A total of 30 FTSE 100 companies have either changed auditor during the last financial year or announced they will do so in the future, while a further five decided to stick with their incumbent auditor for the time being. With a further tranche which have tenders still ongoing, auditors are beginning to look toward a slightly quieter future.

The survey reveals the audit market for these blue chip companies is worth £589m, up 10% from £534m in last year’s survey.

However, according to EY’s head of audit Hywel Ball, activity will stay at a healthy level.

‘Most companies tender either in the autumn or the spring, so we still have some big companies out there that are tendering, but that then will have broken the back of the FTSE 100, so we will move to a lower volume of tenders,’ he said.

Even though many companies are giving a clear steer in their audit committee reports about a possible timetable for when they are likely to test the market, a number are still going to tender earlier than they have to.

‘The FTSE 100 market will be busy until the summer of 2017 and then it will slow down,’ said Ball.

Hemione Hudson, PwC’s head of assurance, agrees. ‘The market has settled down from where we were in 2014/15, where there were a high number of tenders in the FTSE 100,’ she said. ‘As we came into a world of mandatory rotation there was quite a bit of pent up change that had to happen and companies decided that they wanted to go to tender quite early because they could see how the land was lying. It was the right thing to do from a governance perspective and, therefore, they wanted to do it on their own timetable.’

Hudson adds that PwC is not expecting to see as much activity next year as the market reaches a position she calls ‘a steady state’.

For more, read Accountancy's FTSE 100: Auditors Survey here.