Short answer first: most small businesses pay somewhere between $200 and $1,500 a month for ongoing bookkeeping. Published 2026 pricing guides put the typical landing spot for a business under $5M in revenue at $400 to $800 a month. A solo operator with light volume can land near $200. A business with payroll, several accounts, and a few hundred transactions a month can run past $1,500. The spread is wide because the work is not one thing.

What actually drives the price

Transaction volume. This is the biggest lever. Fifty transactions a month is a tidy file. Five hundred is a part-time job. Every quote you get will quietly start here, so count yours before you shop. One bank feed, one card, and a payment app is a normal month for most small businesses.

Number of accounts. Each bank account, credit card, and loan has to be reconciled every month, for every month in question. Three accounts is roughly three times the reconciliation work of one.

Payroll and extras. Payroll, invoicing your customers, paying your bills, and sales tax filing are usually priced on top of core bookkeeping, not inside it. A quote that looks cheap sometimes just leaves these out.

How far behind you are. Cleanup is a separate, one-time project priced before monthly service starts. Recent guides put simple cleanups at a few hundred dollars and full-year rebuilds at $3,000 to $5,000 or more. Per-month-of-history pricing is common: every month behind gets reconstructed, account by account.

Industry complexity. A service business with clean bank feeds is straightforward. Ecommerce payouts, inventory, job costing, or multiple entities add real hours, and quotes reflect that.

The three ways bookkeepers charge

Hourly runs roughly $20 to $50 an hour for freelancers and $30 to $70 an hour at many local firms. Flat monthly packages are the most common arrangement once volume is steady, because both sides know the number in advance. Catch-up work is usually a flat project fee or a per-month rate times the months behind. If a quote does not say which model it is, ask before you compare it to anything.

The cost nobody puts in the quote

Doing it yourself is not free. Software alone runs about $20 to $50 a month, but the real cost is your evenings. Owners routinely spend five to ten hours a week on receipts, invoicing, and reconciliation once a business gets busy. Multiply your hours by what an hour of your time is worth and compare honestly.

The second hidden cost shows up at tax time. When books arrive at a CPA messy and months behind, the cleanup gets done anyway, at tax-season urgency, before any return can be filed. Clean monthly books are almost always the cheaper version of the same work. One more thing in your favor: bookkeeping fees are generally treated as an ordinary and necessary business expense, so they are typically tax-deductible.

Get your number in two minutes

Ranges only get you so far. We built a small estimator that runs on your own figures: your transaction count, your accounts, whether you run payroll, and how far behind you are. It shows its math, and every assumption in it can be changed, because your quote should come from your books, not from an average. Try it here: Bookkeeping Cost Estimator.

If you run a bookkeeping practice, you are on the other side of this question every week. The Bookkeepers Growth Network, the community we are partnered with, gives member practices a lead dashboard, an AI assistant trained on their own services, and a hub for every client, so the quoting conversation starts with a prospect who already understands the value.

The bottom line

Budget $400 to $800 a month if your business is typical, more if you have payroll and volume, plus a one-time cleanup if you are behind. Then stop guessing: run your own numbers through the estimator, and take the output into your first call with any bookkeeper. You will know within a few hundred dollars whether a quote is fair.