How much a bookkeeper costs in 2026

The three ways to pay, side by side

There are three ways to pay for bookkeeping, and each is priced in a different unit. Freelancers bill by the hour, an employee is a salary, and an outsourced service charges a flat monthly fee. Put in the same unit, they compare like this:

How you pay	Published rate	What the rate buys	What sits on top of it
Freelancer, by the hour	$11 to $25 an hour on Upwork	Hours of work, however long the file takes	Your own time checking the work, plus the software
Employee, full time	$24.36 an hour median wage	A person who is there whether or not the work is	About 31% more in benefits and payroll costs, plus a desk, software and training
Outsourced service, monthly	Under $100 to $750 a month for a small business	A closed month: categorized, reconciled, reported	Usually catch-up work, sometimes a setup fee

Sources: Bureau of Labor Statistics wage data for bookkeeping clerks (May 2025), BLS employer compensation costs (June 2026), Upwork’s bookkeeper rate page and each service’s own pricing page, all read in September 2026.

What an in-house bookkeeper really costs

The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median US bookkeeping, accounting and auditing clerk at $50,670 a year, or $24.36 an hour, as of May 2025. The bottom tenth earn under $36,000 and the top tenth over $74,550.

The wage is not the cost. For office and administrative staff in private industry, wages are only 68.7% of what an employer pays per hour. The other 31.3% is benefits: paid leave, health insurance, retirement contributions and the legally required payroll taxes. Grossed up by that share, the median bookkeeper costs:

Period	Wage only	With benefits and payroll costs
Per hour	$24.36	about $35.46
Per month	about $4,223	about $6,150
Per year	$50,670	about $73,800

That still leaves out the software licence, the computer, and the weeks before a new hire knows the file. It also assumes the work fills a full-time week. For most businesses with under a few hundred transactions a month it does not, which is why a full-time hire usually only makes sense once bookkeeping has grown into accounts payable, receivables and payroll as well.

What a freelance bookkeeper charges

Freelance rates vary more than any other option. Upwork shows a median of $11 to $25 an hour for bookkeepers on its platform. US-based freelancers with years of QuickBooks experience charge well above that. goLance’s 2026 rate guide puts freelance bookkeepers at $25 to $225 an hour, with experienced ones mostly between $63 and $110.

The hourly rate is only half the figure. The other half is how many hours the file needs, and that depends on volume. For a file that takes 5, 10 or 20 hours a month:

Hours a month	At $15 an hour	At $25 an hour	At $60 an hour
5	$75	$125	$300
10	$150	$250	$600
20	$300	$500	$1,200

Hourly billing has one structural problem. You pay for time, not for a finished month, so a slower bookkeeper costs more for the same result and you cannot forecast the bill until the month is done.

What an outsourced bookkeeping service charges

Outsourced services quote a flat monthly fee and scale it by the size of the file. The published entry prices for small businesses, for plans where a person keeps the books, read in September 2026:

Service	Entry price	What sets the tier
Ledgerbrook Get a free file review	$99 or $199 a month	Accounts and transactions per client file; no hourly limit
Bench Bookkeeping Light	$199 a month	Businesses with $250,000 or less in yearly revenue
Merritt Bookkeeping	$250 a month	One standard plan
Intuit Experts full-service	From $300 a month	Average monthly expenses; one-time cleanup fee first
Xendoo Essential	$395 a month	Up to $50,000 monthly expenses, 4 accounts
Pilot Core	From $399 a month	Monthly expenses, from $9,000; includes a US-based bookkeeper
Bookkeeper360	From $399 a month	Monthly close; weekly is $599
inDinero Essential	From $750 a month	Controller-led, accrual available

Ledgerbrook’s monthly close is $99 or $199 per client file, per month. The lower figure is the standard band: Up to 3 bank or credit card accounts, and up to 200 transactions a month. Anything above either limit is the higher one. There is no hourly limit inside either band, so a month that takes longer than usual costs the same.

For a like-for-like comparison of what each of these includes, see the best bookkeeping services for small business, compared. For the cheapest end of the table and what those plans leave out, see affordable bookkeeping services.

What changes the price, whoever you hire

Every pricing page above scales on some mix of the same four things:

1. Transaction volume. More transactions means more to categorize and match. Bookkeeper.com’s tiers run 100, 200 and 300 transactions a month.
2. Number of accounts. Every bank, credit card and loan account is reconciled on its own every month. Xendoo’s plans step at 4, 6 and 12 accounts.
3. Monthly expenses or revenue. Pilot, Xendoo and Intuit Experts tier on expenses; Bench and Bookkeeper.com on revenue. It is a proxy for volume, and a rough one: a business with a few large payments pays more than one with many small ones.
4. How far behind the books are. Almost every service prices catch-up separately. Xendoo’s catch-up starts at $295 a month of backlog, Merritt’s at $200, and Bookkeeper360’s onboarding starts at $1,000. Months that are wrong rather than missing are a cleanup, and what a QuickBooks cleanup costs compares those prices.

What should not move the price is the business’s success. A file is not harder to reconcile because the numbers in it are bigger.

Freelancer, employee or service?

A freelancer suits a business that has someone who can review the work and wants to pay only for hours used. The risk is continuity: if the freelancer disappears, so does the knowledge of the file.

An employee suits a business with enough work to fill most of a week, usually once payables, receivables and payroll are all in-house. Below that, you pay a full salary for part of a job.

An outsourced service suits most small businesses in between: a fixed monthly figure, a closed month on a known date, and no hiring. The things to check are who owns the books if you leave, whether a person or software does the categorizing, whether the price has a revenue or hours cap, and whether catch-up is priced before you sign. The questions to put to any quote are in what outsourced bookkeeping costs.

When the cheapest option costs more

The figure to compare is the cost of a closed, reconciled month, not the hourly rate. A $15-an-hour bookkeeper who leaves three accounts unreconciled costs more than a service at four times the rate, because someone has to pay to fix it before the tax return. If your books are already behind, price that first: Ledgerbrook’s catch-up is $99 per month of backlog, and a free file review counts the months before anything is quoted.