•The research needed for tenure or promotion in accounting is unclear.•We evaluate faculty research from universities with a Ph.D. or Masters in accounting.•Quality measured by Australian Business Dean’s Council and accounting journal lists.•Our research provides valuable input for decisions about accounting faculty research.•We categorize research records by university type and main accounting subdisciplines. The quantity and quality of research articles required to attain tenure or to be promoted in accounting is not always known and evolves over time. To help add clarity to this dilemma, this study evaluates the quantity and quality of publication records for faculty who successfully achieved tenure or promotion at universities offering Ph.D. and/or Masters programs in accounting. Quality of publication was determined based on a number of metrics including the Australian Business Dean’s Council journal list (ABDC), which is now widely used for tenure and promotion decisions as well as for accreditation purposes, and the BYU rankings of accounting journals. We are one of the first empirical studies to use the ABDC to determine research quality. Our analysis shows that for tenure decisions, accounting faculty at Ph.D. granting institutions publish, on average, fewer articles than accounting faculty at Masters universities, but those published articles are at much higher quality journals. In addition, both tenured and promoted faculty at private universities publish significantly more in high quality accounting journals than faculty at public universities. Collectively, our results indicate that research quality and quantity differ between universities that grant Ph.Ds. in accounting and those that only offer a Masters degree in accounting, and between public and private universities. More importantly, our research provides quantity and quality expectations for tenure and promotion cases that can be used by accounting faculty, administrators, and external reviewers across different types of universities. Given that our results are based on historical data and tenure/promotion requirements tend to continually increase over time, this study’s results should only be used as a guide for future tenure and promotion cases.