A bookkeeper costs $30 to $90 an hour in 2026, and most independent US bookkeepers quote between $45 and $75. A flat monthly service for a business under $2M in revenue runs $300 to $900, national online providers sit at $299 to $599 a month before add-ons, and an in-house bookkeeper costs $55,000 to $75,000 a year once payroll taxes and benefits are counted. Your transaction volume, the number of bank and card accounts you run, any backlog that has to be cleared first, and your entity type decide where inside those ranges you land.
How much does a bookkeeper cost per hour?
$30 to $90 an hour is the honest range in 2026, and the spread inside it maps almost exactly onto how much the person can do without asking you first. At the bottom, $30 to $45 buys data entry, so someone categorizes what the bank feed brings in and reconciles the accounts, and anything unusual comes back to you as a question. In the middle, $45 to $75 buys a bookkeeper who handles payroll journal entries, fixed assets, loan amortization and sales tax without prompting. At the top, $75 to $90 and up is someone who closes a month properly, produces statements a lender will accept, and tells you a number looks wrong before you've noticed.
Hourly billing carries a structural problem worth naming, which is that it prices the provider's speed rather than your outcome, so a slow bookkeeper at $45 costs you more than a fast one at $75 and the rate card gives you no way to tell them apart. Ask for an estimated monthly hours range in writing before you sign anything, and treat a refusal to put one on paper as the answer to your question.
How much does a monthly bookkeeping service cost?
Flat monthly pricing is where most owner-led businesses end up, and the table below is what the market charged in mid-2026. Every figure is a range published or quoted by the provider, checked in July and August 2026, and each one moves with your volume.
| Option | 2026 range | What you get | Where it strains |
|---|---|---|---|
| Freelance, hourly | $30 to $90 an hour, often 5 to 15 hours a month | One person, flexible scope | No coverage when they're away, and cost varies month to month |
| Freelance, flat monthly | $250 to $600 a month | Predictable categorizing and reconciliation | Payroll, inventory and sales tax usually cost extra |
| Local firm or CPA practice | $500 to $1,500 a month | Continuity, and the return often included | Slowest to answer during tax season |
| National online provider | $199 to $599 a month, plus onboarding | Standard process, defined deliverables | Tax billed separately, onboarding from $1,000 at some providers |
| Software with expert help | From $300 a month after a cleanup fee starting at $800, plus a $35 to $235 software subscription | Works inside a file you already own | The all-in number lands well above the headline |
| In-house bookkeeper | $55,000 to $75,000 a year all in | Full availability, deep context | One person's vacation is your entire coverage plan |
The published headline is rarely the number you pay, because national providers quote the bookkeeping and bill the tax return separately, so Pilot lists tax from roughly $2,450 a year and Bookkeeper360 lists it around $1,000 to $1,500, which turns a $299 headline into a $500 monthly reality once the return is counted. Intuit's full-service option also requires an active QuickBooks Online subscription on top of its service fee, so the real starting point is closer to $335 a month than $300.
What does an in-house bookkeeper cost all in?
$55,000 to $75,000 a year is the all-in figure for a full-time bookkeeper in 2026, built from a $45,000 to $60,000 base plus roughly 20% to 25% on top for employer payroll taxes, health insurance, paid time off and a software seat. A part-time bookkeeper at fifteen hours a week lands around $25,000 to $35,000, and that's usually the version an owner-led business at $500K to $2M actually needs, because a business that size generates 8 to 20 hours of bookkeeping a month rather than 160.
Hiring in-house buys you availability and costs you continuity. One person means one person's vacation, one person's judgment on a hard classification, and one person's memory of why the 2024 equipment loan was booked the way it was, so when they leave in March the file goes cold in April and you're paying for a catch-up by summer. That gap is what a firm or a managed service is really selling against, which is why our small business bookkeeping service assigns a named accountant with the process documented behind them.
What actually drives your price up?
- The number of financial accounts, because every checking account, credit card, loan, line of credit and payment processor is a separate monthly reconciliation, so going from two accounts to six roughly doubles the monthly work with no change in revenue
- Transaction volume, which is the count of lines hitting those accounts, so a consulting firm at 90 transactions a month and a shop at 900 pay very differently on identical revenue
- A backlog, which gets priced as its own project rather than folded into the monthly rate
- Payroll, since every pay run needs a journal entry, quarterly filings to tie out, and liability accounts that clear on schedule
- Inventory, which needs cost of goods calculated rather than expensed, and it's the most common reason a small business gross margin reads wrong
- Sales tax in more than one state, because each jurisdiction is a separate return and a separate liability account to reconcile
- Multiple entities or locations, or one entity with funding sources that have to be reported apart from each other
Revenue barely appears on that list, which catches people out, because a $1.8M professional services firm with two bank accounts and 120 transactions a month is cheaper to keep books for than a $600K online retailer with four processors, inventory, and sales tax in nine states. When a provider quotes off revenue alone they're pricing a proxy, and the proxy misses in both directions. We price the drivers themselves instead, metering on the number of financial accounts and your posted transaction volume, and the current numbers are on the Median pricing page.
Why does a cleanup get quoted separately?
Because it's a different job, and pricing it inside the monthly rate means either you overpay every month after it's finished or the provider loses money for the first six. Catch-up and cleanup work runs $150 to $600 for each month you're behind at typical complexity, and more on files with several accounts and payroll, so a year of backlog is a $1,800 to $7,000 project sitting in front of a $400 a month engagement.
Ask for the cleanup scope in writing with a date range and a definition of finished, because the word covers everything from clearing an uncategorized pile to reconstructing two years of a balance sheet. The definition we use on a bookkeeping cleanup is every account reconciled to the statement through the end date, every balance sheet line supported by a document, and a trial balance your tax preparer can file from without asking follow-up questions.
When does the cheap option cost you more?
A $200 a month bookkeeper is a genuine bargain right up until the year they hand your tax preparer a file nobody can file from. The rework gets billed at preparer rates of $150 to $400 an hour, and a return-blocking cleanup in March is the worst possible moment to buy hours, because everyone competent is already booked through April. A single bad year commonly costs $2,000 to $5,000 to unwind, which is about three years of the discount you were collecting.
The other version of expensive moves slower and shows up nowhere, and it's the decisions you make on wrong numbers. When shipping and merchant fees sit in an expense account instead of cost of goods, your gross margin reads six or eight points high, and you price a job or a product line off that figure for a year before anything corrects it. Nobody sends an invoice for that, which is precisely why it survives so long.
The test worth applying to any quote is what happens in the gap. Ask what the provider does when a $4,000 charge appears that nobody recognizes, and the useful answers are that they ask you within a day or two, or they park it in a named holding account and tell you it's parked. The answer that costs you money is that they pick the most likely category and move on, because that's how a guess becomes a number you trust.
How do you compare two quotes fairly?
- The scope in months and accounts, with every bank, card, loan and processor listed by name rather than counted
- What's included against what's billed separately, specifically the tax return, payroll filings, sales tax returns and 1099s
- What happens to the price when volume changes, and at which threshold it moves
- What onboarding or cleanup costs, as its own number with a date range attached to it
- Who does the work, and whether the same person handles your file each month or it goes into a queue
- How fast a question reaches you, since a provider who batches questions into one monthly email will hold a dozen unanswered items for four weeks
Run that list past both quotes and the cheaper headline often loses. A $299 a month service with the tax return at $2,450, payroll filings at $50 a month and a $1,000 onboarding project comes to $7,638 in the first year, and a $500 a month quote with the return included comes to $6,000, so the option that looked $200 a month cheaper ends up costing $1,638 more.
What should you expect to pay at your revenue level?
At $500K to $1M in revenue with two or three financial accounts and under 200 transactions a month, $300 to $500 a month is a fair market rate for monthly bookkeeping with a real person reviewing it, and the tax return sits on top at $1,200 to $2,500 for an S corporation or partnership. At $1M to $2M with payroll, four or more accounts and 300 to 800 transactions a month, $500 to $1,000 a month is normal, and a firm handling the return and the sales tax filings as well will quote toward the top of that band.
Anything materially under $200 a month at those volumes usually means offshore data entry with nobody reviewing the output, a bookkeeper who's about to reprice you, or a headline rate with the real cost hiding in add-ons. Ask which one it is before you sign, because all three are survivable when you know going in.
Our own pricing is metered rather than tiered, so it moves with the number of financial accounts you run and the volume of entries posted to your ledger, and a simpler business pays less without having to negotiate for it. The AI categorizes and posts every business day and a named accountant reviews what it flags, which is what keeps a file from becoming next year's cleanup project, and the current rate card sits on the pricing page alongside what outsourced accounting covers beyond the monthly numbers.