How bookkeeping is priced

Ask five bookkeepers what they charge and you'll often hear "it depends" five times. It does depend, but on a short list of things you can pin down before the first invoice.

The pricing models you'll run into

The most useful recent figures come from Ignition, which makes proposal and billing software for accounting firms. In July 2025 it surveyed 219 US-based accounting firms that use its software, online. That's a convenience sample, not a picture of every firm in the country, and the question covered monthly bookkeeping and accounting together, not bookkeeping alone.

Asked how they price monthly bookkeeping and accounting, the firms answered:

• Fixed fee: 54%
• Value pricing: 27%
• A minimum fee plus a charge for complexity: 11%
• Hourly: just under 4%

So a fixed monthly fee is the norm among those firms, and billing by the hour is now rare. A fixed fee is easy to budget. The catch is scope: the fee covers a set amount of work, and anything outside it is extra.

What firms said they charge each month

The same survey asked for the average monthly fee for monthly bookkeeping and accounting. The largest group, 29% of firms, charged $250 to $499 a month. Close behind, 27% charged $500 to $749, and about 17% charged $750 to $999. At the top end, 13% charged $1,000 to $1,499, 7% charged $1,500 to $2,500 and 3% charged more than $2,500. Only 4% charged under $250.

Read those as bands, not a price list. We don't publish an "average price", because the spread is wide and the survey mixes bookkeeping with broader accounting work. Wage figures for bookkeeping clerks don't help either: that's what employees earn, not what firms charge.

What moves the price

• How many bank accounts, cards and payment apps feed the books.
• How many transactions go through them each month.
• Whether payroll, bill paying or invoicing are included.
• Whether you need reports monthly or quarterly.
• How many entities or locations you run.
• What state the books are in when the firm takes them over.

Catch-up work is priced on its own

If you're months or years behind, expect catch-up or cleanup work to be quoted separately from the monthly fee. We haven't found a reliable national benchmark for it, so we don't publish one. What you can do is ask for the quote to name the starting month, how many past months it covers, and what happens if the old records turn out worse than expected.

Before you sign

1. Ask which pricing model the firm uses, and what the fee covers each month.
2. Get the exclusions in writing: tax returns, payroll, sales tax and advice are often extra.
3. Ask how scope changes are priced, since that's where a fixed fee grows.
4. Get catch-up work quoted as its own line.
5. Check the firm's pricing evidence on our profiles. Each one shows whether the firm publishes a price, a starting price, or says it quotes each job.

Our market pages show what share of local firms publish any price at all. It's a quick way to see whether you'll need to ask.