FTI Consulting billed an average of $529 an hour for Corporate Finance work in 2025, and the segment's billable staff spent 60% of their available hours on client matters, according to the firm's 2025 annual report on Form 10-K. Nobody pays that rate for a hypothesis. They pay for a number that is still standing after opposing counsel, a creditors' committee, or a judge has spent a day trying to knock it over.
That is the FTI interview in one sentence. The interviewer is not scoring how bold your recommendation is. They are scoring whether they could put your work in front of a hostile reader. The confident single-point answer that MBB prep drills into you is the most common way to fail here, and most guides never say so because they treat FTI as a smaller McKinsey.
By the end of this piece you will know where FTI's revenue actually comes from (and therefore where the seats are), what FTI itself publishes about its hiring process versus what is folklore, how I score a defensible answer against a clever one, and how to build a 13-week cash forecast on a single sheet of paper.
Follow the revenue, because the seats follow it
FTI reports five segments. Their economics differ more than the careers page suggests, and the differences tell you where hiring is happening. Figures below come from the full-year 2025 results release and the 10-K; the revenue-per-head column is my arithmetic, not FTI's.
| Segment | 2025 revenue | Change vs 2024 | Billable staff, Dec 2025 | Revenue per billable head | Utilization | Average rate per hour |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Corporate Finance (restructuring, transactions, transformation) | $1,551.0m | +11.5% | 2,297 | $675k | 60% | $529 |
| Forensic and Litigation Consulting | $764.7m | +10.8% | 1,541 | $496k | 57% | $442 |
| Economic Consulting (including Compass Lexecon) | $720.8m | -16.5% | 1,014 | $711k | 59% | $583 |
| Technology | $373.9m | -10.5% | 662 | $565k | not reported | not reported |
| Strategic Communications | $378.5m | +12.6% | 907 | $417k | not reported | not reported |
Three things to take from the table.
First, Corporate Finance is 41% of the firm and grew 11.5%. By June 30, 2026 its billable headcount had reached 2,358, up 7.8% year on year, per the second-quarter 2026 release. If you are applying without a strong segment preference, this is where the volume is.
Second, Economic Consulting had a bad 2025. Revenue fell 16.5%, utilization dropped from 66% to 59%, adjusted segment EBITDA margin went from 12.7% to 3.5%, and billable headcount fell from 1,110 to 1,014, then to 970 by June 2026. That is a 12.6% headcount decline in eighteen months. FTI attributes the revenue fall to lower demand for antitrust work. It does not mean Compass Lexecon stopped hiring, but it does mean fewer seats and a higher bar than in 2024. If economic consulting is your target, read the Compass Lexecon guide alongside this one.
Third, the numbers hang together in a way you can check yourself. Corporate Finance revenue per billable head of about $675k, divided by the $529 average rate, implies roughly 1,280 billed hours a year, or about 25 hours a week. At 60% utilization that implies about 2,100 available hours, which is a normal working year. The approximation is loose because revenue includes success fees and pass-through costs that the rate excludes, but it tells you what the job is: roughly 25 hours a week that someone is paying for by the hour and will scrutinize line by line.
Technology's per-head figure is inflated because FTI excludes "as-needed" staff from the headcount (an average of 602 of them in 2025), and Strategic Communications is mostly not billed by the hour, so treat those two rows as directional.
Your client is usually a lawyer, and that changes the scoring
The 10-K says that 99 of the top 100 law firms on the American Lawyer Global 100 list refer or engage FTI, and that "referrals from clients, law firms and other intermediaries" are key to winning work. It describes the demand driver for FLC, Economic Consulting, and Technology as law firms and their clients relying on "independent outside resources to evaluate claims and data, facilitate discovery, assess damages, provide expert reports and testimony." In its own job postings FTI calls itself "the leading global expert firm."
Expert firm, not strategy firm. The distinction is not branding. It changes who reads your work and what happens when it is wrong.
| Dimension | Strategy engagement | FTI engagement |
|---|---|---|
| Who commissions the work | CEO or sponsor | Often counsel, a lender, a board committee, or a court-appointed party |
| Who reads it | People who want you to be right | People paid to prove you wrong |
| What a good number looks like | One number, stated with conviction | A range, with the assumptions that move it labeled |
| What "rigor" means | The logic holds | Every input traces to a document you can produce |
| What kills the work | A boring recommendation | An unsupported assumption found on page 40 |
| Standard of proof | Persuasive | Would you sign it, and would it survive a deposition |
FTI's early-talent recruiting manager put the interviewer's question plainly in a Handshake panel on consulting careers: "Can I put this candidate in front of our clients, and will they represent this company well?" At FTI, "in front of our clients" can mean in front of a creditors' committee that is voting on whether the client survives.
What FTI publishes about its process, and what it does not
Firms publish less than prep sites pretend. Here is what FTI itself puts in writing in its US student postings on its own careers portal, as of the 2026 and 2027 cycles.
| Stage | What FTI states | Where it says so |
|---|---|---|
| Application | Apply to a segment posting, not to "FTI"; the 2027 entry-level postings recommended no more than two segment applications | 2027 postings |
| Preference form | Sent within two business days; you pick a market and a practice area within the segment | 2026 intern postings |
| Pre-recorded video | Two questions, one minute to answer each, sent within two business days | 2026 intern postings |
| 2027 full-time timeline | Applications opened July 27, priority deadline August 28, final deadline September 18, 2026; status update within a week of the close | 2027 entry-level posting |
| Later rounds | "Several rounds of interviews with members of the team," mostly virtual, ending in a super day of behavioral, technical, and case interviews | FTI recruiter, Handshake panel |
| Eligibility (US) | Minimum 3.0 GPA; US work authorization without future sponsorship | 2026 and 2027 postings |
What FTI does not publish: the case format, its length, whether it is written or spoken, what the scoring sheet contains, or how much it varies by office. From the interviewer's chair, I would expect it to vary a great deal, because FTI's segments hire different people. The 2026 FLC internship posting lists preferred majors including accounting, construction management, health sciences, actuarial science, and law, and pay of $20 to $34 for what is a non-exempt hourly internship. That is not the profile of a generalist case-cracker. It is the profile of someone who will be useful on a specific kind of matter in week one.
Folklore, labeled as such: London graduate hiring is widely described by candidates as ending in an assessment centre with a group exercise, and some segments are said to add a written exercise. FTI does not publish this. Ask your recruiter and believe the recruiter over the forum.
The practical consequence of the two-questions-one-minute video is underrated. You get sixty seconds to explain why this segment. "I like solving problems" is empty in any format; in sixty seconds it is fatal. Name the type of matter you want to work on (a contested Chapter 11 plan, a construction delay claim, a merger review) and one thing about it you already understand.
The defensibility test: how I score an FTI-style answer
When I score a case in this style I am listening for five things. None of them is "was the recommendation bold."
| What the sheet rewards | What it sounds like | Where candidates leak points |
|---|---|---|
| Sourced inputs | "The $14m weekly receipts figure is from the prompt; the 75% cost of goods is my assumption from grocery norms" | Blending given facts and guesses into one confident sentence |
| Labeled assumptions | "This whole answer rests on supplier terms holding; if they don't, the number roughly doubles" | Hiding the assumption that does all the work |
| A range with a driver | "Between $7m and $20m, and the driver is how many suppliers move to payment on delivery" | One number, no driver |
| The next document | "I'd want the payables aging by vendor and the log of supplier calls this month" | "Next step: implement" |
| Audience fit | Written as a memo to counsel or the lender, not a pep talk to the CEO | Closing with a growth strategy nobody asked for |
Score each from 0 to 2 and you have a ten-point sheet. In my experience a strategy-trained candidate walking into this interview scores 4 or 5: fluent structure, decent math, then a single-point answer with hidden assumptions and a CEO-style close. The candidate who gets the offer scores 8 or 9 with less polished delivery.
Ned's rule. At FTI, your answer is exactly as strong as the weakest assumption in it, because that is the one the other side will find. Name it before they do, put a range around it, and say which document would settle it.
Worked example: Harvest Lane Markets and the 13-week cash forecast
Corporate Finance is the largest segment, and the 13-week cash forecast is the document restructuring work runs on. Here is a case you can rebuild in a spreadsheet in ten minutes. The company and every figure are invented.
Prompt. Harvest Lane Markets runs 38 grocery stores. Its revolver is fully drawn, it has $9.0m of cash, and its lender has asked whether it needs new money before a refinancing that is thirteen weeks away. You have the following weekly figures.
- Receipts: $14.0m a week (grocery is cash and card, so receipts track sales)
- Cost of goods: $10.5m a week (75% of sales), currently bought on 14-day terms
- Other operating cash costs: $0.9m a week
- Payroll: $3.2m every second week (weeks 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12)
- Rent: $2.6m in weeks 1, 5, 9, and 13
- Advisor and legal fees: $0.8m in weeks 4, 8, and 12
Step one, the base case. Recurring net cash before lumpy items is 14.0 minus 10.5 minus 0.9, or +$2.6m a week. Layer on the lumpy items and run the balance forward from $9.0m.
| Week | Lumpy items that week ($m) | Base case ending cash ($m) | Stress case ending cash ($m) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Rent 2.6 | 9.0 | 9.0 |
| 2 | Payroll 3.2 | 8.4 | 8.4 |
| 3 | none | 11.0 | 0.5 |
| 4 | Payroll 3.2, fees 0.8 | 9.6 | -11.4 |
| 5 | Rent 2.6 | 9.6 | -11.4 |
| 6 | Payroll 3.2 | 9.0 | -12.0 |
| 7 | none | 11.6 | -9.4 |
| 8 | Payroll 3.2, fees 0.8 | 10.2 | -10.8 |
| 9 | Rent 2.6 | 10.2 | -10.8 |
| 10 | Payroll 3.2 | 9.6 | -11.4 |
| 11 | none | 12.2 | -8.8 |
| 12 | Payroll 3.2, fees 0.8 | 10.8 | -10.2 |
| 13 | Rent 2.6 | 10.8 | -10.2 |
Base case: the low point is $8.4m in week 2 and the company ends with $10.8m. A strategy-trained candidate stops here and says the business is cash-stable, so the conversation should move to margin. That is the 4-out-of-10 answer. It is arithmetically correct and useless, because it treats a distressed company's payables as if they belonged to a healthy one.
Step two, the assumption doing all the work. Harvest Lane buys on 14-day terms, so at any moment it owes suppliers about two weeks of purchases: $21.0m. Suppliers read the same trade press as the lender. If they move the company to payment on delivery, Harvest Lane has to pay for new deliveries while also paying down the $21.0m already outstanding. Spread that over weeks 3 and 4 and each of those weeks absorbs an extra $10.5m of outflow. That is the stress column. The trough is minus $12.0m in week 6, and the company never gets back above zero before the refinancing.
Step three, the answer as a memo to the lender. In the base case Harvest Lane needs no new money. If suppliers tighten to payment on delivery, it needs about $12m to cover the trough plus a minimum operating balance, say $5m for tills and float, so roughly $17m, and it needs the money by week 3, not week 6, because it has to be in the account before deliveries stop. If only half the supplier base tightens, the extra outflow is $10.5m rather than $21.0m and the trough is around minus $1.5m, so the need is closer to $7m. The range is $7m to $20m, and the single driver is supplier behavior, not sales. The two documents I would ask for before Monday are the payables aging by vendor and a log of every supplier call in the last thirty days.
That last paragraph is the whole job. Notice what it does not contain: a growth plan, a single "the answer is," or any pretense that the sales line is what matters. Notice what it does contain: the base case, the assumption that breaks it, a range, the driver, the timing, and the next document. Every number traces back to the prompt or to a stated assumption, which is the first thing a lender's counsel will check.
The disputes-side version of the same discipline, but-for minus actual with a range, is what Cornerstone Research and NERA interviews run on damages rather than cash.
The same test, segment by segment
The defensibility test does not change across FTI. What counts as the weakest assumption does.
| Segment | The conversation is really about | The assumption that gets attacked | The MBB habit that hurts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Corporate Finance | Cash, not EBITDA; who gets paid, in what order | Supplier terms, collection timing, covenant headroom | Recommending a strategy to a company with six weeks of cash |
| Forensic and Litigation Consulting | What happened, in what order, and what the documents show | Causation: did X actually cause the loss you are counting | Reframing a fact pattern as a market-entry problem |
| Economic Consulting | The but-for world and how you would test it | Your counterfactual: what would have happened absent the conduct | Estimating market size when the question was damages |
| Technology | Where the data lives and how you would defend the collection | Completeness and chain of custody | Talking about "digital transformation" instead of what was collected and how |
| Strategic Communications | What the company should say, to whom, in what sequence | Whether the message survives the facts coming out later | Treating a crisis like a brand exercise |
Alvarez & Marsal, the closest rival in restructuring, applies the same cash discipline but its interviews lean more operational; the A&M guide covers that difference. For middle-market operations work with a private equity flavor, compare West Monroe.
The rep to do tonight
Rebuild the Harvest Lane table in a spreadsheet. It should take ten minutes. Then change one assumption, say a 5% sales decline from week 5 as shelves thin, and watch what it does. With cost of goods held at 75%, recurring net cash falls from $2.6m to about $2.4m a week; the week-13 balance drops by about $1.6m and the trough deepens by less than $0.5m. Small, which is the point: sales are not the driver in this case, and being able to say so with a number is what separates the 8 from the 4. Then write a five-sentence memo to the lender. If it contains the words "range" and "driver" and the name of a document, you have done the rep.
Then do the spoken version. CoachNed's math drill puts case arithmetic on a clock so the numbers become automatic and your attention is free for the assumptions. Run three sets, then take the five-minute first rep, which needs no account, and rewrite its closing turn as a memo to counsel instead of advice to a CEO. When you want a full case with a debrief, the live voice case with Ned runs about eighteen minutes and returns seven scores. Everything is open for seven days, no card; then $120 for a recruiting season or $49 a month.
CoachNed is independent and not affiliated with FTI Consulting, Compass Lexecon, or any other firm named in this guide.
Frequently asked questions
Does FTI Consulting use case interviews?
Yes, in at least some segments. FTI's own recruiting manager has described the final super day as a mix of behavioral, technical, and case interviews, and the firm's postings describe a two-question pre-recorded video as the first screen. FTI does not publish the case format, and it varies by segment and office, so confirm with your recruiter.
Is the FTI interview harder than McKinsey, BCG, or Bain?
It is different rather than harder. The structuring bar is lower and the defensibility bar is higher: you are expected to know the difference between a fact from the prompt and your own assumption, and to give a range with a driver rather than one number. Candidates who have only done MBB prep usually find the first part easy and the second part unfamiliar.
Which FTI segment is easiest to get into?
There is no public acceptance data by segment. What is public is headcount: Corporate Finance grew its billable staff 7.8% in the year to June 2026, while Economic Consulting shrank from 1,110 billable professionals at the end of 2024 to 970 by June 2026. More seats does not mean a lower bar, but it does mean more chances to meet an interviewer who wants your specific background.
Do I need an accounting or finance degree for FTI?
Not across the firm. FTI's 2026 FLC internship posting lists preferred majors from accounting and finance through construction management, health sciences, law, and statistics, and Economic Consulting hires economists. Corporate Finance leans toward accounting and finance because the work is cash and balance-sheet based. Match the segment to your degree rather than the other way around.
How long does FTI's recruiting process take?
For the 2027 US entry-level cycle, applications opened July 27, 2026, the final deadline was September 18, and FTI said candidates would hear about next steps within a week of the close, with interviews and super days following over the autumn. The 2026 internships ran on a similar pattern, closing February 4 with a final decision promised by March 6.
Sources
- FTI Consulting Form 10-K for fiscal 2025, filed February 26, 2026 — segment descriptions, billable headcount by segment (6,421 of 8,118 employees), utilization and average billable rate definitions and figures, law-firm referral language, Economic Consulting decline, as-needed Technology staff. Checked 2026-09-24.
- FTI Consulting Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Financial Results — 2025 revenue of $3,788.9m, segment revenues, growth rates, and margins. Checked 2026-09-24.
- FTI Consulting Reports Second Quarter 2026 Financial Results — June 30, 2026 billable headcount by segment and Corporate Finance growth. Checked 2026-09-24.
- 2026 Intern, Forensic and Litigation Consulting, FTI student careers portal — preference form, two-question one-minute video interview, preferred majors, pay range, eligibility, and "leading global expert firm" language. Checked 2026-09-24.
- 2027 Entry Level Consultant, Technology, FTI Consulting posting — 2027 timeline, two-segment recommendation, and video-interview invitation window. Checked 2026-09-24.
- So you want to work in consulting, Handshake — FTI's early-talent recruiting manager on the interview stages and the "in front of our clients" test. Checked 2026-09-24.