There is no standard price for bookkeeping. What you can charge depends on how much work the engagement actually contains, what that work costs you to deliver, and what the client would otherwise have to pay to get it done another way. Those three things are knowable. Most bookkeepers guess at all three and then pick a round number.
This guide walks through the three pricing models bookkeeping firms actually use, how to size an engagement before you quote it, a method for turning that scope into a monthly fee, and why the in-house cost of the same work is the most useful reference point you have.
The three ways bookkeeping is priced
Hourly
You bill for the time you spend. It is the easiest model to start with and the hardest one to grow on, because it caps your income at the hours you can work and it punishes you for getting faster. The month you finally automate a client's bank feed is the month your invoice to them drops.
Hourly still has a real place: one-off cleanup projects, ad hoc advisory calls, and any engagement where you genuinely cannot predict the volume yet. Use it while you are learning a client, then move them onto a fixed fee once you know what a normal month looks like.
Monthly fixed fee
You agree a defined scope and charge the same amount every month regardless of hours. This is what most established bookkeeping practices run on, and it is better for both sides. The client gets a number they can budget. You get predictable revenue and keep the benefit of every efficiency you build.
The risk sits entirely in the word "defined". A fixed fee against a vague scope is a fixed fee that quietly becomes an hourly rate falling toward zero. The scope section below is the part that makes this model work.
Tiered packages
Two or three named packages, each with its own scope and price, and clients pick the one that fits. It speeds up sales, because the conversation moves from "what will this cost" to "which of these is you", and it gives an existing client an obvious path upward when they outgrow their tier.
The catch is that packages only work if the tiers are built from real scope boundaries, such as transaction volume or whether payroll is included, rather than from vague words like Basic, Plus and Premium. If a prospect cannot tell which tier they are in by reading it, the tiers are not doing their job.
Price the scope, not the hours
Before you can put a number on an engagement you have to know how big it is. The size of a bookkeeping job is driven by a short list of things, and every one of them should be written into the quote:
- Number of bank and credit card accounts to reconcile each month.
- Monthly transaction volume across those accounts. This is the single biggest driver and the easiest to verify: ask for three months of statements before you quote.
- Payroll. Whether you run it, review it, or only record the journal, and how many people are on it.
- Accounts payable and receivable. Entering bills and chasing invoices is a different job from categorising a bank feed.
- Sales tax or VAT filings, and how many jurisdictions.
- Inventory, which turns a straightforward file into a complicated one.
- Reporting cadence. A monthly close with a report pack and a call is more work than a set of books that sits there until the accountant asks.
- The software they already use, and whether it is set up properly or you will be working around it.
Two clients with identical revenue can differ by a factor of three on this list. That is why a revenue-based price, or a price copied from what somebody else charges, is usually wrong in one direction or the other.
What your client is actually comparing you to
When a small business owner weighs up your quote, the alternative in their head is usually hiring somebody. That comparison is one you can put real numbers against, which makes it far more persuasive than any argument about value.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median pay for bookkeeping, accounting and auditing clerks at $24.36 an hour, or $50,670 a year, as of May 2025. That is the wage alone. On top of it an employer pays the employer share of payroll taxes, which the IRS sets at 6.2 percent for Social Security and 1.45 percent for Medicare, plus unemployment insurance, workers' compensation, any benefits, a desk, software licences and the time spent recruiting and managing the person.
So even a part-time in-house bookkeeper at half the median wage costs a small business meaningfully more than the wage suggests, carries a hiring risk, and stops working the week they are ill. Your quote is not being measured against zero. It is being measured against that.
Worth knowing as context for the conversation: BLS projects employment in the occupation to decline by 6 percent between 2025 and 2035, which it attributes largely to software automating routine tasks. The clerical part of the work is shrinking. The judgement, the clean-up and the reporting are not, and that is what a fixed fee should be priced around.
Set the monthly fee up once and let it invoice itself
Billbooks can send a recurring invoice on a schedule and chase it automatically when a payment runs late, so a fixed-fee client never needs a manual invoice again. Free for 30 days, no credit card.
A method for setting the monthly fee
The figures below are a worked example with round numbers, chosen to show the method. They are not benchmarks. Swap in your own.
Step 1: estimate the monthly hours from the scope
Go through the scope list item by item and put an hours figure against each. Four bank accounts and roughly 250 transactions might be six hours of categorising and reconciling. Payroll for three people, two hours. AP entry, three hours. The monthly close, report pack and a thirty minute call, three hours. That is 14 hours a month.
If you have never timed this work, time it on your next two clients before you quote the third. An estimate built from your own logged hours is worth more than any published average.
Step 2: find your cost per billable hour
If you are a solo practice, your cost per hour is not what you want to take home. Start with your target annual income, add your self-employment tax, which the IRS sets at 15.3 percent, made up of 12.4 percent for Social Security and 2.9 percent for Medicare, add your own health cover, retirement contributions, software, insurance and professional development, then divide by the hours you will actually bill.
That last number is the one people get wrong. If you work 40 hours a week and 28 of them end up on a client file, only 70 percent of your time is billable. The rest is sales, admin, your own books and the hours nobody pays for. Dividing by 40 instead of 28 understates your cost by more than a third. The same arithmetic is set out step by step in our guide to bill rate vs pay rate.
Say that arithmetic gives you a full cost of $55 per billable hour.
Step 3: turn hours into a fee, with a margin and a buffer
Fourteen hours at a $55 full cost is $770 of cost. To hold a 30 percent margin on the price, divide by 1 minus the margin:
$770 / (1 - 0.30) = $1,100 a month.
Then add a buffer for the fact that you are absorbing the risk of a bad month, which is what the client is paying a fixed fee for in the first place. Ten percent is a reasonable starting point, and it is the difference between a fee that survives a messy quarter and one that does not.
Step 4: sanity-check it against the in-house number
Set the annual value of that fee next to what the same work would cost in-house given the BLS figures above, and check that the story holds up. If your fee is higher than a full-time hire for a file that needs 14 hours a month, either the scope is bigger than you estimated or the price is wrong. If it is a small fraction of a part-time hire, you have probably underpriced and the client is getting a bargain they did not ask for.
Cleanup and catch-up work is priced separately
Almost every new client arrives with something behind. Six months of uncategorised transactions, a bank account that has never reconciled, a prior year the accountant sent back. Do not fold that into the monthly fee, and do not quote it blind.
Cleanup is the one part of bookkeeping where hourly pricing genuinely fits, because nobody can see the bottom of the file from the outside. Two workable approaches: quote the cleanup hourly with an estimated range and a checkpoint at which you both reassess, or run a paid diagnostic of a few hours first and quote a fixed price once you know what is in there. Either is better than a fixed price for an unknown quantity of work, which is how bookkeepers end up doing 40 hours for a 10 hour fee.
Bill the cleanup as its own project, with its own quote and its own payment terms, and start the monthly retainer from clean books.
Where bookkeeping fees leak
- The quick question. Individually trivial, collectively an unbilled advisory service. Decide whether calls are inside the fee, and if they are, say how many and how long.
- Chasing paperwork. Time spent asking a client four times for a missing receipt is time you are paying for. Write the client's obligations into the engagement, not just yours.
- The year-end package. Preparing the file for the accountant is real work and often sits outside the monthly scope by accident. Either price it in explicitly or quote it as an annual extra.
- Silent growth. The client who signed at 200 transactions a month is at 600 two years later, on the same fee. Review transaction volume against the tier annually, and put that review in the engagement letter so it is expected rather than awkward.
- Never repricing. Your software costs, insurance and time are all more expensive than they were. A fee set three years ago and never touched is a pay cut you gave yourself.
About the price ranges you find online
Search for what to charge for bookkeeping and you will find plenty of confident ranges. Almost all of them are published by firms that sell bookkeeping, outsourcing or software, which means they are marketing pages rather than surveys, and their numbers are chosen to make a particular offer look reasonable. There is no equivalent of the BLS wage series for what bookkeeping practices charge their clients.
Treat those ranges as background noise, not as a benchmark. The numbers you can actually verify are your own logged hours, your own costs, and the published wage data for the in-house alternative. Price from those.
Common mistakes
- Quoting before seeing the books. Ask for three months of statements. A quote given on a description of the business is a guess.
- Pricing from revenue. A business with $2m of revenue and 80 transactions a month is less work than one with $400k and 900.
- Assuming every working hour is billable. Utilization below 100 percent is normal, and pricing as if it were 100 percent is how a fully booked practice ends up unprofitable.
- A fixed fee against an undefined scope. Without written boundaries, a fixed fee becomes an unlimited service.
- Competing on price alone. There is always somebody cheaper, and the client who chooses purely on price will leave for the same reason.
One thing that does not set your price, though it is often assumed to: certification. Bookkeeping is not a licensed profession in the United States, and neither the Certified Public Bookkeeper credential from the NACPB nor the Certified Bookkeeper credential from the AIPB is required to practise. Either can help a prospect trust a practice they have not worked with before, which makes them a sales asset rather than a pricing one. What you charge still comes from the scope and your costs.
For the wider question of choosing between hourly and fixed pricing, see flat rate vs hourly rate, and for the mechanics of billing a recurring engagement, recurring billing.
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Frequently asked questions
How much should I charge for bookkeeping services?
There is no standard rate. Size the engagement first by counting bank accounts, monthly transactions, payroll, AP and AR, sales tax filings and reporting cadence, estimate the hours that scope takes, then price those hours at your own full cost plus the margin you want. A price copied from another practice is priced for their scope and their costs, not yours.
Should bookkeeping be billed hourly or as a monthly fixed fee?
A monthly fixed fee suits ongoing work, because it is predictable for the client and lets you keep the benefit of any efficiency you build, where hourly billing reduces your income every time you get faster. Hourly fits cleanup projects, ad hoc advice and any engagement whose volume you cannot yet predict.
How do I price a bookkeeping cleanup or catch-up project?
Price it separately from the monthly retainer, and do not quote it blind. Either bill it hourly with an estimated range and a checkpoint where you both reassess, or run a short paid diagnostic first and give a fixed price once you have seen the file.
What does a bookkeeper cost to hire in-house?
The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median pay for bookkeeping, accounting and auditing clerks at $24.36 an hour, or $50,670 a year, as of May 2025. On top of the wage an employer pays the employer share of Social Security at 6.2 percent and Medicare at 1.45 percent according to the IRS, plus unemployment insurance, workers' compensation, any benefits and the cost of software and equipment.
How many hours a month does a small business file take?
It depends almost entirely on transaction volume and whether payroll, AP, AR, sales tax and inventory are in scope, so the only reliable answer is your own timed hours on similar files. Time two existing clients properly before quoting the next one.
How often should I raise my bookkeeping fees?
Review every engagement annually against its actual transaction volume and hours, and write that review into the engagement letter so both sides expect it. A fee that has not moved in three years has usually fallen behind both the work and your costs.
Do I need a certification to charge more for bookkeeping?
Bookkeeping is not a licensed profession in the United States, so no certification is required to practise or to set your prices. Credentials such as the Certified Public Bookkeeper from the NACPB or the Certified Bookkeeper from the AIPB can help a prospect trust an unfamiliar practice, but what you charge is still governed by the scope of the work and your own costs.
