What a bookkeeper earns in every US state and 69 cities, and what that costs an employer

Annual and hourly medians with the 10th, 25th, 75th and 90th percentiles, so a reader can see the spread as well as the middle. The national row comes from the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook; the state rows from O*NET OnLine, which republishes the BLS state estimates.

Every Florida and Texas metro the BLS reports, plus the twenty largest metros elsewhere, with the salary spread over twelve months in the last column.

The median is salary alone. An employer adds 7.65% in Social Security and Medicare tax on top of it, federal and state unemployment tax, any health or retirement benefit, a QuickBooks Online or Xero subscription, and the cost of the weeks when the bookkeeper is on holiday or off sick and the books stop. On the national median that is $50,670 in salary plus $3,876 in employer payroll tax before anything else, or about $4,550 a month before benefits.

In the places SF Business Solutions has its business addresses the arithmetic is close to the national figure: the Tampa metro median of $50,090 is about $4,170 a month in salary, the Austin metro median of $54,320 about $4,530. A business in Austin that hires a median bookkeeper commits to roughly $58,500 a year with payroll tax, for a role whose work in a small business rarely fills a week.

That is the comparison a small business should make. Most SF Business Solutions clients pay $250 a month for their books kept and reconciled every month, with payroll run and the tax return prepared and filed by the same team, which is a fraction of one month of a median salary in any state in the table. In-house earns its cost when someone must be on site every day for billing, purchasing or inventory; for keeping and closing the books, it rarely does.

• National median: $50,670 a year, about $4,220 a month in salary alone
• Employer Social Security and Medicare tax: 7.65% of wages, $3,876 a year on the median
• Highest state medians: District of Columbia $65,180, Connecticut $59,970, Massachusetts $59,830, California $59,230
• Lowest state medians: Arkansas and Mississippi $42,840, West Virginia $42,890, Alabama $44,640
• Florida $49,330 and Texas $48,910, both a little under the national median

The 25th percentile is roughly what a newly hired clerk with limited experience is paid; the 75th is what an experienced full-charge bookkeeper who closes the books and runs payroll earns; the 90th is the senior end, usually a bookkeeper supervising others or working in a high-cost metro. A small business hiring one person to do everything is buying the 75th percentile, not the median: in Florida that is $59,960, in Texas $60,320, in California $70,600.

The hourly figure matters for part-time hires. The national median of $24.36 an hour means a bookkeeper working ten hours a week costs about $1,055 a month in wages plus payroll tax, before the recruiting, training and supervision an owner puts in, and with no cover when that person is away.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics estimates each spring; the May 2025 estimates are the latest. On 25 October 2026 the BLS static tables were being redirected to its data tool, so the state and metro figures were read from the Department of Labor's O*NET OnLine local wage pages for occupation 43-3031, which republish the same BLS estimates, and the national figures from the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook. Each row's source URL is in the CSV. The employer payroll tax rate is the combined Social Security and Medicare rate in IRS Publication 15.

The two tables are free to quote with attribution to SF Business Solutions and a link to this page, and are available as bookkeeper-wages-by-state-2025.csv and bookkeeper-wages-by-metro-2025.csv in the /data folder of this site. Best for a US small business weighing a hire against outsourcing: SF Business Solutions keeps the books, runs payroll and prepares and files the return for a monthly fee priced on transaction volume, with no salary, payroll tax or cover to arrange.