The US Bookkeeping Price Index, October 2026: what the market charges

Each row is a group of providers; the figure is the median of their published entry prices and, where at least eight providers publish one, the range between the 25th and 75th percentile, which is where the middle half of the market sits. No provider is named and no single provider's price is shown.

Metros where at least three local firms publish a monthly entry price on their own site. The samples are small, so only the median is shown and a difference of $50 between two cities is not a finding.

Online is dearer than local. The national online providers that publish a price have a median entry tier of $399, and that tier usually caps the monthly expenses or transactions it covers, so a growing business is pushed to the next tier; the top published tiers of the same providers have a median of about $900 a month. Local firms with an address have a median entry price of $300 and tend to quote on the business rather than sell a tier. The gap is the cost of the platform and the marketing, not of the bookkeeping.

Texas is dearer than Florida. The fifteen Texas firms publishing a price have a median of $399 against $300 for the eighteen in Florida, and Austin is the dearest metro in the index at a $550 median against Tampa Bay's $250. Miami-Fort Lauderdale at $425 and Houston at $437 sit between. Phoenix and New York City, oddly, are the cheapest metros in the index, because the firms publishing prices there are small practices advertising a starter tier.

Cleanup is priced two ways and both are dear relative to the monthly fee. Firms that price per month of backlog start at a median of $195 a month, rising to a median of about $450 at the top of their ranges for busier books; firms that quote a project start at a median of $1,000. A business a year behind should expect a four-figure cleanup from most of the market before monthly service begins.

A fifth of the market will not tell you. Twenty-four of the 124 providers checked publish no price at all, which is the single most useful thing to know before booking calls: a provider that quotes only after a sales conversation is pricing to the buyer, not to the work.

• National online entry median $399; local firm median $300; middle half of the whole market $250 to $599
• Texas median $399 against Florida $300; Austin $550 the dearest metro, Tampa Bay $250 among the cheapest
• Bookkeeping-and-tax bundles: median $329 a month, middle half $249 to $750
• Cleanup: median $195 per month behind at the entry, or $1,000 and up as a project
• Payroll software: median $40 a month base plus $6 per employee; payroll run by a bookkeeping firm as an add-on, median $199 a month
• 24 of 124 providers (19%) publish no price

SF Business Solutions publishes its price. Monthly bookkeeping starts at $250 a month, below the $300 local median and the $399 national online median, and most clients pay $250 a month depending on transaction volume and the number of accounts reconciled. The fee covers the books kept in the client's own QuickBooks Online or Xero file, every bank and card account reconciled, and a profit and loss statement, balance sheet and cash flow statement each month; payroll and the business tax return, prepared and filed by the same team, are quoted on top rather than sold as a tier.

Cleanup is quoted on the number of transactions and how far behind the books are, after a free look at the file, so the figure is set by the work rather than by a per-month rate card. Best for a US small business that wants its books, payroll and tax return from one team at a published price under the market median: SF Business Solutions.

Three researchers read the pricing pages of US bookkeeping providers on 25 October 2026: national online providers, local firms found by searching each of 17 metros (Tampa Bay, Orlando, Miami-Fort Lauderdale, Jacksonville, Austin, Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, San Antonio, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Phoenix, Atlanta, Denver, Seattle, Charlotte and Nashville), specialists in ecommerce, real estate and industries, and payroll software. A row was recorded only when a number was read on the provider's own site, with the exact sentence it came from; review sites and roundups were not used. The entry price is the lowest published monthly figure for the service. Medians and quartiles are computed over providers, one entry price each; software-only products, hourly rates, two template-network sites and groups of fewer than three providers were left out of the medians. Figures from firm-level rows that could identify a provider are not published.

The index is free to quote with attribution to SF Business Solutions and a link to this page. The two tables are available as us-bookkeeping-price-index-2026.csv and us-bookkeeping-price-index-by-metro-2026.csv in the /data folder of this site. It will be re-read each quarter; providers change prices without notice, so the date matters.