 AICPA members, UltraTax CS led at 22.9%, then Drake Tax at 16.3%, Lacerte at 15.8% and CCH Axcess Tax at 12.5%.
Which tax software do employers name most in job postings?
The CCH family, appearing in 640 of 7,877 live tax postings in our data. UltraTax follows at 112, Lacerte at 73, Drake at 33 and ProSeries or ProConnect at 29.
Is Drake Tax worth learning?
It's the highest-rated product in the survey, at 4.4 overall, and the price satisfaction is unusually high. It's named in fewer postings, though, so learn it if you're headed for a small or mid-size practice and expect to pick up CCH or UltraTax if you're headed for a larger one.
What software do corporate tax departments use?
Our postings point to ONESOURCE (526 mentions), Corptax (162) and Alteryx (207), plus Excel in 64% of tax postings.
Do I need tax software on my resume?
Only about 9.6% of tax postings name a specific professional product, and another 906 say 'tax software' generically, so list what you've used and the number of returns or entities you handled. A full busy season in any professional package counts for more than the brand name.
Pick the return you dread reviewing, open a blank workbook and build the thing that checks it. The software names will keep changing, and the people who can show their own checking tool will keep getting the interview.
