2026 US Bookkeeping and Accounting Cost Index

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes national wage data every year through its Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program. The most recent release covers May 2025 pay and was checked directly on bls.gov on 2026-09-29 for this guide.

Three BLS occupations map onto most small-business bookkeeping and accounting needs:

• Bookkeeping, Accounting, and Auditing Clerks (BLS code 43-3031): median annual wage $50,670, or $24.36 an hour. This is the role that maps to day-to-day transaction coding, reconciliation, and data entry.
• Accountants and Auditors (13-2011): median annual wage $83,680, or $40.23 an hour. This covers staff and senior accountant work: reviewing the clerk's output, closing the books, and preparing financial statements.
• Financial Managers (11-3031): median annual wage $166,570, or $80.08 an hour. This is the controller and CFO-adjacent tier, overseeing the finance function rather than doing transaction-level work.

Robert Half's 2026 Finance and Accounting Salary Guide, checked live on roberthalf.com on 2026-09-29, breaks pay down further by job title, with national midpoints and, for some roles, live per-metro salary pages. Robert Half's figures run above the BLS medians because Robert Half places candidates through recruiting, which skews toward businesses actively hiring at market rate rather than the full spread of every business that employs someone in that role.

National midpoints from the 2026 guide, checked 2026-09-29:

• Full Charge Bookkeeper: $63,000 to $82,500, midpoint $71,000
• Staff Accountant: $73,750 midpoint
• Senior Accountant: $80,000 to $109,000, midpoint $94,750
• Accounting Manager: $113,000 midpoint
• Corporate Controller: $185,000 midpoint
• Chief Financial Officer: $269,750 midpoint

Robert Half also publishes live per-metro pages for some roles. For Senior Accountant, checked 2026-09-29:

• Chicago, IL: $100,000 to $136,250
• New York, NY: $109,200 to $148,785
• San Francisco, CA: $108,000 to $147,150

All three metros run well above the national range, roughly 25 to 37 percent higher at the midpoint. Robert Half does not publish an equivalent metro breakdown for Full Charge Bookkeeper, so this guide does not invent one; see the worked example and methodology sections below for what that means in practice.

A quoted salary is not what an employee actually costs a business. Payroll taxes, health insurance, retirement contributions, workers' compensation, and other benefits sit on top of the base wage, and none of the figures above include them.

The BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation (ECEC) survey tracks this directly. The June 2026 release, published September 9, 2026 and checked on bls.gov on 2026-09-29, puts total civilian-worker compensation at $49.46 an hour worked, made up of $33.85 in wages and salaries and $15.61 in benefits. Benefits run about 31.6 percent of total compensation across all civilian occupations, not accounting-specific, since the BLS does not publish a separate loaded-cost table by detailed accounting occupation.

This guide uses a disclosed 1.30 multiplier on base salary as the fully loaded cost estimate: base salary times 1.30. That's the commonly cited shorthand for benefits, payroll taxes, and overhead (often quoted as a 25 to 35 percent add-on), informed by the ECEC benefits share above. It is an estimate, not a BLS-published figure specific to accounting roles, and actual loaded cost varies by state, company size, and benefits plan. Treat it as a starting point for budgeting, not a precise number for any one employer.

Applying the 1.30 multiplier to the Robert Half national midpoints:

• Full Charge Bookkeeper: $71,000 base, about $92,300 fully loaded
• Staff Accountant: $73,750 base, about $95,875 fully loaded
• Senior Accountant: $94,750 base, about $123,175 fully loaded
• Accounting Manager: $113,000 base, about $146,900 fully loaded
• Corporate Controller: $185,000 base, about $240,500 fully loaded
• Chief Financial Officer: $269,750 base, about $350,675 fully loaded

None of these totals include recruiting cost, onboarding time, software licenses, office space, or the cost of turnover if the hire doesn't work out. They also assume the position is filled continuously, with no vacancy gap while a business looks for a replacement.

Say a Chicago-based small business wants a dedicated, full-time bookkeeper on staff rather than an outsourced provider.

Robert Half does not publish a Chicago-specific salary page for the Full Charge Bookkeeper role the way it does for Senior Accountant, and this guide will not substitute a state-level aggregator figure for it. A third-party aggregator does publish an Illinois bookkeeping-clerk median attributed to the same BLS dataset, but it hasn't yet been checked against the BLS's own primary data file (see methodology below), so it is left out here rather than published on secondhand authority.

What can be stated with a verified source: Robert Half's own Chicago page shows Senior Accountant pay running about 25 percent above the national midpoint there. If a similar premium applies to a bookkeeper role, and there's no verified data confirming it does, the national Full Charge Bookkeeper midpoint of $71,000 might land closer to $85,000 to $90,000 base in Chicago specifically. Since that adjustment isn't source-verified, this worked example stays conservative and uses the verified national figure instead.

National Full Charge Bookkeeper midpoint: $71,000 base, $92,300 fully loaded at the 1.30 multiplier, or about $7,692 a month.

Compare that to two outsourced options scoped for a similar business size (roughly $50,000 to $150,000 in monthly expenses, the band most providers checked for this guide target at their entry-to-mid tiers): Finbryn's Growth tier at $549 a month, or a mid-tier competitor like Xendoo's Growth plan at $625 a month billed annually (both checked 2026-09-29, see the comparison below). At those price points, the in-house hire runs roughly 12 to 14 times the monthly cost of the outsourced option.

That comparison isn't apples to apples in every direction. A full-time employee is available for work beyond bookkeeping, can handle in-person tasks, and builds institutional knowledge an outsourced provider has to document instead. An outsourced monthly fee is scoped narrowly to the deliverables in that plan's tier, with anything outside scope priced as a separate add-on. The dollar gap is real and verified; what it buys on each side is not identical, and a business should weigh both before deciding.

Every price below comes from the provider's own live pricing page, checked directly on 2026-09-29. Where a provider bills annually at a discount, both the annual-billed and standard monthly rate are shown.

• Bench Accounting: $199/month (Bookkeeping Light), $399/month (Bookkeeping), $649/month (Bookkeeping + Tax). Source: bench.co, checked 2026-09-29. Bench became insolvent and told customers on December 27, 2024 that it would shut down, then filed for bankruptcy in a Canadian court in January 2025. Employer.com, a California HR technology company, acquired Bench's assets within days and kept it running under the same brand, platform, and much of the same team; about 85 percent of Bench's customers stayed on. Bench is operating in 2026, not discontinued, and it was never absorbed by Pilot, a separate and unrelated competitor. Source: bench.co/transition-faqs and Banking Dive, January 15, 2025.
• Pilot: $99/month (Essentials, cash basis, up to $100,000 in monthly expenses, no dedicated bookkeeper). Core and Custom tiers are quoted after a scoping call rather than published as a fixed monthly rate. Source: pilot.com/pricing, checked 2026-09-29.
• Bookkeeper360: $399/month (Monthly plan) or $599/month (Weekly plan, marked most popular), plus a separate onboarding and prior-bookkeeping cleanup project starting at $1,000. Source: bookkeeper360.com/pricing, checked 2026-09-29.
• 1-800Accountant: $209/month (Tax Advisory), $299/month (Starter, most popular), $469/month (Business Complete, includes bookkeeping and payroll). All three billed annually despite the monthly display. Source: 1800accountant.com/pricing, checked 2026-09-29.
• Xendoo: $355/month annual-billed or $395/month standard (Essential, up to $50,000 in monthly expenses), $625/month annual-billed or $695/month standard (Growth, up to $75,000, most popular), $895/month annual-billed or $995/month standard (Scale, up to $125,000). Source: xendoo.com/xendoo-pricing, checked 2026-09-29.
• Zeni: $494/month annual-billed or $549/month standard (Starter, AI bookkeeping for pre-revenue companies), $719/month annual-billed or $799/month standard (Growth). Source: zeni.ai/pricing, checked 2026-09-29.
• inDinero: $750/month (Essential), $1,250/month (Growth), custom pricing (Executive). Source: indinero.com/pricing, checked 2026-09-29.

Entry-tier prices in this range ($99 to $399 a month) are typically cash-basis, software-assisted, capped at a fairly low monthly expense volume, and don't include a named, dedicated bookkeeper. The $400 to $1,000 a month band is the more realistic comparison for a business that wants a named accountant, a monthly close, and support beyond data entry.

Finbryn's current published rate card for US clients, live at finbryn.com/us/pricing and checked 2026-09-29:

• Essentials: $249/month, or $224/month billed annually. Monthly cash-basis bookkeeping up to $50,000 in monthly expenses, bank and card reconciliation, a monthly P&L and balance sheet, a named pod rather than a rotating pool of staff, books closed by business day five, month-to-month with no onboarding fee.
• Growth: $549/month, or $494/month billed annually. Everything in Essentials up to $150,000 in monthly expenses, cash or modified accrual bookkeeping, AP/AR support, 1099 contractor tracking, and a quarterly tax-ready reporting package.
• Scale: custom quote after a scoping call, for multi-entity businesses needing consolidation support and controller-level oversight.

Finbryn also publishes a separate rate for CPA and accounting firms needing extra staffing capacity: a dedicated FTE, from bookkeeper through senior accountant level, from $1,500 to $2,200 a month by seniority, billed directly to the client firm with no setup fee. That's a different market from the small-business tiers above (a staffing arrangement for an accounting firm's own client work, not bookkeeping for an end business), but it's a useful data point if you're pricing an FTE-equivalent against the in-house numbers in the first section.

Add-ons priced separately: business tax preparation support from $1,200 a year, personal tax return support from $499 a year, sales tax filing from $125 a month, fractional CFO from $1,500 a month, and foreign-owned LLC compliance (Form 5472 and pro forma 1120) from $800 a year. Full detail and the current calculator: finbryn.com/us/pricing.

Six variables explain most of the spread between the lowest and highest numbers in this guide, whether you're pricing an in-house hire or an outsourced plan:

• Transaction volume per month. More bank and card transactions means more categorization and reconciliation work regardless of business size.
• Number of legal entities. Every additional entity is close to a separate set of books, and most providers, Finbryn included, price entities as a near-linear add-on rather than folding them into one flat rate.
• Cash versus accrual. Accrual bookkeeping, recognizing revenue when earned and expenses when incurred rather than when cash moves, takes more judgment per transaction, and most providers price it above a cash-basis plan.
• Catch-up and backlog months. Reconstructing a period that was never recorded costs meaningfully more per month than maintaining a current one, since each backlog month has to be reconciled from source documents rather than from a live feed.
• Payroll. Whether payroll runs through the same provider, and how many employees it covers, is priced as a separate line almost everywhere in this comparison, Finbryn included.
• Sales tax. Multi-state sales tax nexus tracking and filing is a separate line item on every rate card checked for this guide, priced by state count and filing frequency rather than folded into the base bookkeeping fee.

A business comparing prices across this guide should confirm which of these six variables its own operations actually trigger before assuming any single number applies. A price built for a single-entity, cash-basis business with 100 transactions a month and no payroll will not hold for a three-entity, accrual business running weekly payroll, even at the same provider.

Primary sources for this guide: the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program (accessed through the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, May 2025 data) and Robert Half's 2026 Finance and Accounting Salary Guide, both checked directly on their own sites on 2026-09-29. Provider pricing comes from each vendor's own live pricing page, also checked 2026-09-29, not from a review aggregator or a third-party roundup.

Two things this guide deliberately does not do:

First, it does not publish state or metro-level wage medians beyond what Robert Half's own live salary pages state directly (the three Senior Accountant metro ranges above). A third-party aggregator does publish state-level bookkeeping, accounting, and financial-manager medians attributed to the same BLS OEWS dataset, but those figures haven't yet been cross-checked against the BLS's own primary data file (the oesm25nat.zip release at bls.gov/oes/special-requests), so they're left out of this guide rather than published on secondhand authority. That check is planned before any future update adds state-level figures.

Second, this guide does not compare US costs to any offshore delivery location, and does not state where any provider, including Finbryn, delivers its work from. That comparison is a separate, deliberate decision held for a founder call, not an oversight.

Sources treated as directional only, never cited as a primary figure above: Glassdoor, Indeed, and ZipRecruiter aggregator pages. As one example, ZipRecruiter's national average for Full Charge Bookkeeper runs noticeably below Robert Half's placement-market range, which is expected, since ZipRecruiter blends every posted job including non-agency small-business roles, while Robert Half quotes placement-agency market rates specifically. Neither number is wrong for what it measures; they measure different things, which is why this guide treats them differently rather than averaging them together.

This page is reviewed and refreshed on a monthly cadence, since provider pricing is the figure most likely to move between checks. The date at the top of this page reflects the most recent check, not the original publish date.