For a small business owner comparing quotes, how much a bookkeeper costs is the question every article answers with "it depends" and then declines to explain. This post gives the actual numbers: hourly rates, monthly packages, per-transaction models, what drives the price up, and what four different options cost side by side.
Every figure below is cited, either to published federal wage data or to a provider's own pricing page with the date we checked it.
What Does a Bookkeeper Cost
A bookkeeper costs either a wage, if you employ one, or a fee, if you outsource. Those are different numbers and mixing them up is the most common error in this comparison.
The wage is public record. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median pay for bookkeeping, accounting and auditing clerks at $50,670 a year, or $24.36 an hour, as of May 2025. The lowest 10 percent earn less than $36,000 and the highest 10 percent more than $74,550.
A salary is not what an employee costs, though. The BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation release for March 2026 reports that wages and salaries are 69.9% of total compensation in private industry, with benefits accounting for the other 30.1%. Divide the median salary by that share and a full-time bookkeeper costs an employer roughly $72,500 a year before recruitment, software or cover for holiday and sickness.
That figure is the one to hold in your head, because almost no small business needs a full-time bookkeeper. What you actually need is some fraction of that role, and working out which fraction is the whole exercise.
How Much Does a Bookkeeper Cost by Hour, Month and Package
Hourly rates
Employed bookkeepers cost about $24.36 an hour in wage terms at the BLS median, which is roughly $35 an hour once the employer load is added. Independent bookkeepers and firms charge more than that, and they have to: their rate covers software, insurance, overhead, unbilled time and profit, none of which an employee's wage includes.
One published example gives a sense of the gap. Bench lists a QuickBooks-certified bookkeeper at $55 an hour with a $1,200 onboarding fee, verified on its pricing page on 9 September 2026. Hourly is the right model when the work is genuinely unpredictable, and the wrong one when it is not, because you are paying for the hour rather than the outcome and you carry the risk of it taking longer.
Monthly packages
Most outsourced bookkeeping is sold as a flat monthly fee, tiered by volume. This is the dominant model in 2026 and the easiest to budget against. The trade-off is that tiers have caps, and the published price is usually a floor rather than a quote.
Per-transaction and expense-banded models
Several providers price by your monthly expense volume rather than a flat tier. QuickBooks bases ongoing pricing on your average expenses in QuickBooks after an initial cleanup fee, and Pilot caps its self-serve $99 tier at $100,000 in monthly expenses. This model tracks your growth, which is either fair or unwelcome depending on which direction you are growing.
What actually drives the price
Four things move a bookkeeping quote more than anything else.
Transaction volume. The single biggest driver, because categorizing and reconciling is per-line work.
Number of accounts. Every bank and credit card account is a separate reconciliation against a separate statement.
Payroll. Adding payroll adds runs, filings, liability accounts that have to clear, and contractor classification.
Catch-up. Back months are priced per project rather than per month, because what matters is how many months are open and what state they are in. Bookkeeper360 publishes onboarding and prior bookkeeping starting at $1,000 per project, verified 9 September 2026, and most providers do not publish a rate at all.
Work out your own number
The calculator below converts your volumes into hours, costs those hours at the published BLS wage, and puts that beside what outsourced services actually charge. It is the same tool as our bookkeeping cost calculator, embedded here so you do not have to leave the page.
The four-way comparison
| Option | Typical cost | What you get | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| In-house bookkeeper | $50,670 / yr salary, about $72,500 fully loaded at full time | A person, full or part time, and everything around employing them | BLS OOH 43-3031 and BLS ECEC March 2026 |
| Local firm | Not published | Varies widely by firm and region | No public rate card we could verify |
| Online service (staffed) | $199 to $599 / mo published starting prices | Monthly close done for you, tiers capped by volume or expenses | Bench, QuickBooks and Bookkeeper360 pricing pages |
| Self-serve AI software | $25 to $99 / mo | You drive the tool; nobody is accountable for the close | Puzzle, Digits and Pilot pricing pages |
| Pelcro AI + CPA | $149, $299 or $499 / mo | AI processing with a licensed CPA reviewing and signing off every close | Our published pricing |
How Pelcro Prices Bookkeeping
Our packages are $149, $299 and $499 a month for Starter, Growth and Full-service, published with no setup fee and no annual contract. Catch-up work on back months is quoted separately, because pretending otherwise would mean quoting a number before knowing how many months are open.
The reason a flat published price works is that the expensive part of bookkeeping is volume, not judgment. Categorizing several hundred transactions and reconciling accounts is repetitive work that software now does well, and paying a person to do it by hand is most of what makes a traditional arrangement expensive. AI does that continuously, flagging anything it cannot place with confidence instead of guessing.
A licensed CPA then reviews the file, resolves the flags, confirms the reconciliations tie to the statements and signs off. That review is included at every tier, because it is the part you are genuinely paying a professional for.
Here is the honest caveat. Our $149 entry price is below the cheapest staffed service we could verify, which is Bench at $199 a month, but it is well above what software costs if you are willing to run it yourself: Puzzle starts at $25, Digits at $65, and Pilot's self-serve tier at $99. If your volumes are small and you are comfortable in a ledger, one of those may serve you better, and our own comparison of online bookkeeping services says so in more detail.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much should a small business pay for bookkeeping?
Published starting prices from staffed online services run from $199 to $599 a month as of September 2026, and most small businesses land in the lower half of that. Self-serve software starts lower, from $25 to $99, but you are doing the work. The right way to sanity-check a quote is to work out how many hours the job actually takes at your volumes, then compare that against the BLS wage. If a quote is far above what the hours justify, ask what else is included.
Is it worth paying for a bookkeeper?
It is worth it when the alternative is doing it yourself badly or late. Books closed a quarter behind tell you what already happened rather than what to do next, and the cost of a missed deduction or an unnoticed cash problem usually dwarfs the fee. It is not worth it if your volumes are tiny and you are disciplined, in which case software is the cheaper answer.
How much do bookkeepers charge per hour?
The BLS median hourly wage is $24.36 as of May 2025, which is about $35 an hour as an employer cost once benefits are included. Independent bookkeepers and firms charge above that because the rate has to cover overhead and profit as well as the hour. One published example is Bench's QuickBooks-certified bookkeeper at $55 an hour, checked on 9 September 2026.
Why is bookkeeping cheaper than it used to be?
Because the data entry portion has been automated, and that portion was most of the hours. What has not become cheaper is the review: deciding whether an expense is deductible, whether cut-off is right, whether the books are actually correct. Providers who pass the automation saving on while keeping a qualified reviewer in the loop are the ones worth comparing.
Do these prices change?
Yes, and the ones quoted here are dated for that reason. Every third-party figure in this post was read off the provider's own pricing page on 9 September 2026. Providers change pricing without notice, so check the current number before you decide anything, and tell us if you find one of ours out of date.